Free Republic

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet? I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a...

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet? I didn’t think so. (snip) With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion. Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of...

Mr. McCain has been sounding the traditional Republican tax-cutting theme, trying to convince voters that Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, wants to increase taxes and spread the wealth like a socialist. Helped by the emergence of Joe the Plumber and using Mr. Obama’s own words, Mr. McCain has insisted that Mr. Obama’s tax policies would hurt small businesses and upwardly mobile individuals, while providing welfare for low-income Americans. Mr. Obama has been fighting those accusations in stump speeches and commercials, in recent days asking members of his audience to raise their hands if they made less than $250,000 a year....

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.” What an awful statement. Palin defended the...

[This article is unbelievably biased. Even the headline is biased.] Voters in at least 10 swing states are receiving hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls — uniformly negative and sometimes misleading — that the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are financing this week as they struggle to keep more states from drifting into the Democratic column. [snip] In one widely reported call, Mr. McCain raises Mr. Obama’s links to William Ayers, a founder of the 1960s-era radical Weather Underground. “You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers,” a recorded voice says....

The New York Times best sellers list for Sunday, October 26 (sales for the week ending Oct. 11) was released yesterday afternoon to industry insiders. Kaylene Johnson's biography, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down, will be No. 12 on the Paperback NonFiction list. That sounds pretty good until one takes a closer look at some data. The New York Times ranking formula is proprietary, although these numbers usually VERY closely follow the raw numbers generated by Nielsen's BookScan (certainly within 10%). It is often stated that BookScan records approximately 60-to-70 percent of the actual sales...

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama's background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: "Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion." That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Obama, who is Christian. The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues...