WonderfulPessimist.com

While Illinois Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been given a nice, spiffy “middle of the road Democrat” image by a sycophantic news media, his voting record does not measure up to his rhetoric, according to a recent report by reporter Bill Sammon.

Americans for Democratic Reform, a liberal advocacy group that ranks all members of Congress, gave Obama a 95-percent rating in its most recent survey. “His record is liberal, and his rhetoric is moderate,” explained Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

The 95-percent liberal rating puts Obama strongly into the camp of the Democratic Party’s extreme left wing, not the DLC/blue dog Democrat camp most perceive him as being. Of course, considering Obama ran virtually unopposed for his Illinois Senate seat after his only serious competitor, Republican Jack Ryan, was besmirched by a divorce-related scandal and ultimately dropped out at the 11th hour, the path to Washington has so far been paved with gold for Obama.

But the road to the White House will be less smooth, and if Sen. Obama is serious about winning it, such examination of his rhetoric vs. his record is a natural part of the path for any politician, and one he’ll have to get used to.

Such double-speak - praising Reagan in one breath while cursing him in the next, in an attempt to appeal to both sides, for example - may work when you have no serious opponent running against you. But with political hardball veterans like Sen. Hillary Rodham and former Sen. John Edwards, both fiesty lawyers as well as politicians, facing off against him for the Dem nod, Obama will need to quickly develop a thick skin.

Like the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. Not even if, like Sen. Rodham’s husband, your name is Slick Willie. If he’s unable to adjust to that, he could always pursue a career in Raleigh real estate.

Israel, currently under the rule of Ehud Olmert, a former Likud party member who helped found the centerist Kadima party, has appointed the first Israeli Muslim to a cabinet level position. Knesset member Raleb Majadele, a member of the Labor Party, is the first Muslim to rise to such a high level in Israel’s democratic government. Of the seven million people living in Israel, about 20 percent - 1.4 million, approximately - are Muslim Arabs.

“The present government is proud to be the first government to give executive representation to the Arab Muslim minority,” said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The appointment is certainly a blow to Palestinian claims that Israel shuts out Muslims from the political process in Israel, let alone the caterwauling that Israel is a terrorist state that mindlessly persecutes Muslims. It’s time for Palestinians to get out of the terror game and into something more promising, like presentation folder printing.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee made it official today, announcing that on Monday he would file papers to formalize his exploratory bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Huckabee is the first candidate considered a genuine conservative to enter the race.

Huckabee, a native of Hope, Arkanses, is actually from the town of 11,000, unlike Democrat Bill Clinton, who claimed to be from Hope, but was actually born and raised in Hot Springs. Huckabee gained some national attention for a dramatic weight loss achievement that marked his tenure as governor of Bill Clinton’s home state.

Wonderful Pessimist still has huge reservations about Huckabee’s electability. When your return address labels come from the same state - even the same town - as Bill Clinton, that’s not a way to endear oneself to conservatives. And Huckabee’s name recognition pales in comparison to RINOs like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Huckabee needs more than weight loss methods to sell his candidacy to the country; he’s running for president, not The Biggest Loser.

But as the only notable conservative in the race - and no, the extremely obscure Sam Brownback doesn’t count - one at least has to consider the viability of Huckabee, or surrender to the inevitability of the GOP falling into RINO hands for the next four to eight years, at least. Dismal.

My oh my, did the Democrats make a mistake in ticking off Joe Lieberman or what? Since winning re-election as an independent after his own Democratic party tried to oust him for not being a pure enough liberal, Sen. Lieberman - his party’s VP candidate only seven years ago - announced on Fox News Sunday that he may throw his support behind a GOP or independent candidate in 2008, and that his support for Democratic candidates for the White House is no longer a lock.

“I’m going to do what most independents and a lot of Democrats and Republicans in America do, which is to take a look at all the candidates and then in the end, regardless of party, decide who I think will be best for the future of our country,” Lieberman said Sunday.

Sounds like Sen. Lieberman should start investing in some new professional business cards; if he continues his centerist drift, he may have to leave the “D” “I” and “R” off his name as a party designation; he’s governing this time around more as an American than as a party loyalist.

Rudolph Giuliani may not have declared his candidacy for a 2008 GOP presidential bid quite yet, but it sounds like he’s getting ready to print up the business cards and the campaign literature. According to a New York Times report, Giuliani was sounding all the right notes in New Hampshire this past weekend.

While Giuliani remains a favorite of many due to his 9-11 leadership of New York City, many are conveniently putting aside his social liberalism while waiting for him to declare his candidacy. Still, he’s talking like someone ready for a marathon, not a 100-yard dash.

“When I say to you that we should reduce taxes to stimulate the economy, I’ll say it to you because I did it and I saw it work,” he said. “When I say we have to bring peace and security as sort of the beginning of anything, whether it’s in Baghdad or in other parts of the world or here at home, I’ll say that to you because I saw that happen in New York, and I made it happen. I did it.”

My take? Giuliani is the best of the RINOs, but I’m still holding out for a true conservative to declare and capture the imagination. Whether it’s Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee or someone yet to surface, the GOP is looking mighty thin on genuine conservatives this time around.

Maybe former President Jimmy Carter should just follow the version of the Golden Rule most of our mothers taught us: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

In his latest display of antisemitic idiocy, Carter complained that there are, and I quote, “too many Jews on the Holocaust council.” The absolute insanity of his statement is a disgrace to any legacy the failed president had left, and undoes all the goodwill he built running Habitat for Humanity the last couple decades or so. House painters and builders should offer their efforts to a cause not controlled by an antisemitic fellow like Carter, I say.

It’s bad enough that Carter is stoking the fires of antisemitism with the release of his new book on the Middle East, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Now we find out that his antisemitism has been present for decades and kept hush-hush by the liberal media.

At least now, the truth is coming to light.

Well, it’s about time some folks started speaking up and admitting the man who invented the Internet is full of crap. A growing number of meteorologists and climatologists are speaking out against the myth of global warming as bunk science promoted purely for grant-money gravy train reasons.

The latest is an ABC weatherman from Alabama named James Spann. Spann blows the lid off the grant money-driven shell game that is global warming mythology, exposing it for the pork-barrel project it is, rather than the hard science it claims to be. If global warming research is fat in the government budget, consider Spann the fat burner.

Spann writes, “Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story.”

He continues, “Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab. The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe. If you don’t like to listen to me, find another meteorologist with no tie to grant money for research on the subject. I would not listen to anyone that is a politician, a journalist, or someone in science who is generating revenue from this issue.”

Of course, this kind of talk never makes it to the airwaves, I suspect. Why? Let’s turn to Spann again!

Spann writes, “Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh? … I have nothing against “The Weather Channel”, but they have crossed the line into a political and cultural region where I simply won’t go.”

Of course, I’ve felt the same way and said the same thing for years. Heck, when I was a kid, our Scholastic Weekly Reader was gloomily predicting a new Ice Age on the way … not the movie, either! Now it’s global warming. But don’t believe me … I’m just a wonderful pessimist. There are plenty of folks like Spann out there who know the truth, even if they are threatened to be drummed out of the broadcast industry if they don’t tow the proper political line…

Pravda Minneapolis wants everyone to believe they are the newspaper of record, the only intelligent paper for Minnesotans to buy. And yet they feature stories like this on their front page and prominently displayed on their Web site all the time.

Let me ask this as simply as possible: what the heck is any serious news organization doing covering the state lottery, especially when there’s no winner? They’re basically collaborating with the state to sell more tickets on the long-shot dream of a big payday that for most people never comes to fruition.

For all its pretensions as a liberal paper and source of all things “fair” … having Pravda Minneapolis tout the state lottery is a huge sellout of its liberal values. After all, even most politicians see the lottery as the most regressive form of taxation - even though it’s voluntary - ever devised by state governments.

Buying a lottery ticket and expecting to win stacks the odds so much against you, one would have a far better chance of buying a ticket and hoping that Pope Benedict would show up and do karaoke at your child’s First Communion party, loaded down with first communion gifts straight from the Vatican vaults.

Shame on you, Pravda Minneapolis!

In his state of the state address, RINO Gov. Tim Pawlenty laid out a new plan that, despite his RINO status, makes common sense on the topic of education.

Calling Minnesota’s schools “obsolete,” Gov. Pawlenty called for an overhaul of secondary education that emphasizes rigor, relevance and results, an agenda that includes transforming some (not all) of the state’s high schools into “rigorous academies” that would deliver private school results from public institutions.

That high-performance high school agenda includes requiring four years of a second language, as well as a boosted emphasis on math, science, technology and engineering. The new agenda would also have high school graduates completing the equivalent of their first year of college prior to getting their high school diploma.

While such an aggressive agenda is sure to upset all the usual suspects - especially teacher’s unions - it is a forward-looking agenda designed to help Minnesota students compete better not only in the US, but with students from other top-performing academic countries.

Of course, the Red Star and Sickle immediately leaped into action to criticize an agenda that, had it been uttered by a Dmeocrat, they would have immediately embraced, seeking out the most outspoken liberal students and teachers, just to get their agenda across.

The usual suspects answered the call of Pravda Minneapolis with the predictable comments about being insulted that the governor called their schools “obsolete,” citing Minnesota’s rank near the top of the US in test scores and graduation rates.

But the truth is, RINO Gov. Pawlenty is right for once; to stay on top, Minnesota can’t compare itself just to other US states in academic performance, when nationally academic performance is falling off and can’t even meet the demands of No Child Left Behind in many cases.

One ought not wait until Minnesota falls to the academic standard level of Arkansas before calling for changes and improvements. After all, what offers a better return on investment: a graduating class ready to start degrees in technology and prepared for high-tech jobs at IBM and other top firms, or graduating classes that, after four years of high school and a college degree to their credit, can only manage to hold down a retail job selling Christian gifts?

While there’s nothing wrong with working retail, it’s not a career track to supporting a family.

The rumor mill is rife with the possibility - denied by White House press secretary Tony Snow - that President Bush may be set to reverse course and lay out a completely new “compassionate conservative” agenda for global warming. If this is the case, it’s probably because after January 2009, W. will be hanging up his address plaque somewhere other than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.

Global warming is one of the biggest science scams to hit popular culture since Al Gore floated the idea that he personally invented the Internet. Strangely enough, the former Vice President is behind a lot of the global warming myth as well.

Even by the most conservative estimates, Earth is 6,000 years old and most scientists believe it’s millions and millions and millions of years old. Weather patterns that take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to go through are not only possible, but likely. In fact, a recent Harvard study - the most comprehensive of its kind - indicates this is the case and even supports the idea that we’re coming out of a period of global cooling, as well as the idea that as recently as the 1600s or so, global temps were far above what they are now and the world didn’t exactly end.

But don’t let facts stand in the way of panic merchants and scientists striving to protect their federally-funded research. Far be it from anyone to admit that there’s not a crisis, when only crisis-fueled research pulls in the grant money that employs all these panic-pushers… and Al Gore, who any day now should be announcing that he’s the one who created the Earth in seven days, not that glory-hound, God.

Stay the course, W! Global warming is a myth, even if the honest scientists to have the proof are repeatedly muzzled by the vested-interest global warming researchers who want to keep their jobs and their federal grant money flowing in unabated.

Well, Democrat Senator Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois has filed the papers to set up an exploratory committee to figure out if it’s worth his time to run for president in 2008. May I yawn yet? Too early?

As charismatic as Sen. Obama may be, the truth of the matter is, any Democrats who think a White House run by this guy will prove as lopsided as his virtually unopposed Senate run in 2004 was are deluding themselves, or at least chugging an energy drink too many.

Truth is, Obama is attractive as a candidate primarily because he’s an unknown quantity. He hasn’t had a chance to tick many people off yet. But is a U.S. Senator with two years of experience at the federal level ready to be President?

Sorry, but no. Maybe in 2012 or 2016, but 2008 is too soon.

Of course, since Wonderful Pessimist caucuses with the GOP, it’s not like I care that much. If the GOP does its job and nominates someone good - meaning, someone who’s not John McCain at the very least - then who the Dems nominate won’t matter that much.

We hear a lot in the media about how women are shut out of the American political process. Don’t believe it. Did you know that no less than nine of the nation’s 50 governor’s chairs are currently filled by women? Sure, it’s just under 20 percent, but that’s a lot better than some folks would have you believe. And these are women of substance, not fretting Frannies worrying about diet pills. The list includes six Democrats and three Republicans.

Here’s a rundown:

Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) was 42 upon taking office, making her the youngest governor in Alaskan history as well as the first woman to hold the office. A former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she took office on Monday, December 4, 2006.

Janet Napolitano (D-Arizona) was originally elected in 2002 after leaving the Clinton White House. She is the third female governor to serve in Arizona and the first to win re-election. She was been a US attorney in the AG’s office under Bill Clinton’s watch, and served as Anita Hill’s lawyer.

M. Jodi Rell (R-Connecticut) is the state’s second female governor, taking office in 2004, after serving under John G. Rowland, who resigned due to a corruption investigation. She was re-elected to own her own term in 2006.

Ruth Ann Minner (D-Delaware) is in the middle of her second term as the state’s first female governor. She was first elected in 2001 after serving as lieutenant governor under Tom Carper.

Linda Lingle (R-Hawaii) is a genuine pioneer. She is the first Republican elected governor in Hawaii in 40 years, first county mayor elected governor ever, first female elected governor ever, the first Jewish governor in the state, the first twice-divorced governor, and the first not to have any children. She first took office in 2002 and won re-election in 2006.

Kathleen G. Sebelius (D-Kansas) is the second female governor in the state’s history. She took office in 2003 and won re-election in 2006; due to a term-limit law in the state, her current term will be her last, and she will be scheduled to leave office in 2011, following the 2010 elections.

Kathleen Blanco (D-Louisiana) took office in 2004 and has come under criticism for her handling of Hurricane Katrina. She has strained relations with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who endorsed her Republican opponent when she ran for office. She is the fourth-oldest governor in the US and the first woman to win the state house in Louisiana history. She is scheduled to run for re-election in 2007, but Hurricane Katrina fallout may put her bid in jeopardy.

Jennifer Granholm (D-Michigan) took office in 2003 and won re-election in 2006, but due to term limits, it will be her last term as governor of Michigan. She is Michigan’s first female governor.

Christine O’Grady Gregoire (D-Washington) took office in 2005, becoming the state’s second female governor. Her campaign was notable for a slim victory margin that at first seemed to favor GOP opponent Gino Rossi, but following a recount launched her into the State House. She won’t face re-election into 2008. She is a survivor of a bout with breast cancer.