"There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president."

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."...

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" ... sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

UPDATE: Language Log responds!

Romney on abortion — 2 ads.

Romney's ad:



Obama's response:



That sounds terrible:

“If Roe v. Wade was overturned, Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions, and it came to your desk – would you sign it? ‘Yes’, or ‘no?’”

“Let me say it: I’d be delighted to sign that bill.”

Ban all abortions? Including abortions that would save the life of the mother? Did Romney really say that? The Weekly Standard prints whole context:

QUESTIONER: Hello, my name is AJ. I'm from Millstone, New Jersey. I would all of the candidates to give an answer on this. If hypothetically, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions and it came to your desk, would you sign it? Yes or no?

COOPER: Mayor Giuliani?

GIULIANI: If Congress passed a ban on all abortions throughout the United States?

COOPER: If Roe v. Wade was overturned and Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions and it came to your desk, would you sign it, yes or no?

GIULIANI: I probably would not sign it. I would leave it to the states to make that decision.

(APPLAUSE)

I think that that -- the problem with Roe against Wade is that it took the decision away from the states. If Roe against Wade were overturned because it was poorly decided, if the justices decide that, it would them go back to the states, and it would seem to me that that would be the answer.

The answer is that each state would make a different decision. I don't believe, in the circumstance that you asked before, that it should be criminalized. I think that would be a mistake unless we're talking about partial birth abortion or late-term abortion.

I think you should have parental consent. I think we should have access to adoptions instead of abortion. But, ultimately, I think these decisions should be made on a state-by-state basis.

COOPER: Governor Romney?

ROMNEY: I agree with Senator Thompson, which is we should overturn Roe v. Wade and return these issues to the states.

ROMNEY: I would welcome a circumstance where there was such a consensus in this country that we said, we don't want to have abortion in this country at all, period. That would be wonderful. I'd be delighted.

COOPER: The question is: Would you sign that bill?

ROMNEY: Let me say it. I'd be delighted to sign that bill. But that's not where we are. That's not where America is today. Where America is is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and return to the states that authority. But if the Congress got there, we had that kind of consensus in that country, terrific.

That is kind of a weird answer by Romney, and I don't blame the Obama campaign for pulling out that quote. I can see why, fighting for the Republican nomination and pushed and cornered like that, he said "I'd be delighted to sign that bill." Notice that the idea is that we'd be in some hypothetical other America, and if we had arrived there, it would be terrific and delightful, but that's not where we are, so there's no immediate prospect of seeing that bill.

The Romney campaign wants to say, it's not a realistic present-day threat — which is true — and it's not what Romney is really talking about when not pushed and cornered by the formidable Anderson Cooper — which is also true. When free to put his policy in his words, Romney prefers to leave the matter to the state legislatures. Of course, that involves overturning Roe v. Wade, which he's open about. It's an anti-abortion position, though not as anti-abortion as the way it comes out in Obama's ad.

Bottom line: Those who are considering voting for Romney ought to understand exactly how anti-abortion Romney is, but it's up to Romney, not Obama to do that precision work.

Stirring up rumors that Obama may replace Biden with Hillary Clinton.

It's the Weekly Standard... conspicuously promoted by Drudge.

It would be a great "game change" — to use the term applied 4 years ago to Sarah Palin.

And — amusingly — it would be Obama taking advice from Sarah Palin, who just a couple days ago said:

[T]he strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary. And I don't want to throw out that suggestion and have them actually accept the suggestion because then an Obama-Hillary Clinton ticket would have a darn good chance of winning.

Don't you love the role of Sarah Palin in American politics? On the sidelines... looming...

"Once upon a time there was a Democratic president who, despite his faults, championed the power of markets, technology, and the global economy."

"He spoke about building 'a bridge to the 21st century.' He ratified major trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO. He supported balanced budgets and signed into law a tough welfare reform. He cut the capital gains tax. He boasted that government spending as a share of the economy fell on his watch. He went so far as to call himself (privately) an Eisenhower Republican."

Bill!

"One sign that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is likely to win the election on June 5 is the sudden disappearance of national media attention to the race."

Writes Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard:

The networks and newspapers that gave wall-to-wall coverage to protests in the streets of Madison in the spring of 2011 and excitedly reported on the drive to collect signatures to force a recall have gone relatively quiet as a succession of polls show Walker leading.... Obama himself, who once promised to walk the picket lines with his union backers when their interests were threatened, seems to want no part of the recall​—​or at least not a high-profile part.

"This grasping at straws was just the capstone to what even liberal observers admitted was a week of self-immolation..."

I'm annoyed that I can't get into that article — about the SG's argument in the Obamacare case — because I don't have a subscription to the Weekly Standard. Now, I'll never know whether that article contains a funnier mixed metaphor than that.

What are those images?

Self-immolation is deliberately setting oneself on fire. I picture dramatic protests from the Vietnam era, but it's been going on for centuries:

It was Western media coverage of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the South Vietnamese regime in 1963 that introduced the word "self-immolation" to a wide English-speaking audience and gave it a strong association with fire. The alternative name bonzo comes from the same era, because the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves were often referred to by the term bonze in English literature prior to the mid-20th century...

Bonzo! Most Americans think of that Ronald Reagan movie when we hear "Bonzo." Perhaps some think of Led Zeppelin. But fiery suicide, to make a political point? That's new to me.

A capstone is "a stone that caps or crowns." I'm quoting the OED, where we can see the metaphorical use of the word goes back to 1685: "Here is the fair occasion... to put the cap-stone upon his other perfections" (tr. B. Gracián y Morales Courtiers Oracle 150). By the way, the Great Pyramid is missing its capstone. Ever notice? Makes you want to put an eye there:



Okay, now what about grasping at straws? What's the image there? I realize I've always pictured ants trying to get out of water by climbing onto some bit of straw. Focusing on that for the first time, I can see that grasping at straws would probably work for an ant. You're supposed to picture a human being trying to escape drowning and desperately grasping at anything, no matter how absurdly useless it is. Wiktionary tells me that the image goes back Thomas More, "Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation" (1534). More is talking about people who will not seek the "comfort" of God. Some of them are completely lethargic — "so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness." Others are so "testy" and "fuming" that you don't even want to talk to them. Then there are people who do want to be comforted. Some of them "seek for worldly comfort":

He who in tribulation turneth himself unto worldly vanities, to get help and comfort from them, fareth like a man who in peril of drowning catcheth whatsoever cometh next to hand, and that holdeth he fast, be it never so simple a stick. But then that helpeth him not, for he draweth that stick down under the water with him, and there they lie both drowned together. So surely, if we accustom ourselves to put our trust of comfort in the delight of these childish worldly things, God shall for that foul fault suffer our tribulation to grow so great that all the pleasures of this world shall never bear us up, but all our childish pleasure shall drown with us in the depth of tribulation.

You know, that eye on the pyramid, as seen on the Great Seal of the United States dollar bill is the "Eye of Providence":

On the seal, the Eye is surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis, meaning "He approves (or has approved) [our] undertakings", and Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages". The Eye is positioned above an unfinished pyramid with thirteen steps, representing the original thirteen states and the future growth of the country. The lowest level of the pyramid shows the year 1776 in Roman numerals. The combined implication is that the Eye, or God, favors the prosperity of the United States.

Have we gone so deeply into the mixed metaphor that it's all coming together somehow?

"The absurdity of the Democrats’ outrage was too much.... They were accusing Republicans of 'making a mockery of democracy,' operating like a 'banana republic,' and..."

"... in former labor secretary Robert Reich’s words, conducting a 'coup d’état.' All the while, Democrats were hiding in another state trying to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business. But in the end, senate Republicans had found a way to vote. The Assembly passed the bill on Thursday. Scott Walker signed it into law on Friday. And that is what democracy actually looks like."

Art means nothing in Washington.

A venerable poet is a figure of fun.

"[T]here was some confusion as to what book young Obama was writing."

"His publisher thought he was writing about race relations. His employer thought he was writing about voting rights law. But Obama seems to have never seriously considered either subject. Instead, he decided that his subject would be himself. The 32-year-old was writing a memoir."

Jonathan V. Last writes in  The Weekly Standard:

Obama came clean to the university first. He waited until his fellowship was halfway over—perhaps he was concerned that his employers might not like the bait-and-switch. He needn’t have worried. [Douglas Baird, the head of Chicago’s appointments committee] still hoped that Obama would eventually join the university’s faculty...

And it all worked out in the end. The book Obama eventually finished was Dreams from My Father. It didn’t do well initially, but nine years later, after his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention made him a star, it sold like gangbusters. Obama got rich. And famous. The book became the springboard for his career in national politics.

Only it didn’t quite work out for everybody. Obama left the University of Chicago... Simon & Schuster, which had taken a chance on an unproven young writer, got burned for a few thousand bucks. And Jane Dystel, who’d plucked him out of the pages of the New York Times and got him the deal to write the book that sped his political rise? As soon as Obama was ready to negotiate the contract for his second book—the big-money payday—he dumped her and replaced her with super-agent Robert Barnett.

Feingold's opponent Ron Johnson scores a Weekly Standard article.

"Farewell to Feingold?"

None of Feingold’s victories was a landslide; he got 53 percent of the vote in 1992, 51 percent in 1998, and 55 percent in 2004. Facing a strongly anti-Democratic year for the first time, Feingold appears to believe his best hope is to paint Johnson as an extremist. “It’s becoming clear that [Johnson is] the third part of that Rand Paul, Sharron Angle tripartition,” Feingold told Politico in June. “He’s refused to say whether he favors the continuation of Social Security and Medicare. He hasn’t even said he supports the Civil Right Act.”

But unlike the Kentucky and Nevada GOP candidates, Johnson hasn’t committed any big gaffes....

Johnson’s biggest liability may be a tendency to speak honestly....

What's your biggest liability? I'm just so darned honest.

"With our soft, mushy Obama Stress Head, you can crush those half-baked liberal ideas..."

"... before they do any more damage. Plus... you can build up an iron grip at the same time. Pin his ears back, turn that smile upside down. Come on... you know you want to."

This is a novelty item offered by The Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion journal that generally maintains an attitude of seriousness and respectability.

Is the Obama Stress Head acceptable?
	Yes, it's fine to have some cute fun at the expense of the powerful.
	Yes, we deserve an outlet for our justified hostility against Obama.
	No, any suggestion, even in fun, of physical violence against the President is wrong.
	No, Obama is a decent man with a hard job to do and he doesn't deserve this low treatment.
	No, the message of violence toward any human head should be beneath The Weekly Standard's standards.
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"WaPo Style Writer Declares Kennedy Old-Money Style Only Cool on Liberals."

The Weekly Standard rags on Robin Givhan.

Did right-wing ideology fuel the Holocaust Museum shooter?

Paul Krugman assumes so.

But the evidence points elsewhere.