‘Stand up and fight!’

My latest American Spectator article:

“Fight!…Fight!…Fight!” The word punctuated John McCain’s peroration to thousands of Pennsylvanians who turned out in Hershey on a cold, drizzly morning to cheer him and running mate Sarah Palin.
“Fight for the ideals and character of a free people,” McCain urged, as he neared the end of his speech. “Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all.”
The crowd inside the Giant Center at Hershey Park was cheering so loudly as to drown out most of the Republican candidate’s words, so that all they heard was “fight!” That was enough, however, for Republicans like Joe the Recording Engineer. Joe Trojcak owns a sound studio near Hershey and says he’s been a Republican activist since 1992. “I got tired of yelling at my TV,” explains Trojcak, 44, who worked as a volunteer at yesterday’s “Road to Victory” rally.
Small businessmen like Trojcak have become Republican heroes ever since the Oct. 12 chance encounter between Barack Obama and “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher in Ohio.

Please read the whole thing. One of the things I enjoy most about covering a campaign is the chance to talk to the people who attend these rallies — some of the nicest people in the world. All that chatter a couple weeks ago about episodes of ugliness at McCain rallies was a complete misrepresentation of the overwhelming majority of people I’ve talked to at events this year — and that’s true of Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians.

Attending a campaign event is an act of civic engagement, and civic engagement tends to correlate with good personal qualities. So the delegates at the Democratic convention in Denver were nice people, and so were the people who attended the Hillary rallies and McCain rallies I’ve covered.

BTW, here’s video of McCain’s peroration:

Undeserved profit?

While giving a speech just now, Barack Obama said that drug companies “make billions of dollars of profits they don’t deserve.”

How does one distinguish between deserved profit and undeserved profit? Somebody needs to ask Obama, because he just promised to get rid of those “undeserved profits.”

Meanwhile, he was offering an ironclad promise of a middle-class tax cut. I think his exact words were “cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye middle class tax cuts.” Maybe I remembered that part wrong. But anyway, he said he really really really wants to cut taxes on the middle class.

So, once he’s separated the deserved and undeserved profits for drug companies, then Obama is going to distinguish those who are “middle class” from those who are “slightly low-class” and “moderately high-class.” He’ll also divide the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, the saved from the sinners.

Here’s something somebody needs to ask Obama: What’s going to happen to drug companies after you take away their “billions in profits they don’t deserve”? Obviously, their stock will be worth a lot less, and that will hurt pension funds that include stock from Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, etc. Less profit also means less investment in research and development, less advertising and marketing, less of everything that the company does with its profits.

Remember a few months ago, when banks and financial companies were making huge profits? Now they’re not. And this is such a “crisis” that the president is demanding that taxpayers fork over $700 billion to fix it.

So why — and someone should ask Obama this — won’t it be a “crisis” when the government takes away billions of dollars of profits from drug companies? Once Obama has made drug companies less profitable, will he then propose a drug company bailout? Wouldn’t it just be easier to leave the drug companies alone? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Now that it looks like Maverick has abandoned any pretense that he’s actually trying to win the election, we all need to start studying Obamanomics. Mere months from now, this crazy crap is going to be federal law.

UPDATE: Apparently, no one in the press corps thought this “profits they don’t deserve” statement was worth reporting.