I am trying to find the transcript of a speech one Dennis Praeger gave, more or less voicing opinions expressed in this editorial.  The video is at the end of this item, and the key quote is at the top.

Who is Dennis Praeger?  Hm.  Some guy.  Really, in the realm of pundits, I have sort of become egalitarian in my attitude to them — one basically unread blogger is worth about as much as one well paid radio show host who can get someone to pay for a talk.  (Hell.  These days an uninformed plumber apparently is credentialed enough to hold forth on national television on Israel.)  I really would like to add a few prefacing sentence to this line, since I’m never comfortable with dangling sentences that look like they could be floating out of context, but the situation is thus that I just have to go with this:

“Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value.”

On to the French Revolution, and a statement of just what are the American values.  I sometimes think there’s a “too clever by half” attitude with “shocking” contrarianism.  It comes forth in arguring that America isn’t a democracy — the founders didn’t like such a thing–, and it comes forth even moreso here in arguing that “equality” was not an American value.  I honestly haven’t read the Federalist Papers, though I probably should, which may put me at a disadvantage in taking on learned scholars of America, but here’s something from the Declaration of Independence.:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal […]

You can look up the rest to see for yourself if the words that follow this negate that “equal” part.  But I’m thinking that Praeger may be stopping his reading of this document even sooner, and emphasizing this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created […]

Which to him, and them, suggest that there is no separation of church and state, goddamnedit.  Well, it’s all a matter of emphasis.

Meanwhile, the noted Constitutional Scholar Sarah Palin comes out full force on her interpration of the Freedom of the Press:

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by “attacks” from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks.  Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

We really are screwed, aren’t we?  Understand, yesterday the sort of Drudge-directed noise machine was in an uproar over Obama bumping three generally conservative reporters off his press entourage.  The Dallas Morning News is understanding; The Washington Times is not so much.  The total effect of this contrived controvery, in light of Sarah Palin’s fascist interpretation of the First Amendment, is the “yes for me, but not for thee” rule.

Playing with this electoral map (and there are others — if your favorite plays better, good for you and it), the game I play is to expand the map to the largest Obama landslide that is feasible, if you figure he wins every state that he has ventured to campaign in.  Then contract those ridiculous Obama states and a few less than ridiculous Obama states over to a plausible McCain victory.

The outsized Obama landslide is kind of interesting.  He wins right down the Pacific Coast, right down the Atlantic Coast — with the exception of South Carolina, and right across the Canadian border — except for the tiny sliver of the Idaho panhandle.  It is a rejoinder to the odd tactic a stripe of Republicans have of waving of the map for the last two presidential elections and pointing to all the red — the Republicans won the Land-mass contest going away.  On a county-by-county level, another map shown in this same spirit, they probably still win that particular contest even in this ridiculous landslide, so I suppose they may well just hang up that map and beam proudly.

Then again, I can’t think of the name for the major metropolitan city of North Dakota.  This line for this McCain campaign’s “brave face” memo is a laugher:  Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win.  You can say a lot of negative things about the logic of Obama’s ND GA AZ buy — maybe it’s counterproductive and a waste of money, maybe it’s a feigning stunt — but this logic falls flat on the face of it.  Incidentally, next Marc Ambinder post down, and… I suspect that the smallest amount of leaning on that massive undecided vote will put this to the expected Republican column.

The other interactive election feature worth looking at is the NY Times Endorsement history.  They started as a Republican (as the Democrats were aligned with the Secessionist Party of the South — which, come to think of it, is about how they ended up back at the Democratic Party for the past forty years), moved into the sort of business-friendly Cleveland Demcoratic tradition, chaffed at William Jennings Bryan but hurtled through Wilson and the retro-Clevelandites who followed through the 1920s.  And by they’ve endorsed every Democratic candidate for president since 1960.

Some high-lights:  the pull-quote for 1964, which seems about right always.  The fact that Franklin Roosevelt looks older in the photograph for 1936 than he does for the one for 1944.  John Palmer, the Gold-Democrat alternate endorsed in 1896, and more specifically his beard.  (I can’t quite come to the same judgement about 1904 Alton Parker’s mustache.)  The 1968 endorsement of Hubert Humphrey, and strictly the pull-quote which many an “Obamacon” have revised, only with Agnew being crossed out and replaced with Palin.  And the apologia for the pointless presidential campaign of 1988 against the supposed superior to the campaign of 1988.