Heartbreaking:

About 150 people packed the Fairmount Cemetery Chapel this morning to pay respects to 3-year-old Marten Kudlis, who died tragically last week while at an ice-cream store in Aurora.

“Oh, my God, Marten, this is the last thing I ever wanted to do with you,” shouted his father, Marat, as the tiny wooden casket was lowered into the ground. “I love you so much.”

Marten had gone with a 10-year-old friend and his mother to play at Lowry Park on Thursday evening. Then the group stopped at the Baskin-Robbins store at South Havana Street and East Mississippi Avenue for a treat.

A high-speed collision in the intersection sent a vehicle crashing into a transformer. A jagged piece of metal flew through the ice-cream shop, killing Marten.

Two women in one of the vehicles also died in the accident. The driver, Francis Hernandez, is believed to be an illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record involving mostly traffic offenses. He has been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide.

Note that illegal immigration isn’t even an issue in this presidential campaign. That’s because neither candidate plans to do a damned thing about it.

Previous posts here, here, and here.

Too much stuff for a separate post about every issue:

• MoDo smears Palin:
  

  Does she really think Adam, Eve, Satan and the dinosaurs mingled on the earth 5,000 years ago?

  Why put out a press release about her teenage daughter’s pregnancy and then spend the next few days attacking the press for covering that press release?

  As Troopergate unfolds here — an inquiry into whether Palin inappropriately fired the commissioner of public safety for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law — it raises this question: Who else is on her enemies list and what might she do with the F.B.I.?

  Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants and a ban on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian?

  There are too many smears there to count. If you don’t recognize them by now — e.g. the “Harry Potter” books appear on a phony list of banned books — I can’t help you. Bad MoDo! Lying MoDo!

• Juan Cole: “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick.”

• Ed Morrissey on Palin’s reforms.

• Sandra Tsing Loh, recently described by the L.A. Times as a “cunning linguist,” uses her lingual skills to praise Sarah Palin for being the only candidate on either ticket to send her kids to public schools.

• ABC News debunks some earmarking urban legends about Palin.

• Beldar relays a heartwarming story of Palin’s kindness to a special needs child and her parents on the campaign trail — with no thought of using it as a photo op.

• And the angry side of Beldar emerges as he excoriates Newsweek for taking the side of “Taserboy” Wooten in the Tasergate scandal. Something that hadn’t really occurred to me before: the man Wooten had threatened to kill, Palin’s father, was that nice man Palin introduced in her speech.

• Roger Ebert:
  

  Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don’t want to know.

  I added the link. I don’t think Roger would have.

• And still more apparent sexism:
  

  South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler sharply attacked Sarah Palin today, saying John McCain had chosen a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

• Even Joe Biden thinks Hillary would have been a better pick than he is.

Yesterday and today saw the McCain camp engaged in an overly outraged defense of Sarah Palin over Barack Obama’s pig remark.

As I said yesterday, it was a “remarkably tone-deaf statement” even if not specifically intended to refer to Palin (something people debate on both sides of the aisle).

But instead of laughing it off as an odd locution from a candidate allegedly adept with words, the McCain camp went into Full Outrage Mode, sending a spokeswoman out to directly accuse Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, and crafting an entire ad around the gaffe.

Look: there has been plenty of sexism in the campaign against Palin. It’s appropriate for observers, like bloggers, to point it out. But the campaign should be careful about doing too much explicit complaining.

This is an excellent example of an attitude Jan Crawford Greenburg says “smacks of the tokenism and paternalism of a past generation,” and what K-Lo calls “whining about sexism.”

Worse, it’s bad politics. Instead of letting the media run with it, leaving Obama’s remark as the focus of discussion, the campaign had to inject itself into the situation. Now, Barack Obama is effectively using their overreaction:

That’s going to appeal to voters.

The old saying is familiar, but apparently not familiar enough to the McCain camp. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Put it on a plaque and send it to John McCain.

UPDATE: Of course, Obama has been quite the whiner in the past — and the media has stretched far more to find racism in the attacks on him than McCain has stretched to find sexism in Obama’s remarks. Allahpundit says it well:

Bear in mind as the inevitable nutroots naysaying about this gets going how insistent and ingenious they were in spinning secret offensive subtexts out of McCain’s ads. They’ll drill through six feet of bedrock to find “code” in something a conservative says, but they won’t dust off the topsoil of Obama’s comments.

Well said.

[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

As I did last year at this time, I’d like to refer Patterico readers to a piece I wrote for National Review Online back in 2004.

Never Forget
There are thousands of stories to be told about those who died on September 11. This is one.

By Jack Dunphy

At the corner of Hudson and Harrison Streets, in the TriBeca section of Lower Manhattan, there stands neighborhood bar called Puffy’s Tavern. If it has been modernized at all in the last 50 years the proprietors have gone to great lengths to conceal it, for to walk through its doors is to pass into some long-ago, gentler time. Puffy’s is a “joint” in the best sense of the word, a place where pretense is neither offered nor tolerated. One of the few signs of modern life to be found within its walls is the bulletin board near the bar, on which are displayed photographs of some of the many celebrities who have planted their famous keisters on the stools and bent their elbows at the old, mahogany bar. But near the photos of Julia Roberts and Renée Zellweger and the like are some of the not-so-famous—the regular folks who stop in for a cold one or two after work each day before heading to the Subway toward home.

Last year, on September 11, I was looking at those pictures with Greg Sullivan, a sergeant for the New York Police Department. “That’s my little brother Patrick right there,” he said, pointing at one of the ten or so men in one photo. The picture was taken at a wedding in the summer of 2001, and in it the men are standing shoulder to shoulder and smiling at the camera. Even frozen in the two dimensions of a photograph, they are plainly the sort of bright and brash young men whose very bearing says “Wall Street” to anyone familiar with the term. They are young men enjoying life, especially life in New York, to the fullest. “Just about all those guys are dead now,” Greg said. “They worked with Patrick, and that day they died with him.”

(more…)

. . . in that I lazily ask you to do the research for me. (Hey, at least I’m not getting paid for this.)

Here’s your assignment: compile the sexist attacks on Palin.

Each example must have a link. Here’s an example to get you started:

• Gary Kamiya of Salon wrote:
  

  In a bizarre turnaround, the uptight Republicans are suddenly the party of sex, women, fun. They’re all about spontaneity, bucking convention, letting their freak flags fly. If it feels good, do it! Let Mr. Dignified, Obama, drone on about the economy or the resurgence of the Taliban or whatever boring downer of a subject he wants to lecture us on. Let that long-winded Joe Biden carry us back to that Poli Sci 201 class we fell asleep in. Hey, did you check out Palin’s rack? It’s party time in America!

  . . . .

  For the die-hard Republicans who lusted over Palin at the convention, her whip-wielding persona was a turn-on. You could practically feel the crowd getting a collective woody as Palin bent Obama and the Democrats over, shoved a leather gag in their mouths and flogged them as un-American wimps, appeasers and losers. “Drill, baby, drill!” the chant ecstatically repeated by the GOP faithful during Rudy Giuliani’s speech, acquired a distinctly Freudian subtext after Palin spoke. The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the base yearned to drill her.

There must be a million more examples out there. I’ve probably documented a dozen or more on this blog already. But I’d like to see them all in one place. If you do a good job of compiling them, I may do a post that collects them all.

UPDATE: I’ve added to the title, so people know what the post is about from the title.

[Posted by WLS]

All I can say is — Wow. 

Read this and scratch your head in bewilderment.

Is she speaking for any other Obama supporters?

— WLS

[Posted by WLS]

Politico has apparently taken sides — at least Ben Smith has — he’s the author of the Politico blog covering Obama. 

This story just went up questioning Palin’s claims as a reformer, considering the long list of earmark pork that she has sought from Congress as the Governor of Alaska.

Fortunately for readers, he had the courtesy of linking to an Alaska Gov. document that sets forth a 4 page list of appropriations requests made on behalf of the state. 

Palin requested millions of federal dollars for everything from improving recreational halibut fishing to studying the mating habits of crabs and the DNA of harbor seals.

It’s a position at odds with her recasting as an anti-earmarking champion, and with the tone of the biting scorn she’s employed toward the budgetary practice this week.

Palin’s earmark requests aren’t unusual, of course. Every self-respecting mayor and governor in America seeks federal dollars for local projects. And Palin has, at times, sounded a cautionary note on earmarks despite the fact that Alaska receives more earmarked federal money per capita than any other state and is unusually reliant on those funds because of its geographic isolation, massive size and extreme climate.

But the document summarizing Palin’s earmark requests… suggested a still-healthy appetite for earmarks. Soon afterward, Palin wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper outlining her not-so-reticent posture on earmarks.

“My role at the federal level is simply to submit the most well-conceived earmark requests we can,” she wrote.

Obama‘s campaign has responded by challenging Palin’s reform credentials.

“Senator McCain said Governor Palin ‘learned that earmarks are bad’, but in 2008 alone Gov. Palin requested $256 million in earmarks for Alaska, and her state received more earmarks per person that any other state,” said spokesman Tommy Vietor. “The fact is that Governor Palin isn’t just good at getting pork projects, she’s one of the most successful pork barrel politicians in history.”

But if you look at the document that Smith links, you quickly get feel for the fact that many of the earmarks are requests for funding that are completely legitimate, and many relate to unfunded mandates imposed upon Alaska by federal legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.   Several examples are set forth after the jump.

(more…)

[Posted by WLS]

This is a powerful piece on the foreign policy consequences of an Obama presidency.  It’s about 180 degrees from the views expressed by Sullivan regarding the imperative of an Obama presidency. 

I’m particularly struck by the characterization of the US moving back and forth between a nationalistic, imperialistic, and cosmopolitan posture vis-a-vis the rest of the world — which I read mainly as post-WWII Europe.

— WLS

[Posted by WLS]

According to the Boston.Globe, Obama’s comments about McCain bringing change to Washington were taken from the text of a Tom Toles cartoon out a couple days ago.

Campaigning in Terre Haute, Ind. on Saturday, Barack Obama, mocking claims by John McCain and Sarah Palin that they will challenge their Republican Party if elected, got off a pretty good line.  Maybe what they’re saying is, ‘Watch out George Bush,'” Obama said with sarcasm, according to NBC News. “Except for economic policies, and tax policies, and energy policies, and health care policies, and education policies, and Karl Rove-style politics — except for all that, we’re really going to bring change to Washington! We’re really going to shake things up!”

It wasn’t Obama’s line, though. It came from Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, whose cartoon Friday featured these words along with a drawing of McCain and Sarah Palin in front of the White House: “Watch out, Mr. Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we’re coming in there to shake things up!” (See the cartoon here.)

There’s got to be a Joe Biden joke in there somewhere.

Obama claims he got the line from a friend who didn’t tell him about the source.  In using this line again today while campaigning in Michigan, Obama attributed it to a Washington Post cartoon.

— WLS

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I suppose this might fit some dictionary definition of “plagiarism,” but I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s an obvious angle for Obama, he didn’t steal the exact words, and he apparently didn’t intend to take it without attribution. I see this as a big nothing; indeed, I was fed the tip last night and passed on it. (And even before the tip, I noticed the similarity when I saw the Obama clip, having read the cartoon.)

Also, it’s “Tom” Toles and not Ted. I corrected it in the post.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Today in a speech in Virginia, Sarah Palin gave us a preview of what she will say in her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

“Just the other day, our opponent brought up earmarks, and frankly I was surprised that he did, considering his record on earmarks. I didn’t think he’d want to go there. In just three years, our opponent has requested nearly a billion dollars in earmarks, and that’s about a million dollars every working day.

We reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state, and it was while our opponent was requesting a billion dollars in earmarks as a Senatorial privilege. What I was doing was vetoing half a billion dollars as an executive responsibility.”

Video and commentary is at the link from Hot Air.

— DRJ