Well, Thank Heaven There’s Finally A Good Use For Google Earth

The Daily Mail reports that at long last there is a real reason for Google Earth. Oh, sure, there's the occasional hovercar sighting. Not to mention the spotting of alien invaders, but this is serious! You can now play "Where's Waldo" (or "Where's Wally" in Britain) using Google Earth.

For years, he has challenged enterprising schoolchildren everywhere to spot him among ancient Aztec kingdoms and medieval battlefields.

But now Wally has set his fans a new goal - to find him over the internet.

Canadian artist Melanie Coles has brought her favourite childhood game firmly into the 21st Century by painting a 55ft Wally - complete with red-and-white-striped jumper, glasses and woollen hat - on to a city centre roof that can only be seen by Google Earth satellites.

There is now a flurry of interest among internet users to see who can be the first to spot this Web 2.0 Wally.

But competition is likely to be tough. Not only will Wally hunters have to locate his rooftop perch, but they will also have to wait for Google's imaging equipment to pick it up.

Although Google Earth pictures can be up to three years old, the company does not reveal when it plans to update its images.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the Google Earth image that shows my house is considerably older than three years old. The last I looked, it still did not show the shed we installed right after we moved in to the house more than seven years ago. The tree the shed sits next to shows clearly, but no shed. So it could be a long wait for Waldo - or Wally.

Pennsylvania Political Polka

An interesting look at political gaffes in Pennsylvania and the effect they have had on the candidates who made them is over at Real Clear Politics. Dr. G. Terry Madonna and Dr. Michael Young look back through history and point out that Pennsylvania has a way of punishing political pratfalls - many less severe than the recent "small town" comments made by Barack Obama.

What these candidates or their handlers did–and what now places them in historical parallel to Obama — was to say things in public that revealed in them political flaws that ultimately undermined their candidacies.

Each did this in his or her own way. For Thornburgh it was his campaign manager who in the heat of the campaign–overcome apparently by a rush of candor– referred to Thornburgh as "the salvation of this sorry-ass state" thereby assuring that the seemingly hopeless underdog Harris Wofford would defeat Thornburgh and retain his Senate seat. Barbara Hafer's version was to dismiss her opponent, then Governor Robert P Casey, as a "red necked Irishman," thus hastening him onto one of the most lopsided landslide victories in state history.

U.S. Senate candidate Lynn Yeakel's sin is illustrative of the genre–for it was not so much what she said as what it said about her. Running in the so called "year of the women," against Arlen Specter and in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill controversy, she was thought by many to be the one to retire Specter. But her candidacy collapsed after she made herself seem like an out of touch elitist by mispronouncing the name of a Pennsylvania county when visiting there.

Finally the latest example of state politicians' succumbing to an advanced stage of lapsus linguae came during the 2006 gubernatorial contest. Locked in a tense GOP nomination fight with Lynn Swann, the African-American all-pro former Pittsburgh Steeler wide receiver, the campaign manager for former Lt. Governor Bill Scranton described Swann as "the rich white guy in this race." Scranton fired his manager and soon withdrew from the race.

Their judgment of the Obama remarks accusing small town Americans of bitterly clinging to guns, religion, xenophobia and (Obama's favorite policy of) anti-trade rhetoric: Obama has himself a real problem in Pennsylvania. Historically, this is true, obviously. Will it derail Obama? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is that Clinton is just not very well liked by an awful lot of people. So Obama may limp across the finish line yet and be the nominee.

In the general election, he's in very bad shape, indeed.

Demeaning America

George Will examines the "small town" remarks of Barack Obama and sees them as the logical, if somewhat disheartening, completion of a transition of the Democratic party from one which celebrated America into one that fundamentally looks down on America and the middle class values that made it great.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture — the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.

I suspect that is spot on. Although I hesitate to use the word 'liberal' to describe the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democrats. Increasingly authoritarian, yes, liberal, not so much. Will makes another series of points worth pondering. Regarding the thought process of the left:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

As I said, authoritarian. Call it progressively authoritarian, since a large faction of the left insists on using that old communist term 'progressive' to describe themselves of late. Even Obama's non-apology reeks of that condescending elite attitude that Will describes so well in this column.