All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Here’s the problem with the iPhone.

Say you’re on a long trip, and you want to watch a movie on the iPhone. Okay, all well and good, but the iPhone battery is not exactly stellarly impressive, and by the time your trip is up, if you’ve been using the iPod features, your battery is going to be drained and you won’t be able to use it as a phone.

Solution? Backup battery.

There are two kinds offered. The first is a backup battery that uses AA batteries. The second is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery.

I opted to try the former, and after looking around a bit, ordered what I thought was the smallest and most convenient battery from a place called RichardSolo.com. It’s supposed to give you 6-8 hours extra of video/music time.

It supposedly works on all iPod models and the iPhone. It’s a small black thing that clips into the standard connector on the bottom of your iPod.

When it gets here, I’ll let you know how it works. I’ve read some great reviews of these things, and some horrible reviews of these things. We’ll see how it goes.

Right. This time I’m talking about Obama making a rather stupid remark regarding Pennsylvania. I’m sure you’ve heard about it by now. The “bitter” remark. Although it’s not the comment that voters are bitter that should be getting attention. Again, the quote, in context, is this:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Okay. It’s true, some coal-boom towns in PA suffer greatly when the jobs leave town. And sure, it makes people bitter.

But for once I agree with Hillary Clinton, who implied Obama’s remarks reflect a view that he’s somehow above the residents of these small towns.

The point I’d like to make is that just because people are bitter does not necessarily make them tough on immigration, supporters of the Second Amendment, or whackily religious. The last one is a real gem for Obama. What made Obama get religion? From the whacked-out Jeremiah Wright? Political expediency. He needed Wright’s backing to get elected. It’s that simple. So, sorry, Obama, but sometimes people turn to religion for their own reasons which have nothing to do with bitterness or political expediency. Some people actually have this marvelous thing called “faith”, Mr. Obama. They have opinions, too, and those opinions are not necessarily direct outgrowth at bitterness towards the current state of things in this country. The majority of them are proud, intelligent Americans, who know what they believe in and know what they want to vote for and know why.

Moving on — anti free trade? Obama is against free trade. He wants out of NAFTA, the biggest free trade agreement we have going (and a significant booster for our economy). So are you bitter, too, Mr. Obama?

Basically, all I’m saying is that you don’t tar people with a brush like this. How would it sound if McCain got up there and said black people are bitter, which is why they turn to the outrageous rantings of people like Jeremiah Wright and Farrakhan? I don’t think that would have gone over too well.

Plenty of people are bitter. Plenty of people are bitter at the government, for good reason. That doesn’t automatically make them vote from pure base emotion. It doesn’t make them “cling to guns”. Some people like to hunt, which, last time I checked, is still legal, despite the efforts of the left.

Once again, though, his campaign (never forget that Obama is merely the pinnacle of an extremely well-run political machine) has done a good job with spin and damage control. His jabs back at McCain and Clinton, after they attacked him on the comment, were well-crafted.

But let’s face it. Obama is looking down his nose at the people of Pennsylvania. I’d like to see them respond with a resounding victory for HRC, which would keep her in the race and please me and my fellow members of the VRWC to no end.

That is correct. A new poll to honor Charlton Heston.

The question at hand is:

Orangutans

OR

Chimpanzees?

I await the results with delicious anticipation.

We lose another good guy.

Eat me.

Okay, so there’s this soundbite running around from a radio interview Obama did with a radio station in Philadelphia. Here’s the full soundbite in context. What’s going on is people are stopping the soundbite at “typical white person”. Here it is in context:

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t,” Obama told WIP Sports Radio.

“But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

As I said, the problem is that everybody is ending the soundbite at “typical white person”, which is, of course, pissing some people off.

But if you look at the entire quote in context, it makes sense and is not nearly as inflammatory.

Again, make no mistake, I do not support Obama. On the major issues. That doesn’t mean I don’t like or respect the man. And right now, he’s getting pilloried for that remark, which, as you see, if placed in proper context, is not nearly as inflammatory if you just stop the soundbite at “typical white person”.

I think that’s terribly unfair so I wanted to get the full quote out there.

I received this in my email and figured it’d be best to put this on the blog instead of just sending it to my address book.

I don’t know who started this, but all over television, people are pronouncing the word “divisive” as “duh-viz-uv“.

Most dictionaries don’t even allow that as an alternate pronunciation. It is “dah-vice-iv”.

Just been driving me nuts. Sorry.

Dick Morris has brought this issue up, and it cuts to the core of the problem Obama is facing. Obama cannot tell the truth regarding why he joined and stayed with his church and his pastor.

The answer is political. Obama wanted to get into politics in the South Side of Chicago. To get into politics there, you need the black vote. Period. And Obama was definitely worried he would not be perceived as black enough. That’d he’d be perceived as an Uncle Tom. He needed to make himself blacker.

I know a lot of people will violently disagree with me on this, and that’s okay, because I’m speculating. But I think the speculation is really rooted in political reality. And not only does it mean Obama cannot tell the truth about why he chose this pastor — political expediency — but it also means that now, for the first time, we are seeing Obama act like…every other politician on Earth.

Think of his first comments on this, in which he carefully parsed his words to say: “I was not in the pews when those comments were made.”

It begs the question — were you in the aisle?

So it’s a double-whammy for Obama. First you have just the Wright issue on its surface, second you have Obama descending into the very “divisive” brand of politics he claims to transcend.

I like Obama. I like the cut of his gib. I don’t agree with him on — almost every issue — but I like the guy. I think he’s highly intelligent. And a highly intelligent man would not be in the dark about what his pastor was saying for 20-some years.

But for 20 years, Obama never felt the need to sit down with his pastor and tell him, look, I love you, but some of your screeds are simple hate speech, and something I can’t stand for. You’ve helped me; let me help you now.

Instead, Obama has been brought down a peg by this whole thing. Which I think is a shame, because had his campaign dealt with this pre-emptively — and believe me, they knew this guy was a problem, why do you think the pulled him from the campaign and refused to let him give the invocation? — anyway, had they dealt with this before, perhaps in one of his books, and had he said much the same thing as he said yesterday, it wouldn’t be an issue. It just wouldn’t. He would have effectively killed it.

So I do feel bad for Obama, because I know he doesn’t believe the hate spewed by Wright, I know why he chose that pastor, and that church, and I don’t think it was a terribly slimy move…but I cannot forgive the stupidity on Obama’s part in somehow thinking that Wright would not emerge as an issue at some point. After all, these DVDs containing the hate speech from Wright were being sold by the church. No one “dug this up”, it was out there for everybody to see.

Make no mistake, I do not agree with Obama on politics, but I admire the man greatly for his personal achievements and for the kind of race he’s been running. And it’s sad to see him reduced to the level of “typical politician”.

This thing has legs, and it’s going to hound him all the way to November, and may well cost him the general.

That’s about it…Arthur C. Clarke passed away today.