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    October 1, 2008

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   The Debate Moderator

 

   

Malkin My dictionary defines "moderator" as "the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting." On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions. But there is nothing "moderate" about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She's so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out. In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate. She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on Jan. 20, 2009 -- a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States.   Read On

 

  
 
   

 

  
   
John McCain may have one chance left to win this election, the Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, Richard A. Viguerie, said. "He must free Sarah Palin to go after Barack Obama and the liberal Democrats, or he will almost certainly lose.""The McCain campaign has put this 'pit bull with lipstick' on a leash. The campaign has surrounded her with people from the Bush administration. And as we can see from the wreckage of the Bush presidencies, these folks don't have the slightest clue how to make a case to the American people.""McCain has to get rid of these Bush people around Palin, along with the lobbyists and the folks from the Washington PR firms, and replace them with principled conservatives who have experience making the case for conservatism." Nationalizing the election along liberal-conservative lines is McCain's key to victory, Viguerie said. "America is a center-right country. So, for four decades, when elections break along the liberal-conservative fault line, the more conservative candidate wins." "But the liberals are making this election about the record of the Bush administration and the GOP leadership in Congress - ironically, a record of cronyism and Big Government. That's why they're ahead." Viguerie noted that, "John McCain has not been willing and able to cast this election as a choice between one side that is center-right and the other that is extremely liberal. Only Governor Palin can do that. She brings together all the types of conservatives - economic conservatives and religious conservatives, libertarians and 'values voters,' and people who are simply fed up with Washington's culture of corruption - and she appeals to millions of Americans in the center." That, Viguerie said, "is why the Left hates her so much. And that is why she represents McCain's last, best chance." He said McCain must "remember why he picked Governor Palin, and unleash her to do what she does best."
 
         
 

If the notion of dark energy sounds improbable, get ready for an even more outlandish suggestion.Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations."If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating," said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. "It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were."Scientists first detected the acceleration by noting that distant supernovae seemed to be moving away from us faster than they should be. One type of supernova (called Type Ia) is a useful distance indicator, because the explosions always have the same intrinsic brightness.Since light gets dimmer the farther it travels, that means that when the supernovae appear faint to us, they are far away, and when they appear bright, they are closer in.But if we happened to be in a portion of the universe with less matter in it than normal, then the space-time around us would be different than it is outside, because matter warps space-time.Light travelling from supernovae outside our bubble would appear dimmer, because the light would diverge more than we would expect once it got inside our void.One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reigned in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special.  Scientists: Earth May Exist in Giant Cosmic Bubble ...
 
 

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