Necessary Roughness

A couple of things to get off my chest before the debate gets underway.

Debaters: Quit telling me about your opponent. In fact, quit telling me about you. This is probably the biggest stage you’re going to walk on. Use it to convince people of your principles. Talk about how increasing drilling will or will not lower gas prices. Tell us where you think government screwed up in the financial sector. Don’t tell me that you’re qualified because you can see Russia in your backyard, or because you’ve been in the national camera for decades.

It will be interesting whether Gwen Ifill, who has been completely outed as in the tank for Obama, will actually pull punches on Gov. Palin in order to make herself look impartial. She is going to be accused either way: being weak on Palin by the left, being gotcha to Palin on the right. She should have recused herself.

Entry question: What would a debate drinking game look like?

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Toledo’s Maggie Thurber blogs on an article and video by Shelby Holliday. Holliday visited the Veterans’ Memorial in Columbus and watched some of the early voting.

From Holiday’s article:

“Who are you voting for?” I asked another homeless man. “Baraaaack,” he replied. “I want him to do his thang, you know, do his THUG THIZZLE, you know…”

As I started interviewing the homeless men, it became clear that some of their “buddies” who drove them to the polls were pushing quite an agenda. I am not saying all volunteers did this, but there were certainly a few. It appeared as if the homeless guys were being bribed with rides, food, and who-knows-what to go “vote.”

My new THUG-THIZZLE friend told me that he wasn’t even from Ohio and that he was getting on a Greyhound to go back to Chicago. Yet he was voting in one of the key battleground states? How was that fair?

Thurber also links to a YouTube video where a Republican poll observer was turned away from the site. This doesn’t look good for our Democratic Secretary of State.

When asked in an interview with Katie Couric which Supreme Court cases she disagreed with, Gov. Palin could only recall Roe v. Wade. One Townhall.com writer suggests:

Puhleeze.  Neither can any normal American, i.e., one that is neither a lawyer nor a political junkie.  Once again, the MSM is showing the distance between what it considers to be the sine qua non of politics, and what normal people believe matters in an elected leader (i.e., her common sense and judgment).  My bet is that this will sway the electorate . . . not one bit.

Liebau may be right about the “normal American”, but one would hope that a governor would be a little bit of a political junkie.

The first ones that came to mind were cases that would be relatively safe: Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. If I were really ornery, I’d say Marbury v. Madison, which introduced the country to an activist judiciary. If a liberal were ornery, he or she could say Bush v. Gore.

But if you really want a winning answer, the case to disagree with is Kelo v. New London (Wikipedia article), where the Supreme Court ruled that potential tax revenue was enough “public use” for a government to seize property and give it to private developers. This was a complete clusterbombing of private property rights by five Supreme Court justices.

Any others come to mind?

Just over a month ago I wrote a post that showed the mischievous side of the older sister. It’s only fair that “Baby A” get some good press, too.

She went to a Vacation Bible School, where every day they had a skit that showed a Bible story. On Day Five, they had a skit that depicted the death and resurrection of Christ. She exclaimed, “That’s the story Dad knows!”

I also got to attend the girls’ first day of school, at a preschool hosted by an ELCA church. While the kids were in circle, the teacher explained that they would memorize a new Bible verse every month, and that verse would be a rule how we are to behave. My girl raised her hand and asked, “Are you going to talk about Jesus, too?”

The girl has been listening.

Tomorrow night, Oct 2, the Plagiarist-Gaffe Machine meets the Hockey Mom-Beauty Queen at Washington University in St. Louis, 8pm Central Time, with the moderator in the tank for Barack Obama.

I’ll liveblog it, but if there’s enough interest, I’ll just create a short post tomorrow and we can slug it out in the comments.

Who’s in?