Past rumors are now confirmed as absolute truth in the wake of the slobberknocker comeback in Philly: Redskins Owner Daniel Snyder is, in all actuality, Michael Scott’s long lost twin brother. Well, but maybe with a little more of that John Henderson fire (from an old WaPo profile):

“Hey, turn on ESPN!” he says. “They got the Redskins! Turn it on!” I turn on the TV in my room so now we are both watching ESPN. “They’re showing us losing to Dallas!” he mutters. The Dallas Cowboys have now beaten the Redskins nine consecutive times.

“I hate Dallas,” Snyder yells. “. . . Would I cut off a finger to beat Dallas?”

“I don’t know, Dan,” I reply, “you might.”

“I would,” he says.

The original evidence is provided by Mr. Irrelevant.

For the fans out there: Artist Lou Romano shares some of his Pixar work for The Incredibles. It’s some fantastic stuff.

In honor of Dallas week:

Pearlman writes that Michael Irvin, incensed that tackle Everett McIver, in mid-haircut, would not leave a barber chair at training camp in 1998 so Irvin could get his haircut first, stabbed McIver in the neck. McIver was rushed to the hospital and survived, but not without losing a lot of blood. Irvin’s silence on the charge has been deafening. I asked a Cowboy who played on that team if the story was true. “Absolutely,” the Cowboy said. “I’m surprised it was kept quiet over the years.”

More from Jamie Mottram.

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

By Adam Zagajewski. Translated by Renata Gorczynski.
Posted every 9/11.

>> I used to do comprehensive predictions for the NFL season - ranking each time, analyzing each draft, predicting specific records - and sometimes I was right, and sometimes I was really wrong, but usually I was better than the ESPN guys who do this for a living. I still do all of this, but I do it in the deserted sports bar now, so no one has to listen to me except the hobos who wander in looking for freebies. So I’ll just give you my playoff teams and a few other facets.

My predictions for the way the season turns out (made before the Brady injury - I’d stick the Titans in there instead):

Coach of the Year: Ken Whisenhunt

MVP: Drew Brees

Offensive POY: Terrell Owens

Defensive POY: Julius Peppers

Offensive ROY: Chris Johnson

Defensive ROY: Keith Rivers

AFC East: Buffalo Bills

AFC North: Pittsburgh Steelers

AFC South: Indianapolis Colts

AFC West: Denver Broncos

Wild Cards: New England Patriots, San Diego Chargers

NFC East: Philadelphia Eagles

NFC North: Green Bay Packers

NFC South: Carolina Panthers

NFC West: Arizona Cardinals

Wild Cards: Dallas Cowboys, New Orleans Saints

Super Bowl Matchup: Steelers v. Panthers

Super Bowl Victor: Pittsburgh Steelers

One of the most pointed accusations Sarah Palin lodged against Barack Obama was the fact that, despite not authoring a single significant piece of legislation, he’s found the time to write two memoirs.

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state Senate.

Annenberg’s FactCheck.org, who I find to typically be quite fair in their judgment, steps in to defend Obama. On this point, they write:

Palin’s accusation that Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law or even a reform” in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate is simply not a fair assessment. Obama has helped push through major ethics reforms in both bodies, for example.

In advancing this argument, FactCheck.org oversteps in a significant way, and one that I believe they ought to reexamine in order to justify their argument - or failing that, to retract their point entirely.

The truth is that Sarah Palin’s statement is absolutely correct: neither Barack Obama nor the staffers in his employ (like speeches, remember, they tend to be written by others) have authored a single major law or reform.

The FactCheck.org folks first turn to the last part of Palin’s statement - “even in the state Senate.” They write:

Of course, we can’t say what Palin considers “major.” But if Palin’s own ethics reforms in Alaska were important enough to highlight in her convention address, then it’s only fair to credit Obama’s efforts on that topic. In 1998 in the Illinois Senate, Obama cosponsored an ethics overhaul that bars elected officials from using their campaign funds for personal use and and was called the the first major overhaul of Illinois campaign and ethics laws in 25 years. It also bans fundraisers in the state Capitol during legislative sessions. Obama’s Republican cosponsor Kirk Dillard even appeared in an Obama ad last summer describing Obama’s skills working with members of both parties to get legislation passed.

In this paragraph, FactCheck.org take an extremely generous view of legislative authorship. Bill cosponsors typically have very little to do with the drafting of a bill - especially in a state senate. Cosponsors are typically recruited after the bill itself is crafted, as a way of creating weight behind a piece of legislation and highlighting the importance of the measure. The ideal list of cosponsors includes members whose constituencies are most effected by the bill, a handful of influential committee members and leadership members who will determine the bill’s placement on the schedule for hearings, and at least one member of the opposing party (and sometimes not more than one - you just need one to call it “bipartisan,” as John McCain knows very well).

Some of these cosponsors will, on occasion, have an issue with one aspect of the legislation; they’ll sign onto the bill in turn for a small change in their favor, or more frequently, they’ll sign on to create some political cover for themselves. But in no sense is a cosponsor an author of a piece of legislation: neither they nor their staff drafted the legislation, and they do not have any opportunity to fundamentally alter the law except in the most extreme and odd circumstances.

Here’s a perfect example for you to consider: McCain-Feingold. The BCRA legislation is famous because of the two principal sponsors - but did you know there were 41 other co-sponsors in the Senate alone? They were:

Bayh, Bingaman, Boxer, Cantwell, Carnahan, Carper, Cleland, Clinton, Cochran, Collins, Corzine, Dayton, Dodd, Dorgan, Durbin, Edwards, Feingold, Feinstein, Graham, Harkin, Jeffords, Johnson, Kerry, Kohl, Landrieu, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Lincoln, Mikulski, Miller, Nelson, Reed, Reid, Sarbanes, Schumer, Snowe, Stabenow, Thompson, Wellstone, and Wyden.

There’s no question that Barack Obama has worked to get bills passed, in the state Senate and in the Senate. But if Hillary Clinton had claimed during the primary campaign to have “taken the initiative to reform Washington by authoring McCain-Feingold,” something tells me Obama would have pounced on that as a vast exaggeration - which, of course, it would be.

Cosponsors are allies in a fight: what they aren’t is, by any stretch, the authors of a piece of legislation.

FactCheck.org continues:

In Washington, Obama was instrumental in helping to craft the 2007 ethics reform law that ended gifts and meals from lobbyists, cut off subsidized jet travel for members of Congress, required lobbyists to disclose contributions they “bundle” to candidates, and put the brakes on other, similar common practices.

I’ve looked through FactCheck.org’s source list on this post, and unless I’m missing something, the only citation they have to support this argument is this article from Illinois Issues, a publication so unbiased in its coverage that it has repeatedly published the works of one Barack Obama on community organizing and other topics. Needless to say, surely you would have to have a better source to claim that Obama was “instrumental” to the crafting of a piece of major legislation. You’d think.

But let’s assume my depiction of cosponsorship is dead wrong, and that charitably, as a cosponsor, Obama should receive credit as a coauthor of the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.”

There’s only one problem with that: Barack Obama was not a cosponsor of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

In other words, the only piece of legislation FactCheck.org claims as the basis for attacking Sarah Palin - their only citation for what is, by their measure, Obama’s sole significant legislative act in the U.S. Senate - is a bill he did not cosponsor, did not write, and did not do much except comment on in the press.

In fact, the only evidence that he did anything other than put pressure on the bill’s authors to include a few changed passages on bundling is that Obama participated in a few press events and conference calls about the bill. That’s really shoddy. I should hope FactCheck reconsiders this paragraph and their argument that Obama was “instrumental” in this legislative feat, because it’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder about fairness.

Finally, there’s this point:

In addition, we already noted in a recent article Obama’s efforts with Republican senators to help detect and secure weapons of mass destruction and to destroy conventional weapons stockpiles around the world, and to create a publicly searchable database on federal spending.

I’ll grant the validity of this paragraph, but I do not see how this conflicts with Palin’s statement in any way. Her argument was that Obama had not authored (or directed the authorship of - as I said, the lawyers ultimately write these things, so let’s not pick nits as some did with Palin’s speech being written by a professional in that area) a piece of significant law. This is absolutely true. There is no major piece of legislation in Obama’s resume that was authored, created, or even outlined by him - and if he were to introduce one tomorrow, that would still fail the test - it has to pass, remember, to become a law.

One does not expect Obama to match John McCain’s lengthy record of significant bills authored and successfully passed in his short elected career as a talented public speaker who happens to be an elected politician. But it’s more disappointing when you consider what a brilliant writer Obama is, and not just on matters of law or personal memoir: he’s a talented fiction writer, too.

Everyone knows Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams from My Father, covering his time in Chicago. What fewer know is that during his years as an organizer Obama was also working hard on fiction-writing. “He wrote stories about the people he was working with,” Mike Kruglik told me, “fiction that was beautiful, beautifully crafted, fantastically evocative about what it was like to be in that community, including how bleak the landscape was, how threadbare some of the institutions were, what it looked like and felt like.” I asked Kruglik if he had read the stories. “Yeah,” he answered. “[Obama] gave them to me. They were about what a pastor was doing with his church.” Kruglik says he can’t remember much beyond that — this was years ago — but given the prominent role that Obama’s pastors and his church have played in the campaign, there would probably be a great deal of interest in the stories today. But you won’t get them from Kruglik, who says he gave the stories back to Obama without making any copies.

This seems just the sort of skill that would be well-suited in crafting a major law or a reform. But we’ll have to wait and see if that comes to pass - despite FactCheck.org’s insistence, Barack Obama has not done that yet.

originally posted at redstate

Jennifer Rubin posts on something that’s a truly significant moment: The great Sally Quinn recants her position on Sarah Palin.

Quinn had been one of Palin’s biggest critics in the days leading up to her speech (read her column here). But yesterday in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, she declared: “I was wrong about her.”

I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.

Sally Quinn deserves credit for being far more honest than most of her media colleagues - she’ll actually admit she doesn’t know everything. Of course, there’s no evidence that McCain himself hadn’t known this stuff in advance, as Jen points out. But I think there’s something more here: I think a woman like Quinn is a perfect example of the sort of feminist most likely to be moved by Palin’s 21st century subtext of feminine empowerment, and subtle rejection of the vestiges of sixties-era emasculating uber-feminism.

Where Hillary embraced the sixties’ sexual revolution view of womanhood, Palin rejects much of it - it doesn’t take a village to raise her children, she and her guy can do it themselves - but in so doing, doesn’t lose any of the toughness or confidence that she needs to be a leader. This is the sort of thing, combined with great natural charm and humor (she can smile as she twists the knife) that Quinn finds so admirable.

Kudos to Quinn for admitting her error. Now if only the rest of the media was so honest.

originally posted at redstate

In case you hadn’t been reading us already. I’ll be crossposting everything shortly.

“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We’ve got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – [my campaign has] a budget of about three times that just for the month.”

“This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy … our opponent is against producing it.”

A week ago, from far and wide, the followers came to the mountaintop to glimpse Barack Obama in his moment of glory. And the New Adonis did not disappoint.

The event was an act of soaring political grandeur, inspiring the devoted flock to call out in hallelujahs. Yet in the speech itself, try and find it you may, but there was no phrase particularly memorable, no quotable line.

Do not hold that against his speech. It is not what Obama said that mattered.

The lasting image of Obama’s speech will be the spectacle itself: a Super Bowl halftime show without a game score to go with it (unless it is New Democrats 0, Neo-Old Democrats 1). No one is prompted to such an equivalent force of emotion, the tears of joy, at the idea of President McCain. At least, no sane person. But sanity itself is an act of rebellion in a civic universe where the political pageantry surrounding a man who has accomplished such meager political crumbs and done so little in life is enough – more than enough – to carry a candidacy based on the unassailable purity and goodness and untapped power of that one man all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania.

What Sarah Palin came the Twin Cities to say tonight mattered. It mattered because it proved she was not merely chosen for her gender, for her looks, for her style, or for the historic mark she represents for the Republican Party. She was chosen because of her beliefs - because she’s taken on the hordes of corrupt bureaucrats and pork swilling politicians, even those in her own party, to achieve what she believes is right. It’s because on the most crucial test for any politician - will you stand up, despite all the forces arrayed against you, for what you believe to be right? - Sarah Palin passed, and Barack Obama has that nagging Incomplete.

When has Barack Obama taken an arrow from his own party for anything he believed in? When has he decided that he would act, with bravery and courage, staking out a tough decision that he believed to be right, against the wishes of the old political masters of his party? When has he broken with the leftist base, who today screams with all their might that this woman is not fit to lead even as she governs a state budget and an employee base that dwarfs anything Obama has run, that her family is fair game because she is vile, that her place is the home and not the campaign trail, and cannot possibly be a mother and a political leader?

Obama has no lack of a certain kind of courage – give him that. It takes bravado of a sort to declare that you deserve the credit for so many things in the state senate, in a biopic video so short that it cannot find space to mention Columbia or Harvard Law, where you had no hand in the legislation, and most often voted “present.” It is courage of a sort to take a file photo of yourself standing alongside Dick Lugar as an indication that you, through sheer force of will and over the objections of the warmongering right, ended the expansion of nuclear weapons. It is a form of boldness, yes, to declare in one instant that John McCain is a man to be respected and honored, and in the next contend that this man – who defended the Democratic nominee in 2004 against all attacks, even accurate ones – has committed a grave insult against all in the arena by declaring, old war hero that he is, that he will put his country first.

That man in the arena presented himself the kind of savior America needs, after all of his promises, declaring his ascendant “humility.” He read the word off the teleprompter carefully, as if using his mouth in a way it was not used to. Humility. Yes, the humility that promises on the one hand to create massive corporate loopholes to encourage artificially-created jobs, then on the other to pay for them by closing massive corporate loopholes. The humility that swears in the one instant to lessen costs, and in the next to require vast sums of money from corporations to a degree that would drive any sane organization from our shores. The humility that promises to cut taxes, even for people who do not pay taxes, and pay for them by going line by line through the federal budget and cutting out the treasured programs managed and cared for by Democrats in the bureaucracy since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and defended by their allies in the Congress, with but the stroke of a pen.

And this is the man - humble, humble Barack, who has never cut one program, who has never shrunk one agency, who has never fired one bureaucrat - who says that Sarah Palin is too raw and naive.

One wonders which reporter will be brave enough to ask which major program he will cut first. He had, before people started paying attention to his campaign, mentioned NASA as a possible plum target – creating a sucking sound of irony, considering the prominent placement of the returning astronauts in his campaign video…but such needling questions are for after an election, not before.

Barack Obama came to Denver to give a Democrat speech. It may eventually be remembered as the apotheosis of a conventional Democrat speech: the images taken from places he did not live, jobs he did not work, wars he did not fight in, to connect with the broadest possible audience of people. It could have been given, nearly all of it, by John Edwards, man of the milltown – before he ceased to exist – or by Hillary Clinton, the original blue collar warrior from Chicago. It was a speech for Democrats, and delivered to Democrats – and hence the lack of the true outline that makes for powerful remarks. Like the State of the Union speeches given by the eloquent yet fickle President Clinton, it is assumed that this laundry list, a litany of campaign promises that merge together into a mushy feeling of warmth and contentment, would be met with glorious clamor, as if proceeding from the mouth of a god. And they were.

Sarah Palin did not come to speak as a god. Her words proceed not from the bowels of Olympus, but the heart of the enduring American spirit - the driving force that calls out from the rough frontier for young men and women to go West, and ever West. It asserts the worth of the seekers, the pioneers, and all those who are ever unsatisfied with the limits of the status quo - that things are as they ever will be, and you should accept it, and move on. She speaks to those who heed the call to carve out a spot of land and make it your own, to build a good home, to raise a good family, and to be ready, should they ever call for you, to defend the freedoms that made all this possible - to defend them with your all. This is an ordinary action - but in the course of doing it, it can become extraordinary.

What Sarah Palin said tonight matters. She asks you not to vote for her because of what she claims to be, but because of what she is - because of the principles that undergird her, that motivate her, that made her challenge the old guard in her own party and the bureaucrats in others - and now, to take on the self-proclaimed Arbiter of Change. What she said tonight shows that underneath her pleasant exterior and her mother’s smile is a sharp, talented executive - one who knows how to throw a punch, and how to make change a reality, not a promise. She is tough - she is a fighter - and she is not about to blink.

“Yes, I am a woman,” she says. “And I am ready.”

It was not what Obama said that mattered. Those were words – just words. He shined in his moment of beauty, his message delivered with the Chestertonian clarity of the absurd.

“No, I am not a man,” his speech declared, “I am a cause.”

And so, as the man has declared it, he is.

originally posted at redstate

Josh Trevino, Redstate co-founder, encounters President Roosevelt.

“Colonel Roosevelt at your service, sir!” “Colonel Roosevelt, lovely to meet you.” “And where are you from, young man?” “I’m from Texas, Colonel Roosevelt.” “Texas! Why, I trained my Rough Riders at Fort Sam Houston!” “You certainly did, Colonel!” “And have you had a bully time at this convention?” “Except for the protestors, yes.” “Those anarchists! You know they did in our great President McKinley.” “Ah yes — the dastardly Mr Czolgosz.” “Indeed, sir! And they tried to get me in Buffalo some years later!”

And thus for some time. Needless to say, he’s a McCain man.

Follow the link for the inspiring photographic evidence.

Bully.