Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Last Saturday afternoon, I received an excited phone call from my sister Amy, who told me that she was with some friends in a pub beneath a bowling alley. The Secret Service had arrived and did their Secret Service thaang, and now Barack Obama was upstairs bowling a game.

Amy’s a McCain supporter, a solid Republican, but she was excited. I told her that, no matter our political party, Barry’s candidacy was history. Plus, that morning, the local paper had run an article about how we’re so Republican and our State’s primary so irrelevant that all Presidential candidates ignore this county.

Amy called back about half an hour later to tell me that she got a picture, and it’s below. My sister was forced to stand next to Junior Casey, while a friend is pictured next to Barry. Please not that the three folks on the left – Barry, the friend, and Amy – are smiling, happy to be a part of a small even in Campaign 2008, while Junior Casey seems unsure of where he is.

Great fun was had by all (except for Junior, who looks like he might have been murmuring).

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Leading off FOX News Sunday, Senator Jack Reed declared that we had to get out of Iraq, and Senator Lindsey Graham noted that this battle with Mookie al Sadr’s militias were part of an Iranian battle: “Iranians are killing Americans in Iraq.”

Tennessee’s Dem Governor Phil Bredesen was up next on FNS, discussing his superdelegate convention. He wants this over before August, “then whoever wins can say their mea culpas.” (”It’s my fault for being so nasty in winning this thing, don’t you know, but politics is like this, you buffoonish loser.”)

Over on ABC’s This Week, Obama surrogate John Kerry praised Barry for his unilateral military strike into Pakistan, as he promised at a debate last year, which killed al Qaeda leader Abu Laith al-Libi in January. Stumping for Hillary, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell boasted that Okinawa Jack Murtha had supported Hillary.

Next on TW, Joe Lieberman said that this was not the same Dem Party as nominated him to be veep in 2000; it had, he said, been hijacked by “hyper-partisans” and “isolationists.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Tim Russert chastised CIA Director Michael Hayden for some “miscalculation” by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in throwing the Sadr-ites out of Basra; he quoted part of a Bob Woodward article from a June, 2007 Washington Post to prove that Hayden thought that the Maliki government could not govern Iraq. Hayden had said “in the short term,” as Hayden pointed out and as Woodward had continued in his article. He accused the CIA of torture but let Hayden explain why the Army Field Manual could not be arbitrarily applied against the CIA and its agents in “different circumstances” than members of the Army.

On CBS’ Face the Nation, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson opined that Barry had confronted the issue of Jeremiah Wright. Richardson said that he would not stoop to the gutter with James Carville.

Next on FTN, Philadelphia Mayor Mike Nutter, and Hillary supporter, said that the superdelegates ought to consider which candidate would be best for the party and for the country. Schieffer asked him what African Americans would do if Hillary were perceived as having stolen the election from Barry, but Nutter said that this was about more than race.

On CNN’s Late Edition, James Carville (Hillary surrogate) kept repeating that she has not been nasty, and besides, the Republicans will be worse in the general election. Jamal Simmons (Obama surrogate) was rational throughout, allowing even that Obama could “fall apart.”

Check out the complete, Show-by-Show review over at RedState.com.

For Sunday, March 30, 2008

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace will host Senators Lindsey Graham, a McCainiac, and Jack Reed, a Democrat with a miserable disposition. They’ll discuss Iraq.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos will have Ed Rendell, a Hillary surrogate, and John Kerry, an Obama guy, as guests, keeping this pot well stirred.

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert will talk CIA with the agency’s director, General Michael Hayden.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer will do the surrogate thing Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter for Hillary and Bill Richardson for Barry. The he’ll have the political strategist fired four years ago by Howard Dean, Joe Trippi (see below).

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer talks Florida with Senator Bill Nelson then does the surrogate thaang with James Carville for Hillary and Jamal Simpson for Barry. Plus, he’ll have his usual cast of billions.

= = = = =

Jack Reed (FNS) is a “GET OUT NOW!” pseudo-pacifist, while Lindsey Graham was just in Iraq. Russert wants to talk CIA, so we get Hayden. “How is your agency being corrupted for political purposes by the Bush junta?” We know the form.

Lots of surrogate stuff again, but you’d think Obama’s peeps would have a clue by now just how awful a surrogate John Kerry is (TW). Maybe Hillary does have a chance, although Hillary makes up for Kerry’s buffoonery with James Carville’s annoyingness (LE).

Joe Trippi. He was once fired by Howard Dean and he worked for John Edwards. Perhaps the Dem Party is grooming its next Bob “O-fer” Shrum.

I’ll have the review live Sunday afternoon. We’re having a new TV for upstairs delivered this afternoon to replace the Trinitron, but I refuse to watch Russert in HD (if that show even airs in that format).

I should have posted this yesterday. Hey, that’s when I sent to to my family and friends and to my RedState friends and colleagues.

Here’s this.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF MEDICINE

May God damn cancer to whatever pit He opts to damn unnatural cellular behavior. Then again, it’s different when it is a part of His plan.

We went to see Dr. Shocker this afternoon, the radiation oncologist, this afternoon. To set this up, I’d been worried about this for a week, and last night, I found all sorts of lumps in my throat. (Cancerous lumps, I’d decided, though the “lump in my throat” kind were there as well.) I was nervous, but by the time we’d left to go there, I was fine.

It was the same trip we’d made every weekday morning from late September to late November, across town to the Cancer Treatment Center parking lot behind the hospital and opposite the old graveyard fronted with a old, black wrought iron fence. It looked the same, but it felt different: it was brighter and warmer than it had been when we saw that lot daily, and we had been awake half the day. (The treatments, if you’ll recall, were AM, at 8 or 8:30.)

They’d mailed me a cardboard thing. I detached the top from the bottom via the perforations; the top went on the dash so the non-extant cancer lot police wouldn’t have us towed for being there, while the bottom I scanned when I got inside, let ‘em know we were there, like that old card I used to scan every morning. (I still have that blue thing in my wallet.)

There’s no way of extending this. We went into the familiar waiting room, which felt different. Diane suggested that it might be the brightness, and I recognized that I was more relaxed. Last year, I went in there with a purpose. I was going to do what I had to, undergo what they threw at me, to beat this. It’s the same thing anyone would do, but it adds an urgency which was not there this time.

Diane pointed to the paintings on the wall. We had just seen a feature on Dr. Shocker in the local paper which mentioned him receiving a painting as a gift, an award.

The nurse came out and got us. She inquired as to my health: no complaints, I hope I haven’t lost weight. Onto the scale I went, and I’d gained a little, which I’d expected, as I’ve only recently been eating more. She took us back to the waiting room and left us there after we’d sat. (Last time, the nurse asked all sorts of questions and had me rate my pain on a scale of one-to-ten. Fun, fun, fun, but I suppose it is not as important these days.)

Dr. Shocker came in momentarily. We chatted. He hadn’t seen my PET Scan from last February, but Dr. Howells had at least seen the results. (I’d demanded that he get them from Shocker and revue them.) He’d mentioned something on my scan from before, on my right side, which had troubled him but saw that Dr. Howells had thought nothing of it. Diane told them that it was probably the Goretex used to repair the rupture of my diaphragm seven years ago. Without an MD, my wife had solved a doctors’ mystery.

While waiting for the computer to load, he felt up my neck and looked down my throat using a mirror with a light attached to his headband. He felt nothing, he saw nothing, and this was “exceptionally good.” He reviewed the PET Scan results on his lap top and saw not hint of anything whatsoever. This was alternately “incredibly good,” “exceptionally good,” and “unbelievably good.” He mentioned offhand that it was “early,” and I asked. He said that usually the risk of recurrence runs for three years. I told him that he’d zapped my tumor sufficiently: “You welded my throat shut!”

I see Dr. Howell’s in two months. We made an appointment to see Shocker in three. I think I’ll have healed significantly by each of those appointments, given that I feel much better now than I did last time I saw Shocker several months ago or when I saw Howells last month.

God has me here for a reason.

In a piece backing Barry Obama, carried of course as “straight news,” young Washington Post reporter Alec MacGillis opines:

Like Clinton, he favors expanding the government’s role in delivering health care, and would pay for that by ending President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. He would go a step further than Clinton by lifting the limit on income taxed for Social Security, now $100,000, to set that program on firm footing.

He strongly supports abortion rights and spoke out against a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld a ban on the procedure that some call “partial-birth” abortion.

Young Alec adopts the language of the left while rejecting that of the center-right.

He tells us that Barry “has been endorsed by the activist group MoveOn.org.” The “activist group” ?!? They are fringe leftists, for gawdsake!

As his little piece ends. Young Alec laments 1988 Dem Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, complaing that “Republicans were able to paint the former Massachusetts governor, a relatively moderate technocrat, as a weak-willed lefty.” What about Dukakis was “relatively moderate”? His support for gun control? His support for the practice of abortion? His fiscal confiscatory and redistributionist tendencies? No, Dukakis was on the American left, and so is Barack Obama.

Young Alec’s bias does not belong on a page of a newspaper labeled without the warning label accompanying admitted opinion pieces. Of course, this is true of so much of what we read in the press.

(HT, Adam C.)