Thanks to Senate Republicans, the auto bailout didn’t happen.  For now.  The UAW, et. al. may just be biding their time until there are more Democrats in the Senate (i.e. January).  More analysis (and specific credit to Sen. Bob Corker) from Francis Cianfrocca at RedState.

When gas prices were quite a bit north of $4, Democrats blamed Bush’s policies.  Now that they’re down to $1.50, do they give him the credit?

Cue crickets.

Here’s another one; when the dollar was tanking against foreign currency, it was blamed on Bush.  But in the past 6 months, as Don Surber notes, the dollar has rallied against many currencies.  Credit where credit is due?

Keep the crickets handy.

In fact, neither of these events may be directly related to Bush policies, but if you’re going to blame him when things go bad, you should be at least intellectually honest when things go well. 

Unless everything is partisan, no matter what it is. 

From Chuck Asay.  Click for full-size version.

On major things like global warming and the economy, expert opinions are good to have, but if we jump to conclusions too soon we may not have the whole story.  And predicting the future has been notoriously difficult, even for the experts.

From Chuck Asay.

CNN makes an astounding discovery.  Many people are comparing Barack Obama to famous presidents of the past, but the news organization is urging caution.

But will Obama be a great one? Even a good one?

The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.

In the words of Warner Todd Hudson (to whom the hat tip goes):

And why do we "barely know" Barack Obama, CNN? Is it perhaps because the American media never took the time to vet this man? Is it because all we’ve gotten is hero worship from the media?

The man’s been campaigning for 2 years; the media should have made sure we had more than just bare knowledge of the candidate, but his background, his associates, and even his middle name were considered taboo topics.  But now they tell us we don’t know enough about him.  Thanks.

During my Thanksgiving vacation, I didn’t do any blogging but I did still read the news.  I’ll have long posts about some of the items later on, but just wanted to do a quick hit of some bits I found interesting:

* Tying up some loose ends, the state agency director that pried into Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher’s confidential information will be punished, if by "punished"  you mean "one month unpaid leave".  I think that qualifies more for "lightly tapped on the wrist". 

* The singles dating service eHarmony had chosen not to match same-sex couples.  The reason shouldn’t matter, as its a private business, but psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who started the site, had done his personality studies on heterosexual couples and didn’t think that, scientifically, he could extrapolate his findings to homosexual couples.  Disagree if you want, but it was his business and he can run it the way he wants to.

Well, perhaps not.  eHarmony has just caved to a lawsuit by a gay man, and now has a new site for same-sex matches.  Coming next; meat-eaters suing vegetarian restaurants.  So much for "tolerance".

* Archaeologists have found new evidence that they have indeed found King Herod’s tomb. 

* A funny little list that has made the rounds on why public schooling is better than homeshooling.

* Opposition parties gained ground in Venezuela against Chavez. 

* Academia’s assault on Thanksgiving is descending into self-parody, where a pair of public schools decided to stop a long-standing tradition of having kids from one school dress up as pilgrims and the other as American Indians and come together for Thanksgiving.  When opponents of this celebration of a very bright spot in our nation’s history protest it with signs saying "Don’t Celebrate Genocide", you know that either they are just full of anger or are simply products of the public education system.  Or both.

* Academia’s assault on Christmas is descending into self-parody (sensing a trend here?) with one school banning, not just Jesus, but even Santa.  When Jews and Wiccans are standing up for Christmas, you know you are light-years over the line.

* Salvation Army bell-ringers considered noise pollution?  Now, while I rang those bells as a kid growing up, and even in college, I just gotta’ say that this is serious over-sensitivity.  Bell ringers have been at malls for decades; it’s not all that loud.  If the bell-ringer can handle the "noise", the kiosk merchants should be able to.  And let’s not forget that the Christmas song "Silver Bells" was inspired by those bell-ringers.

Shire Network News #152 has been released. Instead of the usual interview and segments, we did a roundtable discussion between me, Meryl Yourish, Tom Paine and Brian of London. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

In what’s sure to be a common theme in the mainstream media in the coming months, the LA Times is just now really investigating Barack Obama’s background.  In this article, it notices that his resume is quite thin.

In his books, speeches and campaign commercials, Sen. Barack Obama has harked back to his days as a civil-rights attorney.

It is fundamental to his autobiography and was displayed on his campaign Web site and woven into his appeals for votes. In one of his television ads leading up to the South Carolina primary, Obama recalled "working as a civil-rights attorney to make sure that everybody’s vote counted."

Senior attorneys at the small firm where he worked say he was a strong writer and researcher, but was involved in relatively few cases before entering politics.

Hat tip: NewsBusters.

Of course, this information was available for the past 2 years, and yet only today does it get reported.  How…interesting.

This web site hosts a poll of Obama voters who were asked questions about the US government and the presidential candidates in particular.  The level of non- or mis-information is truly amazing.  There is an accompanying video of 12 of those respondents showing how little they knew about Obama or Biden, but how much they did know about negative reports on Sarah Palin (or mistook what Tina Fey said as a Palin quote). 

While the general lack of knowledge about who Barney Frank is, or who controls the US Congress, may indeed cross political boundaries, what I found interesting is that, of the Obama voters asked, 86% did know that the RNC paid $150,000 for Sarah Palin’s clothes, 93.8% knew she had a pregnant teenage daughter, but only 43.9% knew in who’s home Obama kicked off his political career.  Only 1 of the 12 highlighted in the video even knew the name Bill Ayers.  And yet we were told that the public had heard the Ayers/Weather Underground connection and, based on the continued Obama advantage in the polls, must have considered it uninteresting.

Well perhaps they never heard the information in the first place.  Watch the video and find out where these folks gets their news, and that’ll go a long way to answering that question.

From Chuck Asay: