It seems like the sheer number of people who, like me, just can’t seem to wrap their heads around this Obama/Peace Prize thing, is starting to get under the formerly esteemed Nobel folks’ skin and majorly piss them off. Duh. And, they’re surprised because…? The Associated Press is reporting that, in an “unprecedented move,” the jury what voted for to put the Pretendident in the company of greatness, is speaking out in justification of their mind-blowing decision. And, in the real spirit of their phony “unprecedented” honesty, let me be the first to go on record as saying, methinks the Nobel Publisher’s Clearinghouse Peace Prize jury is full of shit:
To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama’s young presidency, “We simply disagree … He got the prize for what he has done,” committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland told The Associated Press by telephone from Strasbourg, France, where he was attending meetings of the Council of Europe.
Jagland singled out Obama’s efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.
“All these things have contributed to — I wouldn’t say a safer world — but a world with less tension,” he said.
Oh, wipe my ass and call me “Whitney,” why doncha, huh? Gee whiz. First of all, Obama may have received “the prize” of prizes for his platitudinous Cairo speech, among tedious others, but that’s not why he was nominated for it. According to the Nobel folks’ website, the nomination had to come in February, after less than two months in office, about two months before his April-in-Prague call for nuclear weapons reduction, and almost exactly two months before his June Sermon on the Nile shoutout to the Muslim world. So, what, these Nobel guys are prescient, too? Or, did they get a timeline, or blueprint of his proposed agenda by carrier pigeon flown paper airplane the day after he and the Chief Justice channeled their inner Moe and Curly and flubbed, then dubbed his acceptance speech? Read the rest of this entry »
We be black. We was black befo’ Obama got elected, and we still black, nah. Summa y’all don’t like dat, an’ it piss y’all off. Y’all be trippin’. Y’all suck. Chill.
Don’t nobody care what y’all think, no way. Y’all the ones always be tryin’ to keep a brotha down. That’s whack. Fuck dat. Fuck y’all. – Black America
I often try to illustrate the not-so-hidden racism rampant in our society by comparing it to the similarly hidden-in-plain-sight sexism we live under, hoping that women will at least consider that many of the “race card” claims being pooh-poohed on a regular basis do actually have some basis in fact. Unfortunately, far too many women, themselves victimized by insidious institutionalized bigotry, obvious to them at every turn, no matter how small, slight, or insignificant such behavior might be considered by perpetrators of said sexism, simply cannot see the same sort of racial bias right in front of their eyes. Though they are not only adept at recognizing overt discrimination directed towards them, but quite skilled at ferreting out intended sexism no matter how cleverly couched, even correctly identifying incidences where deliberate bigotry is intentionally dressed in politically correct clothes in order to escape detection, no such leeway is accorded those who empathize with those of us who suffer racially. Read the rest of this entry »
Okay, where to begin? First of all, I admit to being one of the most vocal opponents to Republican AstroTurfing of TEA Parties, townhalls and Recess Rallies against any and all things Democratic under the guise of being anti- anything Obama. And, exposes like this Think Progress one that I came across courtesy of Edge of Forever at Not Your Sweetie, only reinforce my findings and strengthen my resolve to rail against the sneaky, fake grassroots public support tactics of the Rigid Right as vehemently and vociferously as I bitch about the same kind of Axelrovian Obaganda shenanigans from the obnoxious KoolAid ‘n’ Hopium Nation.
Be that as it may, there’s something to be said on behalf of those offended PUMAs who take exception to being labeled as merely being unduly manipulated tools of the evil right wing. Though there is no doubt that many PUMA sites have been overly influenced by deliberate GoOPer infiltration, there’s more to the story than has as yet met the eye. Read the rest of this entry »
One need only assess the sorry state of modern feminism today to realize the movement is in pretty total disarray. From the schism between so-called second and third wavers exemplified by the shenanigans associated with the latest National Organization for Women’s election, to the current elevation of Sarah Palin, and to an extent, Michelle Obama, to the status of poster girl for modern womanhood, to the suggestion that Barack Obama somehow exemplifies modern feminism, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something is very, very wrong with this picture. The question is, what?
Let me once again be very clear, I have never considered myself to be a feminist. I have never taken a Women’s Studies course, or really paid much attention to the movement at all. At least, not until recently. Lately though, I’ve been doing my own brand of research in an attempt to try to get a handle on just what the heck is going on, especially as it relates to the PUMAsphere. Because as things stand now, whatever’s happening is something I don’t quite like.
So, in my meager efforts to scratch the surface of the vast subject that is feminism, imagine my surprise to find that there is an equal and opposite counter-movement called “anti-feminism.” Now, I was aware that there have always been factions opposed to the concept of gender equality on a variety of bases, but the idea that their efforts rose to the level of separate, and equal, movement was a bit disconcerting. I suppose it would be akin to finding out that their was an acknowledged, coordinated, and accepted anti-Civil Rights, white supremacist movement that openly advocated the defeat of all minority gains. I imagine if such a coalition exists, it is relatively underground, if not in their efforts, at least in their advertising. Read the rest of this entry »
*UPDATE: Here’s the transcript of Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Caesar!)’s
“A New Beginning, ” speech to the Muslim world, for those, like me, who just can’t bear to watch him read it to us.
As I write this, an American Pretendident, Barack Hussein Obama, is in the Middle East about to tell people who hate his country, but love them some him, that he’s not a Muslim, but he feels their pain, from personal experience, while his Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, stands at his side embodying everything they hate about his country. Seems he wants to kiss and make up for all the bad stuff George Bush has single-handedly been doing in the region since, oh, I dunno, the Iranian hostage crisis. I think he’s also planning to try to make the Muslim world, or at least, the Arab part of it, understand that even though he’s gonna keep bombing the shit out of some of them, he really, really wants to be their friend. That’s because he’s from Chicago, and there are a lot of Muslims there, in fact, there are so many Muslims in this country period, that you could call us one big ol’ Muslim country. Read the rest of this entry »
News of the release of documents detailing the shenanigans of the particular parties involved in perpetrating the 700 billion dollar fraud bank bailout, or Troubled Asset Relief Program, came out last week and didn’t really get the attention it was due, what with the Pretendident-as-Solomon’s first “Split the Fetus” tour stop at Notre Dame, and his fingernail clinging, bus undercarriage-headed Speaker of the House, Nasty Pancake’s, more-serious-because-chicks-have-a higher-standard, CIA never lies, and all going on. The Freedom of Information documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that TARP, (or, as I’m sure it is known in certain circle jerks, the Rape of They, The Sheeple, those willing, clueless, hopium-addicted, changeling co-conspirators, who managed to both bend over and grab all of our collective ankles, while forcing everybody’s, theirs included, hands up in a “reach for the sky” surrender gesture at the same time, by electing the Chicago Robbin’ Hood whose vig to the Merry Band of Banksters who he fronted for was due) is the cross-party, cross-administration, shady scummy scam we’ve all known it to be all along. From Politico: Read the rest of this entry »
Is Angie Harmon, formerly of Law and Order and Women’s Murder Club, a left-leaning, undeclared, closet PUMA, or just another plain old Republican? Don’t know for sure where her political compass points, but she certainly has no love for Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) that’s fer derned sher. According to Fox News, Harmon is more than willing to go on record as not being predisposed to climb atop the Unity Pony of ObamaNation, but she’s good and damned sick of being called “racist” because of it:
“Here’s my problem with this, I’m just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Obama it’s not because I’m a racist, it’s because I don’t like what he’s doing as President and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against him you’re called a racist,” Harmon told Tarts at Thursday’s Los Angeles launch of the new eyelash-growing formula, Latisse. “But it has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what color he is. I’m just not crazy about what he’s doing and I heard all about this, and he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … I’m still dressing for a recession over here buddy and we’ve got unemployment at an all-time high and that was his number one thing and that’s the thing I really don’t appreciate. If I’m going to disagree with my President, that doesn’t make me a racist. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn’t make me racist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet. The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence. I know that. However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself. And frankly, I’m sick of it.
All. Of. It.
Each news story, op-ed column, Google search, blog post and talking head garbage spew disguised as informed opinion has added another tidbit of information, often counter to the point the happy yakker thought he/she was making, to the tapestry of my understanding of our nation’s political reality. It’s enough to make you puke. Read the rest of this entry »
Maybe because his plans to ravage the Republican party by inflating Rush Limbaugh’s importance only to tear it down are working so well. And make no mistake, these are Barack Obama’s plans.
Anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to ObamAntics the past couple years knows that calling out the press is one of his favorite past times. He chided Don Imus and called for the schlock jock be fired for his “nappy headed ‘ho’s” characterization of the Rutger’s women’s basketball team. From ABC News, April, 2007:
“I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus,” Obama told ABC News, “but I would also say that there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude.”
He reprimanded the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass in March of 2008, for not being properly deferential at any and all times, when Kass confronted The Never To Be Questioned One about his ties to ersatz realtor and convicted felon, Tony Rezko:
“I know that there are those, like John Kass, who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently.”
Just the corrupt parts, I said.
“I’ll leave that to his editorial commentary, but I think it’s fair to say that I have conducted myself in my public office with great care and high ethical standards,” he said.
Except for Rezko.
He kicked reporters off his campaign plane after their papers endorsed his rival, John McCain. From the Washington Post, October 2008:
The Washington Times, which has had a reporter traveling with Barack Obama’s campaign for nearly two years, has been kicked off his press plane.
“The decision came just three days after the editorial page endorsed John McCain,” Times editor in chief John Solomon said this morning. “I hope a candidate who says he wants to unite the country isn’t using a litmus test for who can cover him.”
What’s more, the Obama operation has ejected reporters for the New York Post and Dallas Morning News, which have also endorsed McCain. And room was suddenly made for two magazines that have not been traveling with the Democratic nominee, Essence and Ebony.
He even got downright pissy with the White House press corps 2 days after he was inaugurated, for daring to ask him a question amidst all the bootlicking he had come down to the press room to get:
“Ahh, see,” he said, “I came down here to visit. See this is what happens. I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.”
And while Politico and others have shown pretty conclusively that the current “Operation: Get Rush” campaign is coming straight from the West Wing via Rahm Emanuel playing field general to suckophants Paul Begala, James Carville and George Stephanopoulis, to lay the blame at the feet of Rahmbo is to miss the larger point.
Barack Obama himself launched the opening salvo in the Limbaugh-Obama war in January. From the New York Post:
President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.
Forget Dog Whisperer, according to Politico’s Nia-Malika Henderson, when it comes to calling your dogs, Barack Obama is a master Dog Whistler. And, according to Nia-Malika Henderson, that’s a very good thing. Of course, when Nia-Malika Henderson refers to “dog whistles,” she’s talking about those code words politicians use to connect subliminally with certain core portions of their constituency, sending crucial, non-politically correct messages over the heads of their targeted enemies. Like, during the primaries, when Obama surrogate Jesse Jackson Jr. mocked Hillary Clinton’s tears in the wake of her New Hampshire victory that threatened to derail the O Train momentum that the O Team imagined was, until that moment, on track to to take him straight to the White House, express-style. Forget the fact that it was only the second contest between the two, making them relatively even at that point, oh, no, Clinton obviously didn’t get the “Obama inevitability” memo, and even worse, and just as obvious, neither did the people who actually voted for her. This had to be nipped in the bud, somehow, after all, Obama’s only victory at that point was a caucus, and some of us were already suspicious about his tactics regarding those. So, JJJr. was sent out to “let the dogs out.” Alex Koppleman, Salon:
“We saw something very clever in the last week of this campaign … We saw a sensitivity factor, something that Mrs. Clinton has not been able to do with voters that she tried in New Hampshire. Not in response to voters. Not in response to Katrina, not in response to other issues that have devastated the American people — the war in Iraq — we saw tears in response to her appearance. So her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina.”
This was a very clever dog whistle, being designed, as it was, to get the attention of both racist and sexist Obama supporters. The intention could not have been more clear had JJJr. come out and said, “Hey y’all, this white bitch is trying to play us with that woman shit.” Of course, like Salon, Slate pooh-poohed the whole idea of sexist dog whistles, a form of dog whistling in reverse, when you think about it:
Barack Obama brought up Hillary Clinton’s period! “I understand that Senator Clinton periodically,” (See? He said it!) “when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.” Clearly, he was saying his rival ought to look into hormone replacement therapy.
What, this sexism is too subtle for you? Not for pro-Clinton blogger Taylor Marsh, who accused Obama of “demeaning women,” or even straight-down-the-middle Andrea Mitchell, who said on MSNBC, “When you start describing a female candidate as being ‘down’ and ’striking back,’ I don’t know, that’s a little edgy, don’t you think?” Karen Stabiner, the author of well-received books about single-sex education and breast cancer, wrote that when she heard what Obama had said, “That was the moment when I, and other women of a certain age, all over the country, winced. The change candidate had embraced one of the oldest clichés in the book—that women are held hostage by emotion, that we can’t be trusted with the big decisions because, depending on our age, we’re either on the rag or having a hot flash.”
As I watched last week’s PBS special about the financial crisis, “Inside the Meltdown,” one of the many things I was struck by was the lengths to which the producers went to establish the consensus of opinion regarding Wall Street’s inordinate sensitivity and susceptibility to rumor, gossip, and innuendo. That such a vast, powerful, integral industry run by people presumed to be America’s “best and brightest” could allow decisions affecting the rise and fall of entire global conglomerates comprising the world’s economic foundation to be based on nothing more than “he said, she said” tales told out of school, or worse, possibly deliberately planted, malicious seeds of doubt, seems hard to fathom. Yet, the possibility of such an eventuality was demonstrated in great detail in the documentary, and, with just a modicum of imagination, one might easily consider that a few well timed “revelations,” true or not, might well take down an entire financial empire, if not industry. A little research might lead one to believe that such a thing is not only possible, it just might have happened.
In March of 2008, at the time Bear Stearns tanked and was sold to JP Morgan Chase at 2 dollars a share, only to have the price bumped up to ten dollars a share after the government intervened, even that price was only considered to be approximately ten percent of its market value. According to many sources, such intervention was rather suspect, for a lot of reasons, especially considering that the firm was not insolvent, though nobody would loan them money because of rumors that they were. In other words, it was not a lack capital that undid the company, but a lack of confidence. Vanity Fair encapsulated the cause of Bear Stearns’ death this way in the opening paragraph of its August ‘08 “autopsy:”
On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players-Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers-in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.
So, why did the corporation’s protestations to the contrary fall on industry-wide deaf ears? The company hadexperienced difficulties the previous year with 2 of its subprime mortgage hedge funds, High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, and was facing lawsuits from Barclays and other angry investors, as a result. Additionally, two of its former managers, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, were eventually arrested in June of ‘08 for taking their own money out of the funds while propping them up with corporate bailout money and lying to investors about it. But, that was after the company died and was consumed.
According to CNN Money, Fortune, CFO Sam Molinaro asserted that by February, ‘08, Stearns’ troubles were behind them:
Bear had survived one liquidity challenge, in the summer of 2007, when two of its hedge funds cratered after the subprime mortgage collapse. The firm had labored to repair its balance sheet and improve its financing. “Our capital position is strong,” said Bear’s CFO, Sam Molinaro, at an investors’ conference in February. “Balance-sheet liquidity has continued to improve throughout the course of the year. We spent an awful lot of time trying to reduce our higher-risk asset categories.”
So, could Bear Stearns have weathered the storm? Then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s old company didn’t think so. On March 11, an email sent by Goldman Sach’s derivatives group to its hedge fund clients, saying they would no longer back them on Bear Stearns deals, was the nail in the company’s coffin.
While I am not prepared to suggest that there was a direct “cause and effect” relative to the currently discussed events, I do think it’s helpful to bear in mind that the financial “crisis” evolved against the backdrop of the presidential campaign. Would Bear have “collapsed” had the results of Super Tuesday been different? Who knows? It is something to think about, though.
On March 28, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters, among others reported that rumors that the company was claiming were “totally unfounded,” were swirling about Lehman Brothers, too. By August 25, on the day the Democratic National convention started, The Deal.com was reporting that the rumors had become a full-fledged storm amid suggestions of a hostile takeover by Korea Development Bank and intra-company planned coup against CEO Richard Fuld.
On September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy after the government, presumably weary of going to bat for “failing” Wall Street companies, like Bear, having bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before, refused to intervene this time. Interestingly, one of Lehman’s holdings, Neuberger Berman, headed by then President, George W. Bush’s second cousin, George Herbert Walker IV, was exempted from the bankruptcy filing:
Neuberger Berman LLC and Lehman Brothers Asset Management will continue to conduct business as usual and will not be subject to the bankruptcy case of the parent company, and its portfolio management, research and operating functions remain intact. In addition, fully paid securities of customers of Neuberger Berman are segregated from the assets of Lehman Brothers and aren’t subject to the claims of Lehman Brothers Holdings’ creditors, Lehman said.
According to Wikipedia, and corroborated here, on September 13, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc,) then President of the New York Federal Reserve, now Secretary of the Treasury, convened a meeting about Lehman’s future that Lehman wasn’t invited to, after Lehman suffered substantial losses starting September 9:
An official from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said participants include Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. The New York Fed official asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the talks.
Participants in today’s discussions at the offices of the New York Fed also include executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Representatives for Lehman Brothers were not present during the discussions.
Lehman claimed to be in negotiations for sale with Barclays and Bank of America, both of whom backed out. Bank of America bought Merill Lynch on September 14, instead. Barclays bought Lehman’s North American investment-banking and trading divisions along with its New York headquarters building, the next day, after Lehman was, for all intents and purposes, dead.
After the fact, in October, former CEO Richard Fuld said in prepared testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, that rumor-mongering was a big part of the problem that brought Lehman down. However, Fuld’s first contention was that the Federal Reserve’s refusal to allow Lehman an exemption to become a bank holding company, or commercial bank, was a body blow to the company. On September 22, a week after Lehman filed bankruptcy, The Fed allowed Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, “the last two major investment banks” to switch. According to the New York Times, this was a major big deal. The Washington Post reported at the time that the Fed had approved the conversion with “unusual haste.”
On September 27, the New York Times* reported that one of the members at the meeting that decided Lehman’s fate was Lloyd C. Blankfeld of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson’s old firm. At that meeting, the state of A.I.G., Goldman Sach’s largest trading partner, was discussed. As we know now, the government bailed out A.I.G., yet let Lehman die. Naked Capitalism asserts that the Goldman Sachs/Paulson relationship might have been more than a factor. In October, Bloomberg claimed that Lehman’s collapse was the fault of JP Morgan Chase, purchasers of Bear Stearns.
It bears remembering that in the midst of this Lehman Brothers/A.I.G./Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac financial upheaval, Barack Obama and John McCain were involved in a pitched battle for the presidency. It is also worth noting that Obama was reported at the time to have been in daily contact with Henry Paulson, Treasury Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs, one of Obama’s largest campaign donors. FYI, Paulson was raised in Barrington, Illinois, outside of Chicago, was also head of Goldman’s Midwestern Division, headquartered there. Worthy of equal or better note, Obama’s campaign economic team included William Daley, Mayor Richard Daley’s brother, and Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, as well as its CEO and New York Fed Board of Directors member, Jamie Dimon, who parlayed his turnaround of Bank One, after being dumped by his mentor, Sandy Weill of Citigroup, into the JP Morgan gig. Oh, gosh, did I forget to mention Bank One is in Chicago? My bad. One other noteworthy Obama advisor at that time was Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc). I have done a series of posts chronicling Jamie Dimon’s involvement in the Obamenon, I humbly advise readers to check them out, here, here, here, and here,to name just a few posts, not so much for my opinions, but for the links to information they provide.
By November, when Obama secured the presidency, Paulson’s TARP had distributed about half of the allotted funds to “troubled” banks, more than half of it to the country’s largest, including Goldman and JP Morgan. According to reports, most of which came to light after Obama was inaugurated, the banksters were forced to accept the funds the Treasury was giving away, whether they wanted to or not, yet were later called on the carpet to explain how they spent them. At the hearing in the House, they, like their counterparts in the beleaguered auto industry, were castigated for frivolous financial excess, even though, not all of them requested government funds. As president, Obama had by that point, already railed against the ” shameful” bankers, and issued a “salary cap,” generally considered to be window dressing, since it only applied to those financial institutions receiving future government assistance from the second half of TARP, not the ones funded in the first bailout. TTTG, tc was said to have prevailed against other Obama administration advisers, namely David Axelrod, in the president’s ultimate soft bailout stance.
The TARP program, or Paulson Plan, is not universally loved by bankers, some say it’s a sneaky attempt at nationalization, or in the words of Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, “subsidization.” The Brookings Institute called for more Congressional oversight in December, calling the plan “frayed” and “rushed into law.” At any rate, the relatively ineffective, previous admonition is now a moot point, having been trumped by the new, stricter “salary cap” guidelines supposedly snuck into the president’s “stimulus plan” by Chris Dodd when nobody was looking.
The new rules require all banks recieving government assistence to be subject to the new, stricter salary cap rules. That means, even banks forced into the bailout program are now under government supervision. And, though Obama has made, “the discussion’s not over” noises, as Politico pointed out, it’s not credible that the administration was blindsided:
The tougher rules that passed in Congress were no last-minute surprise. Dodd talked them up in a February 5 press release, and in another released on Thursday, just hours before the bill was filed. The rules were debated in the Senate.
Okay, I know this is a long post, and to be honest, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mountains of information and questions that arise from it, here. But, for a series of rumors to be the catalyst for events that end up in the “nationalization” and/or “subsidization” of the nation’s banks, at the expense of the global economy, is a mindboggling thing to consider, even if it’s ultimately untrue, or unprovable, if it is.
As I’ve said before, it’s reminiscent of a John Grisham novel, The Appeal, to be exact, so maybe my skepticism is born of an overactive imagination. But all things considered, the more pertinent question is, what if it’s not?
*The New York Times printed a correction clarifying the dates and participants of 2 separate meetings re: Lehman/A.I.G.:
Because of an editing error, an article on Sunday about the financial problems of American International Group referred incorrectly to the timing and participants at meetings at the New York Federal Reserve between Saturday, Sept. 13, and Monday, Sept. 15. Although there were indeed meetings that weekend, there was also a separate meeting on Monday to discuss financial aid for A.I.G. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was the only Wall Street chief executive who attended the Monday meeting, not the only chief executive who attended weekend meetings. Also, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, did not lead or attend the Monday meeting. (Both Mr. Blankfein and Mr. Paulson did attend the weekend meetings.)
Eric Holder, America’s first African American Attorney General under America’s first black President, said in a speech to Department of Justice employees celebrating Black History Month, that we are a “nation of cowards“ because we don’t like to talk candidly about race. This is wrong on so many levels.
Any time we still have to describe people and their accomplishments as “history making” based on skin color, we have a problem with race. It’s 2009, for Goodness sakes, and we still have cause to celebrate racial “firsts.” Not only that, we’ve barely scratched the surface; we have yet to have our “first black” lots of things, like, Senate Majority Leader; hell we’ve barely had any black Senators, given that the nation’s fifth is now president. We, as a nation, have never had a Native American much of anything politically significant, either; the same is true for many other racially diverse groups. And, as we all know, our history regarding women’s history, contributions, and employment issues, not to mention those of LGBT people living openly, and people living with disabilities, is woefully deficient.
But, does not talking about it make us cowards? What good does endless recriminatory discussion do? Does that really advance anybody’s cause, or does it merely inflame passions needlessly?
In this little community we’ve established here in this little corner of the blogosphere, nobody is required to declare their race, ethnicity, gender, or anything else, nor are they expected to check them at the door, unless they choose to, and we seem to get along pretty well. Our commonality is based on things other than physical characteristics, like opinion and ideology. How we think and feel is much more important than how we look, love or pee.
Barack Obama should not be president because he’s black, Eric Holder should not be attorney general for that reason, either. Because that issue was promoted as justification for their attaining their respective positions, many of us were offended, while, to be honest, many more felt vindicated. The disappointment was not limited to people of any particular group, though African Americans disproportionately embraced the counter opinion. Just as many men felt, and still feel, that Hillary Clinton was the better Democratic choice, and many white Republicans felt similarly about John McCain, many black Americans, like me, feel that Barack Obama was not. Race and gender most often had nothing to do with it.
I call our president Black Obama because his racial background played far too large a part in his election. When he secured the nomination of his party, fraudulently in my opinion, that fraud was validated by “the historic nature of his candidacy,” blah, blah, blah. His, and his campaign’s, deliberate, subtle, and blatant exploitation of his racial background was shameful to me. Race should never trump integrity. Just because we’ve never had a black president is no reason to embrace this one.
Yet, once he was elected, all sorts of racial baggage was either laid at his feet, or more often, exonerated, while the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s triumphs was awarded to him simply because of who his father happened to be. His own lack of accomplishment, experience, preparedness and qualification was magically rendered irrelevant because he’s a black man.
Seems to me, as long as all we’re expected to do is talk about what’s wrong, and what has been wrong in the past, those things will continue to happen, and continue to be wrong. Once we decide that these things don’t deserve discussion, contemplation, or consideration, there won’t be anything to talk about, anyway. When it comes to equality and diversity, let’s all just shut up and do the damned thing.
That being said, when racism, sexism and/or any other “-ism” rears its ugly head, it should be immediately, and uncategorically, rejected by all. The only caveat, and it’s a big one, is that “-isms” are like pornography, hard to define quantitatively. While we claim to know it when we see it, ultimately, offense is in the eye of the beholder. On those occasions, just like any other when one experiences hurt at the hands of another, protest is only to be expected. Yet that protest should be limited to that particular incident; revisiting old issues only opens old wounds and diverts attention from the problem at hand, greatly increasing the odds that nothing will be resolved. “You hurt my feelings,” will usually result in an immediate apology, “you always hurt my feelings,” will probably result in a fight.
…”we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.”
I think he’s half right; we, as average Americans, don’t talk to each other, period. If we did, race would probably never come up. And when, and if, it did, we’d probably be able to work it out.
Let’s face it, most PUMAs are sick to death of Barack Obama. We recoil from the sight and sound of him stumbling through ghost-written, TelePrompTer read speeches on our television screens, tens, that feel like thousands, of times a day, droning incessantly about something that only he can so successfully make seem like nothing. And vice-versa. However, where we once railed against the excessive exposure, shouting at our computers and TVs every time he, his name or likeness popped up in yet another puff or fluff piece of a sad excuse for a print “news” article or op-ed column, or tedious You Tube lecture, or “get your very own useless Obama trinket” commercial, we now just sigh.
We’re simply getting tired.
“Obama fatigue” was all the rage this summer after a Pew poll showed that Obaexposure had reached saturation point. Coincidently, about a month thereafter, the economy tanked, an event which diverted attention, and predictably, allowed the Obamachine to go into Obadrive with layers of Axelrod brand Astroturf and effectively counter all the prior negativity. To allow this sort of signature combat maneuver to continue to go undefended is just as dangerous now as it ever was because it allows crappily written pump ‘n’ prop him up pieces of “ain’t he just the greatest thing since Mickey D’s” drivel to sneak into the public consciousness unchecked, except for rightwing Republican kneejerk “everything he does sucks” often baseless, yet predictable partisan responses, which can be easily refuted. We PUMAs just cannot afford to be complacent without accepting at least some of the blame for his further chicanery and incompetence.
Frank Rich in the New York Times, and Pamela Gentry in the Huffington Post, both have “hush the Obama naysayers” pieces today touting the Nascent Neophyte’s “triumph” of getting the massive, unread “stimulus bill” through Congress that many economists claim won’t stimulate anything except the libidos of the crooks who porkified and passed it in the dark. Though Rich’s piece is interminably longer than Gentry’s, both give literary raspberries to those critical of both the bill and the stumblebum method of passage. According to these two, the mere fact that the bill was passed proves Obiteme is not only not incompetent, he’s shrewd, skillful and he’s smarter than everybody on the planet, to boot.
Of course, the fact that he still doesn’t have a Commerce or Health and Human Services Secretary, and his Treasury Secretary is a tax cheat nobody in the world has confidence in, is not mentioned by either opinionist. Nor is the fact that Oblahblah and Associates have mounted a “lowered expectations” media campaign relative to his victorious, historic, stimulus bill, while ducking legitimate questions they don’t like.
And, just what is the great accomplishment of which they crow, anyway? His attempt at bipartisanship was an utter failure, allowing Sen. John McCain, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and young Rep. Aaron Shock to access the airwaves all day Sunday trashing him and it, as John Boehner did on the floor of the House. In fact, the net effect of the reality of Obama’s support for the bill is that more Democrats voted against it (7 in the House) than Republicans voted for it (3 in the Senate).
The main reason such cheerleading must be countered is that if it is not, the Obama “brand” becomes further entrenched in the American psyche without challenge, which is as fraught with danger as allowing Peanut Corp. to continue selling its products without reporting the salmonella outbreak. If nobody raises a stink, people will keep right on buying Jiff because they like Mr. Peanut, regardless of the fact that he represents another company.
Kevin Price of BizPlusBlog, someone I know nothing about, underscores my point that the vast majority of Bicardi ‘n’ KoolAid drinkers know next to nothing about politics, and are those deliberately targeted by the Obama campaign, being overly susceptible to “branding.” Price argues that Obamacamp’s manipulation of the “gotta do someting, anything’s better than doing nothing, or we’re all gonna die” or, “the ship is sinking, hurry up and jump aboard!” theme was directed at these folks:
There are two basic views of government. One sees the best government doing as little as possible and being focused on protecting individuals from other individuals and our country from foreign adversaries. The opposite extreme is that government should play a pervasive role in every aspect of our lives and that it should be the primary driver of our economy and society. The vast majority who have an opinion fall some where in between. Far more than those with an actual opinion have no real view at all. Those people are my concern here.
This uniformed majority are the same people who are driving Barack Obama’s extremely high approval ratings. They don’t really know what they are doing, or what they believe, they are merely very sincere. They think some action is, at least, action. But the actions of this administration will take generations to pay off and they promise to make things far worse than better.
Here’s the rub, most PUMAs are not political science majors, either. We’re simply politically aware bullshit detectors. The danger we face is that, like most fertilizers, the odor of Obandini can become tolerable with enough constant exposure. That’s bad enough, but when the super slick fertilizer salesman touts the benefits of using his new chocolate flavored product on store bought vegetables, and even as an ice cream topping, some gullible folks can be persuaded to forget they’re swallowing bullshit whole. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there are so many more of them. And they’re more than willing to let the government promote the notion that fecalized fast food is nutritious and delicious while they sell it to us and our children by the pound.
We PUMAs just don’t have the luxury of Obama fatigue.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the Democratic presidential candidate from the Republican one. If you’re not looking at them, that is. Just listening to them talk, or reading about their proposals, you’d swear they either switched sides, or sides don’t matter anymore.
Last night, though the “we’re smarter than you” pundits near and far scored the debate for Obama, saying since McCain didn’t deliver a knockout, Obie wins on points, in the light of day, it looks like McCain may have knocked them all silly at the opening bell. In answer to the first question presented to him, McCain said this:
You know that home values of retirees continues to decline and people are no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. As president of the United States, Alan, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes — at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those — be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.
Now, the first I heard of this plan was from Hillary Clinton, but nobody paid attention to her. Last night, immediately after the debate, Obi-WanNaBePresident seemed to take credit, at least according to a press release published by Politico:
The statement, “John McCain Lies Tonight,” began: “McCain today said he had a new plan to allow the Treasury to purchase and restructure mortgages. The truth is that this is not a new proposal and is already part of the rescue plan that was signed into law. It was Obama, not McCain who called for this move two weeks ago.”
But today, Camp O is singing a different Dixie; from AP:
The plan would cause the government “to massively overpay for mortgages in a plan that would guarantee taxpayers lose money, and put them at risk of losing even more if home values don’t recover,” Obama economic adviser Jason Furman said in a statement. “The biggest beneficiaries of this plan will be the same financial institutions that got us into this mess, some of whom even committed fraud.”
I can’t underscore enough what a rotten idea John McCain’s ACORN-like government mortgage buy-up is. I said it during my liveblog. And I’ll say it again: “HE WANTS TO EXPAND THE BAILOUT. He wants to do what ACORN wants to do. We’re Screwed ‘08.”
And, even though Obama slammed McCain just last night for saying the fundamentals of the economy are strong, today the O-man said:
“America still has the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth,” Obama said. “We’re still the home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and our research facilities.”
Having trouble keeping “who’s who” straight? Well, let me tell you, whatever you do, don’t call the black one “Hussein.” I know it’s his name, but it seems to really piss his friends off.
Or something like that. During last nights’ complete waste of time “debate,” Obama asserted that the invention of the computer was due to a government defense project of some sort. Per The Washington Times:
“The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate,” he said.
The mistake was reminiscent of Mr. Gore’s comments about the Internet. When running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1999, he told a CNN interviewer: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
The first computers were created by teams of professors and graduate students. The two teams with the strongest claim to the invention were from Iowa State University and the University of Pennsylvania, where the research originally was funded by the Army during World War II.
Maybe Brokaw’s “Manhattan Project” question helped muddle Obama’s thoughts. Nah, this question came after. From CNN’s transcript:
Should we fund a Manhattan-like project that develops a nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?
What the hell does that even mean? I get the “Manhattan Project” part, it’s the “100,000 garages” that stumps me. Why not a couple thousand shoe stores, or 1,500 beanie factories? Anyway, in response, John McCain said, “Blah, blah, blah, you know who voted for the Bush-Cheney energy bill, that one,” and pointed at Obama. (I’m paraphrasing here.) This seemed to be part of McCain’s strategy to portray Obama as “not-yet-ready-for-primetime.” It clearly rattled Obama, because later, he took a “nyah nanna-na-nah, same goes for you!” approach, when he said this:
Now, Sen. McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears and, you know, I’m just spouting off, and he’s somber and responsible.
McCain: Thank you very much.
Obama: Sen. McCain, this is the guy who sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don’t think is an example of “speaking softly.
Now, Obama’s media supporters are predicting that other sources will soon be calling McCain racist for the “that one” comment. While Grampa Mac was clearly being dismissive, it’s much less clear that his derision was racially motivated. But then, I guess whenever an old white guy, in essence, calls a younger black guy, “Sonny,” you could make the racism case. Whatever. All I know is, I would have cared a lot more about the whole race thing a few months ago, before racism itself became a stereotype.
Besides, the “green behind the ears” thing makes Obama a Vulcan. And, he called himself that.
The only thing I learned in tonight’s presidential debate is that John McCain wants to buy everybody a house. If Barack Obama had only said he wanted to teach the world to sing, we not only could have had a Coke commercial, there’s a chance we might actually have been engaged, if not exactly entertained. What a snoozefest. Meandering intros to chopped up, well-worn talking points for ninety minutes is not my idea of letting the good times roll. I am not Mccain’s “friend,” and listening to Obama ramble into a series of “uh, uh, like I’ve said” statements makes my wisdom teeth ache. And I don’t have any.
Watching the “contest” on CNN, I couldn’t help but notice the squiggly lines on their pointless people meter moving, for no apparent reason, in Obama’s favor, even when all he said was that he basically agreed with his opponent. McCain hit Obama a couple of times on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but not hard enough to do any real damage. Obama tried to tie McCain to Bush, but who really cares, since nobody even remembers that Bush is nominally still president.
The AP says they both lied like dogs about just about everything they said, but I probably nodded off. Being AP, they implied McCain lied more, but the checks they gave mainly just split hairs. ABC has a slightly different take.
How many of these things do we have left?
Couldn’t we get rid of both of them and start over?
CNN wants to excuse Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers and dismiss it as a desperate campaign gimmick by John McCain, they really do, but they just don’t seem to be able to. Poor guys. I feel their pain.
Not.
Just like Obama’s enigmatic rise is more problematic than he would like you to believe, there’s more than enough reason to believe Camp Johnny Mac had this particular gun cocked months ago.
A week long period in which Ohioans could register to vote and immediately cast a ballot ended Monday with turnout that didn’t quite match the expectations of election officials — or the campaign predictions that preceded it.
Early returns showed about 3,000 voters in Ohio’s four largest counties took advantage of the disputed policy, a surprisingly low turnout to some elections officials.
The article doesn’t mention how many of the early voters were Republicans. Or Independents. Or tinfoil hat wearing alien descendants responding to the voices in their heads. Just six days ago, AP reported on the breathless anticipation Ohioans were experiencing:
Voters in this crucial swing state began casting absentee ballots Tuesday, after state and federal courts upheld a ruling that allows residents to register and vote absentee on the same day during the first six days of voting.
Five people were waiting at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections when doors opened at 8:30 a.m. Two in line said they were voting for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, including John Fuller, 73, a retired hospital orderly from Cleveland.
Talk about a “silly season.” Barack Obama’s favorite line for characterizing political attacks against him by his opponents appears to apply especially well to him. Angered by Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin’s “palling around with terrorists” comments, the Obama campaign is threatening once again, to take off the gloves and attack back. This time, they’re focusing their now famous laser-like offensive intensity on John Mccain’s decades old involvement with the “Keating 5,” a group of politicians accused of influence peddling. Camp O will be making the case in a 13 minute internet video scheduled to air at noon, that McCain’s behavior in that instance is not only indicative of his inability to handle the current economic crisis, it laid the groundwork for it.
“I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment.”
Meanwhile, AP-Yahoo News, in it’s “rapidly-becoming-famous” ridiculously illogical defense of Obama’s associations with radical William Ayers, quotes an Obama surrogate calling Palin a “fluffy bunny.” Way to get tough, guys:
“It’s a giant changing of the subject,” said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. “The problem is the messenger. If you want to start throwing fire bombs, you don’t send out the fluffy bunny to do it. I think people don’t take Sarah Palin seriously.”
“Fluffy bunny?” Okaaaay. Maybe you shouldn’t send a “fluffy bunny” to throw firebombs, but you certainly shouldn’t use the phrase “fire bomb” in a defense of a guy who’s proud of setting them. And, you might not want to bring up a case implicating your own party in economic shenanigans as an indictment against your opponent. Ya think?
But AP’s Douglass K. Daniel goes one (or 20) step further by accusing Palin of what the New York Times calls “racism without racists,” or subliminal racism, in bringing to mind post 9/11 images of “dark skinned radical Muslims”. According to Daniel, any mention of terrorism is an attempt to smear Obama with racially based xenophobia. But, the terrorist in Palin’s comments was Ayers, not Obama, and that terrorism association is more likely to bring to mind Timothy McVeigh than Mohammed Atta. Unless Dougie knows something the rest of us don’t about Obama’s religion and extra-curricular activities, the racism charge is more than a stretch, it’s a trip down the rabbit hole.
And that “fluffy bunny” thing is just weird.
But then, the whole Obamanon (Obama phenomenon) is getting weird. In Virginia, a state Obama won handily in the primaries, his supporters are pulling out all the stops to head off potential racist voting by “getting it out in the open:”
When Cecil E. Roberts, president of the coal miners union that shapes politics in much of this mountain region, talks to voters, he tells them that their choice is to have “a black friend in the White House or a white enemy.” When Charlie Cox, an Obama supporter, hears friends fretting about Obama’s race, he reminds them that they pull for the nearby University of Tennessee football team, “and they’re black.”
Union organizer Jerry Stallard asks fellow coal workers what’s more important: improving their work conditions or holding onto their skepticism of Obama’s race, culture or religion. “We’re all black in the mines,” he tells them.
That oughta put those racists’ minds at ease. And, Lord knows, that “subliminal racism” is not always so “subliminal,” so you gotta fight it wherever you see it. Because if you get enough of it, and you let it go by, it might offset the 90+ percent of black people voting for Obama.
Maybe it’s just the fact that according to The Washington Post, the Republican National Committee is planning to call for an investigation into Obi-WanNaBePresident’s fundraising is what’s gotten Team O so discombobulated. Or maybe the Rasmussen Report that almost 60% of Americans polled are fed up with Congress, with almost half convinced that people picked randomly from the phone book could do a better job, that’s just got all politicians spooked.
Personally, I think we all walked through the looking glass and fell down the rabbit hole on our way to The Twilight Zone. Hope there are no “fluffy bunnies” down there; if there are, somebody might make a porno movie about them. And I imagine that could ruin Peeps for me forever.
Well, we all just watched a debate that will change absolutely nobody’s mind, and I, for one, am glad it’s over. Listen, my mind’s made up; I hate Joe Biden and I don’t hate Sarah Palin. I hate Joe Biden because he’s Barack Obama’s running mate. I don’t care about Sarah Palin because she’s John McCain’s running mate. I hate Barack Obama because he’s a creepy, curiously funded, incompetent, inexperienced joke of a candidate who wants to change America in fundamental ways. I don’t like John McCain because he’s a Republican.
Nothing I saw or heard tonight changed my mind one bit.
All that’s left is to sit back and watch the spinmeisters lay Axelrod’s astroturf.
Slate Magazine, which I grew to hate during the primaries for it’s incessant Obama cheerleading, has an article by Walter Shapiro claiming voters are angry, but too stupid to know why.
A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that 43 percent of all voters admitted that they feel “confused” by the proposed plan to stabilize the financial markets. At the same time, voters grasp that something important is happening — 54 percent say, in response to another question, that they are paying “a lot” of attention to the bailout debate in Washington. Pollster Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, said that it was virtually “unparalleled” to have this simultaneous level of interest and confusion in a policy debate. “It’s a tough one to get into the nitty-gritty of,” said Kohut. “It is not like gay marriage that is easy to grasp no matter what your point of view is.”
Hey, Walter, wanna buy a clue? Maybe what voters are “confused” about is the reason people who get paid to figure stuff out spend so much time looking up their own asses for answers to obvious questions. We’re “confused” by the fact that the media is so obviously trying to elect a raving lunatic, which Barack Obama is, that they applaud him for doing absolutely nothing to deal with the current economic mess but repeat, over, and over again, that he’s not the guy he’s running against, whose biggest sin, according to Obama, is that he knows the guy who’s been engineering the money train for the last eight years. The candidate who said, “call me, I got my cell,” the guy who has collected more money from the companies profiting from the restructuring of our financial market than any other, who has also taken more money in his brief tenure from those identified as the major culprits involved in this mess than just about anybody, is for some reason, the media’s fair-haired boy. Oops, I said, “boy.” I must be a latent racist, since that’s the only reason I could possibly have to use that particular phrase in that particular instance, or to criticize the Golden Child at all, at least, according to the media. Never mind that if I am a racist, I must hate myself, ’cause I’ve been black a long time, too.
We’re confused alright, Walter. It’s hard to figure out how the Democratic party could produce a bill in the House to address the crisis of the imminent collapse of our free market system, or however they framed their “fire-in-a-crowded-theater” clarion call, and then not only not push it through, deliberately sabotage it. We don’t get that, Walter. Silly us.
Then there’s David Gergen, who I find considerably more annoying than I would imagine a nest of vipers hatching in my underwear, or a swarm of bees building a hive in my ear to be, who, in a blog post for Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, bemoans America’s lack of trust in it’s leaders, not just in government, but pretty much, across the board:
Four of the five lowest rated groups in the index were business, Congress, the executive branch, and the press. No wonder the “leaders” of these institutions had so much trouble persuading the general public about the seriousness of our financial mess.
David cites research from The Harvard Center for Public Leadership, which he claims to direct, done in partnership with U.S. News and World Report, and Yankelovich, which states this erosion of trust has been going on for a while:
In the fall of 2005, some 65% said we have a leadership crisis in the country. By 2006, the number had risen to 69%. And last fall, no less than 77% declared there was a crisis of leadership. Moreover, 79% said the United States would decline unless we get better leaders.
Gergen goes on to bitch and moan about the challenges facing Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as all the other pseudo-leaders in other fields, in the face of this growing crisis of confidence, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we’d have more confidence in “leaders” if they didn’t have to commission a stupid study to see what’s right in front of their faces. The government does a lousy job; that’s why their approval ratings suck. Both parties are full of corrupt liars. They always promise “change” in exchange for votes; they get the votes, nothing changes. “Business” wants 700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to prop up the house of cards they’ve been ripping off those same taxpayers from, and the media is a joke. Those are pretty good reasons for people to stop trusting them. And, as far as that “better leaders” thing is concerned, we had one running on the Democratic side that I would have trusted in this crisis with my future, but you guys, Walter and David, were among the worst character assassins out there helping to torpedo her chances to be an effective leader. That’s why we hate you and your kind.
No, we’re not “confused” about the inefficiency of government, or the complicity of the press, or the greed of the financiers. We’re “confused” that you seem so surprised that we don’t trust them, or you, as far as we could spit at you from.
In Friday’s debate, Barack Obama made a big deal about his ability to restore America’s world image. Why should that be a big deal? Is it? Business Week debates whether when you get right down to it, the world might be initially pleased with a president so far from Bush on so many levels, (though really, the main difference is probably physical, imho) ultimately, will they be disappointed? And, more importantly, exactly how is he going to accomplish such a thing?
CNN reports that Obama somehow relates world image to national security. On the question of the potential of another 9/11:
McCain that another attack on the scale of the September 11 hijackings is “much less likely” now than it was the day after the terrorist attacks.
“America is safer now than it was on 9/11,” he said, “But we have a long way to go before we can declare America safe.”
Obama agreed that the United States is “safer in some ways” but said the country needed to focus more on issues such as nuclear non-proliferation and restoring America’s image in the world.
This is a song Camp O has been singing for months now, and it makes no more difference (or sense) to me now than it did when I first heard it. Are we supposed to give up nukes so people will come play with us? Why are so many people so concerned with who we elect as president, anyway? Are they really, or is this just more Axelrod astroturfing? There’s a World Wants Obama Coalition on the net, MoveOn.org has a page, “Obama in 30 Seconds,” with a diplomacy section dedicated to quick validation of the idea; who can forget his World Tour Like A Rock Star and the now famous, World Wants Obama poll? Maybe Axelrod read Dennis Ross’ book, “Statecraft: And How To Restore America’s Standing In The World,” and took it to heart, though I’m not sure either one of us buys the whole “chicken-and-egg” premise that if people like what they think about you, the threat of danger is automatically sufficiently minimized. Unless he’s making the case that for terrorists, to know us is to love us, what is the point of giving a good hot damn what the rest of the world thinks? And, who would say that with a straight face? That’s kind of a “blame the victim in advance” sucker bait attitude, in my opinion. When you sit down to talk to foreign leaders, with or without pre-conditions, how effective can you be if you’re preoccupied with getting them to like you? If the country is being governed properly, world respect will come. If all it takes is having a guy with the “right look” to get the globe on board, maybe their opinion isn’t really worth cultivating. At least, that’s what my mama taught me.
What happened to the meltdown? I thought the country was “in the midst of the greatest financial threat since the Great Depression.” So, where are all the news media doom-and-gloom dire predictions of imminent economic collapse today? Seems they took the weekend off. Oh, sure, there is an AP story quoting Harry Reid about “making progress:”
Congressional leaders said Saturday they hoped to reach an agreement on a multibillion-dollar bailout plan for the financial sector before the markets open Monday, even if House and Senate votes would come later.
“The goal is to come up with a final agreement by tomorrow,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said during an unusual weekend session of Congress. “We may not be able to do that, but we’re trying very hard.”
They’re “trying hard?” Good to know. It’s enough to make a cynical person think that maybe the media was being fed over-hyped crisis stories to build up interest in a ho-hum debate between two candidates both parties regret choosing as presidential nominees. But, the Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t sink low enough to try to dupe the American electorate with that kind of fearmongering, would they?
Naaaah.
And, speaking of the debate, what about those two polls giving Obama a decisive edge in public opinion?
Fifty-one percent said Obama, the Democrat, did a better job in Friday night’s faceoff while 38 percent preferred the Republican McCain, according to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey of adults.
snip
In a CBS News poll of people not committed to a candidate, 39 percent said Obama won the debate, 24 percent said McCain and 37 percent called it a tie. Twice as many said Obama understands their needs than said so about McCain.
Considering Team O’s exhortations to it’s loyal followers to watch the debates on CNN, anything from them has to be taken with a grain of salt about the size of a lick.
“Watch Barack Obama debate John McCain tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern on CNN,” the message said. Also, remind friends to register to vote at VoteforChange.com. Please forward this message.
Now, I will readily admit to a certain amount of cynicism here, given the fact that, though I have no affinity for either major party candidate, I truly dislike Barack Obama and the party that, by foisting him upon me, drove me out. So, yeah, I’m going to look for any excuse to bash him, and them, but I am grateful that their combined incompetence, chicanery, and over-all slimy-ness makes doing so very easy.
What did Obama win in the debate? He didn’t totally lose. In a forum he and his camp admit he sucks at, he didn’t quite suck. Though he did smirk, seem to get angry, and interrupt often, the only potentially embarrassing segment came at the end with his unnecessary reference to his Kenyan father. What was the point of that? It only served to bring to mind his recent “Fight the Smears” admission of dual citizenship. His overly familiar usage of Senator McCain’s first name was annoying, it’s a bad habit he has of dismissing his opponent to no good end. (You’re likable enough, Hillary.) Small point, but noticeable.
Basically, both men were predictable. McCain held to his position that Obama was not ready to lead, Obama held to his the “war was a mistake” theme. McCain hammered Obama about meeting with world leaders without pre-conditions and The Weekly Standard already has an exception to Obama’s statements about Henry Kissinger’s position on it’s website:
Henry Kissinger believes Barack Obama misstated his views on diplomacy with US adversaries and is not happy about being mischaracterized. He says: “Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”
Though Obama backpedaled on that and tended to agree with McCain a lot, as I said, he didn’t totally suck or stutter as much as usual. Obama sounded like a professor discussing theories, McCain sounded like a veteran. McCain, imho, won, but since he didn’t knock him out with the ACORN stuff, Obama didn’t totally lose.
Especially since he has successfully re-framed the terms of the debate.
Checkmate.
What was supposed to be a foreign policy debate will instead be a “what-do-you-have-to-do-with-ACORN-and-the-bailout, Mr. Obama?” debate.
Obama, who will be over-prepared for foreign policy, will…probably cry.
He will stutter and stammer about regulations.
He will confuse McCain with George Bush.
Just like he always had trouble telling Bill and Hillary Clinton apart.
He will chant, “change,” “hope,” and “the American people” in the same sentence.
Over and over again.
Whether appropriate or not.
Like he always does.
And he will lose.
Of course McCain wouldn’t want to miss that.
He set it up.
Pay no attention to the pundits, they’re paid party hacks. Read Uppity Woman, No Quarter, any of the right-wing blogs, or check out my last post, below (she said humbly.) Whether you agree or not, the point is, these are now the relevant questions.
Spero News (whoever they are) says ACORN has been involved in government since the Carter administration:
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was given life during the Carter administration, and empowers four federal financial supervisory agencies to oversee the performance of financial institutions in meeting the credit needs of their entire community, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Whenever an institution wants to make virtually any change in its business operation, such as merging, opening up a new branch, or getting into a new line of business, it must first prove to regulators that it has made ample loans to the government’s preferred borrowers, those in low- and middle-income neighborhoods who normally would not qualify for a loan. Lenders with low ratings can be fined by the government.
The Carter administration used tax dollars to fund numerous “community groups” that helped the government enforce the CRA by filing petitions against banks whose “cooperativeness” didn’t measure up, and sometimes stopping their efforts to expand their operations. Banks responded by giving money to the community groups and by making more loans. One of those organizations was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). An active associate of ACORN in the 90s was a young public-interest attorney named Barack Obama.
These organizations long ago predicted that a crisis in the housing market would result in a staggering increase in foreclosures and cause the largest loss of personal net worth since the Great Depression.
Now these folks are seething because the proposed bailout of financial institutions fails to include any provisions to directly help the people at the center of this crisis. To fund the bailout, $700 billion of Treasury securities would be issued to finance the purchase of troubled mortgage assets.
Basically, these organizations want bankruptcy provisions:
Nonprofit leaders want any bailout bill to include a provision that would give bankruptcy judges the discretion to modify primary mortgages.
“This is an effective way of providing relief to homeowners at no cost to taxpayers,” AARP President Bill Novelli wrote in a letter to the leadership of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee.
If bankruptcy court judges could modify people’s mortgages, this might give homeowners leverage to compel lenders to restructure loans or face a forced modification in bankruptcy, said Bruce Marks, chief executive of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.
The Chicago Tribune reported on the 23rd that the bankruptcy issue could be a deal-breaker:
An area drawing the most furious lobbying is around Sen. Christopher Dodd’s desire to modify the bankruptcy law to allow courts to reduce homeowners’ mortgage debt, a practice called “cram downs” as in “we’ll let judges cram down the throats of lenders reductions in the housing loans they hold and thus their profits.”
Bankers successfully blocked such provisions from the bankruptcy reform law Congress passed in 2005 and ever since then have resisted consumer advocates’ attempts to get “cram downs” into federal law.
The blogosphere is alive with the news, supposedly mentioned by Lindsey Graham during an appearance on Greta van Sustern’s On the Record, but reported first by Michelle Malkin, that while such provisions may indeed be at the heart of the breakdown, seemingly, ACORN seeks more than that, and the Democrats seem willing to give it:
Just heard from several readers that Lindsay Grahamnesty told Fox that the Mother of All Bailouts includes a reported $100 million more in funding for the left-wing housing entitlement thugs and heavily tax-subsidized fraudsters at ACORN. Under the original bailout proposal, apparently, a large portion of any repayment of the $700 billion would go to Barack Obama’s good friends at ACORN with a smaller allocation to debt repayment. Readers heard him say it was 20 percent.
Could those ties be the reason nobody called Barack Obama to come help with the bailout negotiations until McCain, who was called by Democrats and Republicans alike, challenged President Bush to do so? Exactly what dynamics are at play here? This seems to cut deeper than any mere stunt, or even normal presidential political one-upsmanship. Obviously, somebody with more journalistic expertise than I possess is going to have to do some digging and apply some clear, non-partisan analysis to give us a even hint of an answer, since I don’t understand why “cram down” provisions should, would, or could coincide with direct funding for ACORN.
In conjunction with partner, Brave New Pac, which shares office space with Brave New Foundation, an organization that lists Acorn, Code Pink,and DFA among others on their partners page, and Brave New Films, DFA has shown how low they will go to with this, the second of two attack ads so far. The Brave New folks, on the other hand, have loads of attack ads of their own on their webpages. This is the first:
Two liberal political action committees are making an issue of John McCain’s past bouts with skin cancer in a television commercial that features his facial scar and demands that the Republican presidential nominee release his medical records to the public.
The 30-second ad, so far airing for $50,000 only on MSNBC, is paid for by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America, a political group headed by James Dean, the brother of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Hey, Howie, here’s a thought. Why not spend some dough promoting your guy instead of ripping the other guy? But then, there’s not enough time or money in the world to make that work, is there, Howard?
When is a deal not a deal? When everybody’s lying about it, that’s when. It seems that in our current economic crisis, image is everything. President George Bush (he is still president, isn’t he?) bluntly admitted as much, says The Boston Globe.
“The market is not functioning properly,” the president said. “There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America’s financial system are at risk of shutting down.”
In that kind of climate, care must be taken to insure that skittish investors see some light at the end of the tunnel. Hence, talk of a deal. From The New York Times:
House leaders and the White House on Thursday announced a tentative agreement on an economic stimulus package of roughly $150 billion that would pay stipends of $300 to $1,200 per household, and more for families with children, plus provide tax incentives for businesses to encourage spending.
Financial markets grew more upbeat Thursday as political leaders said they struck an agreement in principle on a massive spending plan to revive the crippled financial system. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped about 200 points on optimism about the bailout, and demand for safe-haven assets remained high but eased slightly as some investors placed bets that a deal would help unclog credit markets.
US lawmakers were still working Thursday to agree an unprecedented Wall Street bailout package, Democrats and Republicans said after White House crisis talks.
Lawmakers are “working on it,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, as he emerged from the talks called by President George W. Bush.
“Still have a lot of issues to be worked on. Making progress. A lot more to discuss,” he added.
And now that the markets are way closed for the day, from AP:
Key members of Congress claimed agreement Thursday on an outline and crucial details of an urgent multibillion-dollar plan to stave off national economic disaster, but a historic White House meeting with President Bush, the two men fighting to replace him and other congressional leaders broke up with conflicts in plain view.
And while perceptions are being furiously managed, Democrats and Republicans are still bickering over the merits of John McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign until the problem is resolved, even though Newsbusters is reporting that he was asked to do just that:
John McCain got involved in the bailout negotiations after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Sen. Lindsey Graham yesterday that the bailout plan would fail unless McCain came in and brought balky Republicans aboard. That’s what Bob Schieffer reported on this morning’s Early Show. Schieffer’s account stands in stark contrast with the allegation by Dems like Barney Frank and their MSM cohorts that McCain’s moves of yesterday were nothing more than a political “stunt.”
Bailouts? Earmarks? Gas profits? If we’re going to concentrate time and effort looking into misappropriation of funds, why not determine how much money “journalists” make to report stories like these? AP-Yahoo News wants to know why Sarah Palin kept a $1,000 donation from a guy she “urged to resign” for corruption:
Sarah Palin felt so strongly about the public corruption indictment of a Republican state senator this summer that she urged him to resign — but not strongly enough to return the $1,000 he gave to help elect her governor.
The donation from John Cowdery was one of three from Alaska legislators who contributed to Palin’s 2006 campaign weeks after the FBI raided their offices. The sprawling public corruption scandal that followed became a rallying point for candidate Palin, who was swept into office after promising voters she would rid Alaska’s capital of dirty politics.
The article points out that while the contribution does not suggest any wrongdoing, both John McCain and Barack Obama have “given back” money in the past.
Over the years, both McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama have returned campaign donations tied to corruption, expressing regret in both cases. Obama’s campaign says he’s given to charity $159,000 tied to convicted Chicago real estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko. In the early 1990s, McCain returned $112,000 from Charles Keating, a central figure in the savings and loan crisis, after a Senate ethics inquiry.
By those standards, maybe Obama should have sold Rezko back his land. AP-Yahoo also has this story (horrors!) of Palin being “blessed from witchcraft.”
A video on her hometown church Web site shows Sarah Palin being blessed three years ago by a Kenyan pastor who prayed for her protection from “witchcraft” as she prepared to seek higher office.
Good to know she was elected in spite of not being a witch. In more pressing news, the Chicago Tribune has the “exclusive:” Barack Obama prefers the Stones over the Beatles! On his way to the White House for meeting with the president about the nation’s economic woes, the press put the question to the Democratic nominee:
Now the news: apparently there were a few Capitol Hill reporters waiting outside his office. He was asked by one whether he was a Rolling Stones or Beatles guy. “Stones,” Obama reponded to a CQ reporter, per Psaki. She said he also said that he would make some comments after the White House meeting about the bailout agreement.
Nice to know he had time to work something in about that bailout stuff. Not to be outdone, The New York Times, on it’s blog, The Caucus had to share this “news” about David Letterman’s snit over McCain’s cancellation from his show in order to deal with that pesky bailout thing.
David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator’s decision and suggesting “something doesn’t smell right” about the Senator’s plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.
Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, “When you call up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know.” He repeated that “something smells right now” and he suggested “somebody must have put something in his Metamucil.”
If it wasn’t for that damned First Amendment, I’d say it was time for some government oversight into this question of who pays these “journalists,” how much, and why?
Traveling around from internet news site to internet news site, a thought occurred to me: be afraid, be very afraid. Not only is there the threat of a major, global economic collapse hanging over our heads, even with the tentative agreement lawmakers just reached, the entire rest of the political news is just as frightening, in a goofy scary kind of way.
Politico’s Ben Smith, seeming more annoyed today by his perpetually twisted knickers than ususal, says Bill Clinton’s not sufficiently being Barack’s surrogate. Awwwwww…Ben, who always seems to be in a snit about something, is stomping his widdle foot at the former president for having the temerity to refuse to carry Barack Obama’s water. The nerve of that Clinton guy, huh?
Introducing John McCain at the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, Bill Clinton doesn’t mention that he’s endorsed another candidate, or that there’s a campaign on.
Actually, it’s Politico’s Jonathan Martin giving flavor to Ben’s words, since for some reason, Jonathan chose to do a seperate post basically reprinting Ben’s post, with ‘tude. Both mention Clinton’s defense of McCain on Good Morning America, which is not surprising, since they’re the same frigging post.
Then there’s the Harry Reid’s “I want you, stay, I hate you, go away” strange courtship of John McCain.
Yesterday, ABC’s Jake Tapper reported Harry Hippy now says McCain’s help wasn’t needed or welcome.
A Democrat tells ABC News that, in a phone call late this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that it would NOT be helpful for him to come back to Washington, D.C., to work on the Wall Street bailout bill.
Meanwhile, back at CNN, yesterday Florida Congressman, Alcee Hastings, told a Jewish audience that they should be as afraid of Sarah Palin as black people are:
Rep. Alcee Hastings told an audience of Jewish Democrats Wednesday that they should be wary of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”
snip
“For those of you like me that supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, she lost! Get over it!”
Get over this, Alcee. Anyway, looks like Obama may be losing a little luster, just using his name is no longer enough to guarantee huge crowds. Seems his Faith Tour flopped on it’s first stop.
For the new Barack Obama “faith tour” to have any success, it needs to be able to draw young and evangelical voters. Yet, at its first stop in the Virginia back yard of well-known pastor Jerry Falwell, just 15 people showed up for the event.
Hey, all the guys in my neighborhood like to hand out millions of dollars to people who were only eight years old when they bombed stuff. RBO has more on this here.
And who the hell is Khalid Al-Mansour, and why does his name keep coming up?
John McCain has skillfully maneuvered Barack Obama into a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” position smack dab in the middle of a rock and a hard place. No matter what you think of the merits of McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and return to work, ostensibly to lend his “expertise” to the effort to fix the country’s current economic problems, at least it’s bold and decisive action that forces Obama to respond in kind; boldly and decisively. So far, though, he’s just been wimpy.
CNN reports that while Obama has been making speeches:
“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president,” Obama said in Clearwater, Florida. “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once. It’s more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people.”
John McCain has been, well, doing stuff:
Announcing his decision to suspend his campaign, McCain said, “I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Sen. Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”
snip
Salter also said McCain called President Bush and talked to colleagues in Washington and learned that passage of the bailout plan was next to impossible.
McCain’s campaign also said that he had canceled his appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” on Wednesday night.
Now, given that Obama “suspended” his campaign, canceled his “Saturday Night Live” appearance and went home due to Hurricane Ike, he can’t very well stand on principle here. Besides, McCain’s call to Bush worked. An AP-Yahoo News headline screams so:
Bush invites McCain, Obama to White House meeting
With extraordinary stakes on the line, President Bush invited both men vying to succeed him and key congressional leaders to a White House meeting to hammer out a massive financial rescue plan. The president also was appealing directly to Americans in a prime-time address Wednesday to help push his tough-sell bailout into reality.
snip
So, not long before his planned 12-minute address to the nation from the grand East Room, Bush took the unusual step of calling Democrat Barack Obama to invite him to the White House for the meeting on Thursday, said presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino. The White House said the presidential invitation was also extended to Republican John McCain and to Republican and Democratic leaders from Capitol Hill.
So, on a day when all the stars were supposed to be lined up in his favor, Obama finds himself playing defense after being slapped upside the head with the unwelcome news that poll lead, or no poll lead, he is not yet president and still has a day job that requires his attention. And, darn it to heck, he can’t even blame the messenger.
Who’s “playing politics” with the bailout? Depends on who you ask. Republican presidential nominee, John McCain has suspended his campaign and asked Democratic rival Barack Obama, to join him and postpone Friday’s debate. Obama says, no way. According to AP News:
NEW YORK – Republican John McCain said Wednesday that he wants to postpone Friday’s debate to deal with the nation’s financial problems, but Democrat Barack Obama said “it’s more important than ever” that the country hear from its next president.
McCain says that putting politics aside, the need to address the economic crisis requires both candidates to rise above partisanship, and get back to doing the work they were already elected to do:
“It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal,” McCain said. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”
Obama was quick to point out however, that working together to “issue a statement” was his idea:
Obama repeatedly stressed at his news conference that he called McCain first to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. He said McCain called back several hours later, as Obama was leaving a rally in Florida, and agreed to the idea of a statement but also said he wanted to postpone the debate and hold joint meetings in Washington.
Obama said he suggested they first issue a joint statement showing bipartisanship.
“When I got back to the hotel, he had gone on television to announce what he was going to do,” Obama said.
Whether you believe, as some do, that McCain, reacting to increasingly bad poll numbers, is looking to jumpstart his favorabilty by trying to appear decisive and presidential, or that Obama, the heretofore reluctant debater, is showing strength by pressing on and claiming that the debate schedule must be adhered to, since the people need to hear from the candidates and presidents need to be able to multitask, one thing is clear; even in unusual times, we get politics as usual.
My take?
Seems to me, while enjoying his Walter Mitty-ish visions of press conferences-to-come praising him for “reaching across the aisle” to his politically wounded opponent, in an effort to jointly reassure Americans worried about the economy that he and his rival were “above politics,” Barack Obama got “politicked.” In fact, he got blindsided in plain sight. Like a sadistic little schoolyard bully sucker-punching a kid in a wheelchair, only to get his ass karate-kicked by a better-prepared-than-expected “victim,” Obama got played.
What he does next will say a lot about who he really is.
The Reuter’s headline reads: “Obama Ahead Of McCain Amid Wall Street Turmoil”
The opening paragraphs:
Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 9-point lead over Republican John McCain in the U.S. presidential race amid turmoil in the financial system and growing pessimism about the economy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News national opinion poll released on Wednesday.
Among likely voters, the poll found Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent, the Post reported.
The article proceeds to list various poll results from “likely voters,” “those polled,” “respondents,” “Independents” “white voters,” and “white women.” The last paragraph:
The survey of 1,082 people, including 916 registered voters, was conducted Friday through Monday. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus three percentage points and four points for the sample of 780 likely voters.
MSNBC leads with the “9 point” headline and buries the above paragraph in the middle of their story. They also add more categories: “Obama supporters,” “McCain supporters,” “Republicans,” “conservatives” and “white evangelical Protestants.”
I expected to read what “guys named Josh” and “girls who have vibrators” thought, but, alas, that wasn’t there. I guess when you poll about 1,000 people and have roughly the same number of categories as people, sooner or later you run out. Of course, “guys named Josh” who know “girls who have vibrators” might get counted more than once if they’re also “white, Republican, evangelical, conservatives who drive Volvos and are likely to vote if they have time,” but those kind of guys probably don’t hang out with that kind of girl.
Does Axelrod have pollsters on the payroll or does he just spoon feed their results to the media?
Could the recent bickering between Barack Obama and his running mate Joe (Oops, I Did It Again) Biden be the first bricks being laid in the groundwork to dump old Joe for Hillary Clinton, who, according to Bill Clinton, doesn’t want the job anyway?
Maybe.
Today, Barack said that Joe “should have waited” before disagreeing with him, like there’s ever a good time to do so. Here’s the video:
Looks like Obie got caught playing politics, while JoBi was being apolitical, i.e., honest. Can’t have that in a running mate for an astroturfed presidential candidate, can we? After all, appearances are everything.
The rumors of a planned Obama-Biden divorce are still floating around, (my favorite is the lack of available Obama-Biden merchandise is the “proof” that such a thing is in the works) however getting such a thing done might be a problem for a number of reasons. What possible excuse might work? The old “Muskie tears“ and “Eagleton-esque mental issues” routines are out, hoping Sentimental Joe might break down and turn on the waterworks, and the fun of watching him try to extract his foot from his mouth fast enough to say something even more stupid are the only reasons anybody shows up to see him speak anymore . Health problems probably won’t work either, as long as McCain is in the race. No, looks like Obi-Wan-NaBePresident is stuck with Shoeless (Makes It Easier To Insert Foot) Joe, which serves him right for picking a guy who said he sucked in the first place.
Yet another poll gets the numbers right (maybe) but skews the reasons for the numbers all to hell. The AP-Yahoo News Poll out today shows that former supporters of Hillary Clinton are pretty unlikely to vote for Barack Obama, and are unlikely in the same numbers they always have been.
Duh.
Barack Obama’s support from backers of Hillary Rodham Clinton is stuck smack where it was in June, a poll showed Tuesday, a stunning lack of progress that is weakening him with members of the Democratic Party in the close presidential race.
Though the poll finds that most former Clinton supporters never supported Obama based on his qualifications, and still don’t, the article goes on to break down the numbers with a sense of bewilderment I find puzzling. There is also the obligatory “it must be because he’s black and they’re stupid” implication:
As during her primary battle against Obama, Clinton supporters are likelier to be female, white, and less educated than those who did not back her.
Yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah…
Let me explain something to The Clueless Followers of the Obama Messiah Myth, and I promise to speak slowly and use simple little words.
Clinton recieved support from a large number of working class white people in the primaries.
Most of them were women.
Many of HRC’s supporters have always believed that Barack Obama sucks as a presidential candidate.
A lot of the people who supported Clinton still think Obama sucks.
The white ones are still white.
Most of the white ones are working class women.
Who needs a freaking poll? Especially when there are pictures and news stories? The Chicago Sun-Times says Obama is having trouble drawing crowds to venues, like the one in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that McCain recently sold out.
Just a week ago, John McCain and his vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin — who can bring out crowds the way Obama can — appeared in this same stadium, Resch Center, to a crowd of 10,000 fans. There were an uncharacteristic amount of empty orange seats for Obama’s rally.
ABC’s Jake Tapper provided the pictures. Note that not all of the people who stayed away were under-educated white women. Like the people who know a real presidential candidate when they see one, and will accept no imitations, those who didn’t show up to see Obama on what looks like a bright sunny day, come in all shapes colors and sizes.
Has the addition of Sarah Palin to McCain’s ticket caused an upswing in “vaginal voting?” If it has, Bill Clinton understands why. Politico reports that since Palin came aboard, John McCain has had a surge of support from women:
Since picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has obliterated what had been a 34-percentage-point deficit in a poll of likely women voters on the question of which candidate has a “better understanding of women and what is important” to them.
The two are now effectively tied, with McCain’s 44 to 42 percentage lead within the margin of error of the most recent poll conducted by pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake for Lifetime Television. In Lifetime’s July poll, women preferred Barack Obama on the same question by nearly three-to-one— 52 to 18 percent.
Of course, we’re talking white women here.
All summer Obama had roughly similar support among white women as Al Gore did in 2000.
Gallup finds McCain now leads with white women 51 to 40 percent, a wider gap than the GOP enjoyed among white women eight years ago.
Meanwhile, AP reports that the former president “gets” Palin’s appeal because he’s from Arkansas:
Speaking to reporters before his Clinton Global Initiative meeting, the former president described Palin’s appeal by adding, “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’”
Clinton said voters would think, “I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful children. They’re wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”
On “The View” The Big Dawg said that his wife would have been the best VP choice, politically speaking, that is, even though she really didn’t want the job, anyway. So reports Politico again:
But despite observing that his wife would have been the best political pick, Clinton said that Hillary “didn’t” want to be Obama’s running mate.
“She said that if he asked ‘I’ll do it because it’s my duty’ but I think, look, she loves being a senator from New York.”
Clinton said that “the main thing she thought is ‘I should have no opinion on this. I need to get out of this.’”
In common usage, “astroturfing” is Democratic “ratfucking,” which is a term usually attributed to GOP tactics.
Karl Rove is said to be the reigning king of ratfucking. From Salon, August 13, 2007:
Donald Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called “ratfucking,” recruited Rove.
His alter-ego, David Axelrod, is today’s master of astroturfing through his company, ASK Public Strategies, which shares office space with his primary firm, AKP&D Message and Media, from which he astroturfs the campaign of Barack Obama. According to a March 14, 2008 article in Business Week:
On behalf of ComEd and Comcast, the firm helped set up front organizations that were listed as sponsors of public-issue ads. Industry insiders call such practices “Astroturfing,” a reference to manufacturing grassroots support.
The reason I bring all this up is that the blogosphere is abuzz today with speculation that Camp Obama is behind a supposedly “grassroots” You Tube smear of Sarah Palin. These allegations stem from a post on the website, The Jawa Report, which claims:
Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.
David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s chief media strategist.
The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as “astroturfing.”
The “professional PR firm” in question is Winner & Associates, the “employee” said to be responsible for uploading, then yanking, the video is “eswinner” or Ethan S. Winner, son of company president Charles N. Winner and Leslie Song Winner. Winner & Associates is a large PR group affiliated with an even bigger international PR group, Publicis Groupe, and sounds a lot like Axelrod’s ASK, though the Jawa Report links “eswinner” to Axelrod through a common voice-over artist used by the producers of the Palin smear video and Axelrod’s AKP&D firm.
The Jawa article goes to great lengths to “prove” it’s case, and I’m okay with it, to a point. Even if all the connections pan out, one question remains. Why would the “master of astroturfing” job out a smear campaign to a “major PR firm” stupid enough to leave it’s fingerprints all over it?
Doesn’t make sense to me.
On the flip side, there’s another “grassroots” entity making You Tube ads critical of one of the presidential candidates. This one, “weneedmccain” has a series of anti-Obama ads up and it’s producer is just as cryptic. Like the Palin video, these are professional quality ads, the voice-over artist sounds like an actor, not an “average guy” in his basement. Yet when techPresident’s Micah L. Sifry went looking into “weneedmccain”’s identity, he concluded that “Michael Brown” was indeed just a really committed Republican private citizen with seemingly unlimited access to sophisticated digital recording equipment and the resources to use them at will. Yeah, right. Who is techPresident? How and why did he get onto this story? How did he debunk it within hours of reporting it? Why?
Seems to me, one aspect of “ratfucking,” which has been around longer than “astroturfing,” btw, might be to set up a compelling scenario of wrongdoing by the other guy and then yell, “fire.” I’m just not so sure in this instance that the guys doing the yelling aren’t on the same team as the guys with the matches and gasoline on their breath.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, America’s last two investment banks, and two of Barack Obama’s largest donors, have been granted a request by the Federal Reserve to change status to “bank holding companies,” according to AP News.
The Fed announced that it had approved the request of the two investment banks. The change in status will allow them to create commercial banks that will be able to take deposits, bolstering the resources of both institutions.
What does it mean?
The change of status means both companies will come under the direct regulation of the Federal Reserve, which regulates the nation’s bank holding companies. The banking subsidiaries of the two institutions will face the stricter regulations that commercial banks are required to meet. Previously, the primary regulator for Goldman and Morgan Stanley was the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In related news, Politico announced that Obama says he will likely keep Henry Paulson “involved” in his administration, if elected:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said Sunday that if he’s elected, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would be “involved” in the new administration’s transition – a very unusual move when the White House changes parties.
Paulson, 62, is the wealthy former chairman and chief executive of the investment bankGoldman Sachs, and is widely respected on Wall Street.
Kevin Hall, of McClatchy News, wonders if that is a good idea:
Making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson repeatedly said today’s financial problems were long in the making. He should know. He was part of the Gold Rush that has brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.
Paulson presided over one of the most profitable runs on Wall Street as chairman and chief executive officer of investment banking titan Goldman Sachs & Co. from 1999 until President Bush nominated him on May 30, 2006 to take over the Treasury Department .
Goldman Sachs ($208,395) and Morgan Stanley ( $233,272) have both donated to John McCain, too, but not quite as much. Obama got $691,930 from GS and $318,070 from MS.
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Your indulgence is appreciated.
The Registrar.
Is the recent media push for early voting somehow tied to the recent media push for racializing the election? In the past few days so many articles have featured so many people speculating, implying and downright accusing Americans of harboring enough racial animus to prevent Barack Obama from prevailing in his White House bid solely by nature of his blackness, that it is hard not to wonder, as our friends at HillBuzz do, what’s everybody really so afraid of? The HillBuzzers contend that John McCain’s new “attacks by association are fair game” attitude might have something to do with it. Well, of course attacks by association are fair, if not, Obama’s whole campaign is out of bounds, since it’s built on a “McSame, 4 more years of Bush” foundation. A visit to McCain/Palin’s TV Ads website shows no new Rev. Wright or Rezco or Ayers ads, but that doesn’t mean none are forthcoming. And there are those 527’s and other party loyalists with digital video skills and You Tube accounts to consider.
There have also been a lot of articles and blog posts about early voting. Some states, like Virginia, have already begun the process. While mailing in a ballot is certainly more convenient than standing in line at a voting booth, it’s doubtful that concerns for minimizing voter’s free time sacrifice is what drives both campaigns to encourage it. The increased potential for fraud would also have to be a concern to both campaigns. So, why the push, especially by Camp O? Maybe a fear of “the bloom falling off the rose?”
For one thing, votes cast now are binding and can’t be “taken back.” Anything can happen between now and election day. What happens if one of those legions of subliminally rabid racists has a change of heart and decides that voting for the black guy is the only way to get to heaven? If one of the candidates performs horribly in the debates, or makes a major public speaking gaffe, or is implicated in a high profile scandal, or even kicks a puppy or bites a baby’s nose instead of kissing it, there’s no recourse for an early voter’s resultant “buyer’s remorse.” Since I don’t plan to vote for either one of the major party candidates, it doesn’t matter whether or not I don’t do it early. That being said, even if I did think one of these guys was worth voting for, if some devastating information came to light affecting one of the them between now and the election, I would want my options open.
Besides, I’ve never had to stand in line to vote in my life.
“But, I don’t think you’ll see it clearly. Barring some unforeseen development like in — something happens in the debates we don’t know about. I — I — I — it may not be apparent in the polls until last week or two of the election. But, I believe that it will be apparent on election day. I think that — I think Senator Obama will win this election.” – Bill Clinton
It seems that everybody else has. Most of the people bringing up the race of the Democratic nominee do so in an attempt to explain away his potential loss. Some of those mentioning Obama’s blackness are clearly in need of supervision. Dick Meyer, writing for NPR, seems to fit into both categories. It is his theory that the subconscious racism of undecided voters will be the determining factor in their ultimate decision to vote against him.
This polling indicates something else astonishing to the politically plugged in: Many undecideds haven’t really connected their negative feelings about race to Obama yet. Their view of Obama is unformed, and their negative feelings toward African-Americans could be easily triggered when they finally tune in.
edit
But some who have been doing recent research on race believe there is a current of racism that has not been triggered and that is likely to be — perhaps triggered intentionally by Republicans, but also as a natural consequence of the undecided voters finally focusing. And plenty of pundits and advice-givers think Obama is not doing enough to minimize or counter the racial impulses of undecided voters. (I am not convinced there is any way to spin this: What is, is.)
That someone who would suppose something might happen if something undocumented and unproven happens to happen, would then claim that his suppositions amount to the reality of “is,” obviously indicates a cerebral malfunction of some sort, resulting in seriously flawed thinking. Yet, Mr. Meyer is not alone. Time’s Karen Tumulty says John McCain is already trying to capitalize on America’s pervasive undercurrent of subliminal racism. She says the following ad is racist.
While Tumulty believes the attack on Obama’s record to be fair game, the fact that Franklin Raines is featured is a problem:
This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.
Let me stipulate: Obama’s Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn’t even mention a far more significant tie–that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama’s vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama’s principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.
The idea that two black men being accused of unethical activity is racist, is in itself racist. Washington Post linked Obama/Raines on more than one occasion, here, and, in an article on the candidates and the economy called “Tough Decision Coming,” on August 28:
McCain also released a second ad feturing Jim Johnson the following day. The monumentally devastating impact on women, blacks and other minority victims of the sub prime mortgage crisis has been examined by The Nation, USA Today, The New York Times and The Boston Globe, to name but a few. The role of racism inherent in the exploitation of minorities by the sub prime lending industry and its effects in the current crisis is the real story. Since the referenced racism is so hard to see in the above examples, being mainly implied and inferred, one can only conclude that these are cases of personal projections, or, of the pot calling the kettle white. And, yet, the attacks about imaginary racism against Barack Obama, just keep on coming. From Ohio’s WYTV:
Monday afternoon, state Representatives Bob Hagan of Youngstown and Tom Letson of Warren met with reporters.
They argue many voters who call themselves “Democrats” or “Independents”, but won’t vote for Obama, have only one excuse, with Letson saying, “I would say that a lot of it is they’re not going to vote for ‘the black guy’”.
According to Politico, when asked what happens if Obama fails to win, Donna Brazile also got into the act:
“If he doesn’t, then Obama didn’t lose,” she said. “The country just wasn’t ready.”
Yet, none of these race card plays are as inexcusable as the one made by “comedienne” Sandra Bernhard in her re-vamped “Without You, I’m Nothing” show. The New York Daily News comments on one of many intentionally provocative and controversial lines in the show:
The Republican V.P. nom would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she enters Manhattan, Bernhard said. Palin is said to be making a campaign stop in New York next week.
Forgive me if gang-rape jokes don’t greet my ears as oddly and subtly positive, as the Examiner suggests, and forgive me if gang-rape jokes aren’t “a rotating sprinkler that a spectator washes in most happily,” like the Washington Post insists.
First of all, Sandra doesn’t have any “big, black brothers,” and anyone who equates black maleness with gang rape does not deserve any. The invocation of D. W. Griffith-esque imagery of lust-crazed black savages hell-bent on ravaging a white woman, at the behest of another white woman, no less, is too irresponsible to justify the energy and creativity it would take to channel the generated vitriol required to denounce it properly.
The sudden increase in the number of baseless cries of racism on Barack Obama’s behalf are more than troubling, they are as scary as they are creepy and wrong. If, and when, Obama loses, it will be because he is the lousiest candidate imaginable and the American people will have woken up to the fact that they have become the victims of the world’s largest scale practical joke. Racism will have nothing to do with it. Racial manipulation by ill-intentioned political pranksters with no regard for the potentially devastating consequences of their misguided and irresponsible actions will be behind the door of the house upon whose steps blame should be placed.
Don’t think anybody cares which presidential candidate you would rather watch a football game with? Fat lot you know. Do you think some people, like Associated Press/Yahoo will use any metric to try to make it seem like Barack Obama is the “people’s choice?” Me, too. Do you not care about the football watching companion preferences of the average yahoo who took the poll? I feel your pain.
Obama was the pick over McCain by a narrow 50 percent to 47 percent, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll released Friday that generally mirrored each presidential candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with voters. Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.
C’mon, let’s be honest. When I’m ready for some football, I don’t want to have to listen to Barack Obama stutteringly pontificate about the history of football theory and the ramifications of it’s implications on the socio/economic dynamics vis-a-vis the corporate American infrastructure. Nor do I think that three or four hours in the company of John McCain, for any reason, would be particularly pleasant. If I had to do it, okay, but, come Sunday, Johnny Mac probably shouldn’t waste any time sitting by the phone waiting for an invitation from me. Just saying.
The poll did show that Obama still has problems with those pesky Clinton supporters, but the AP writer was quick to point out a trouble spot for McCain, too, to balance things out.
With Obama struggling to win over former supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the poll had worrisome news: 35 percent of them would rather watch with McCain, well above the 23 percent figure for all Democrats.
There was also a danger sign for McCain: About three in 10 voters are still undecided or say they may switch candidates. That group leans narrowly toward Obama as their football companion.
I don’t want to watch football, or have dinner, or take a hot air balloon ride or anything else with either one of them. I don’t even want to see another one of their commercials during a football game, or any other show, for that matter. Even if I did, that doesn’t mean I would vote for them. Thinking back on all the pleasant afternoons and evenings I’ve spent watching sports in the company of friends, strangers, friends of friends, one or two fair weather friends, a few drunks, a couple of acquaintances and at least one witch I really can’t stand to this day, I can’t think of one time when I thought to myself, “Gee, what a wonderful president that guy/girl over there would make. Wish I could vote for him/her.” Considering this new poll, maybe I should give those boisterously enthusiastic guys and gals a second look.
And a note to the pollsters trying to find creative new ways to measure these uninspiring candidates’ popularity, I don’t think anybody wants to see either one of them naked, either, btw.
Three days ago, CNN announced that Barack Obama was taking his TelePrompTer on the road. People, including me, scoffed. How could anyone take a candidate seriously who suddenly needs such a device to deliver a 2 year old stump speech? (If you don’t count the first variation delivered at the 2004 Democratic convention.) Yet, it seems that, once again, Campaigner Extraordinaire has prevailed and proven himself Master Wizard In Chief.
Sept. 15, the day of the Monumental TelePrompTer Announcement, Rasmussen Reports had John McCain up 2 points. Today, the two candidates are tied. Gallup has Obama +4, but on the 15th, they were virtually even. Coincidence? I think not. AP attributes Obama’s recent “surge” in the polls to a number of factors, chiefly the candidates’ response to our recent economic crisis. AFP via Yahoo News, reaches similar conclusions regarding the across-the-board reversion to pre-convention polling levels. However, since neither candidate seems to have much of a handle on the problem, I’m not so sure.
No, I’m convinced it was the novel, strategic inclusion of the groundbreaking TelePrompTer-On-The-Campaign-Trail tactic that did it. What vision! What leadership! Recognize a potentially disastrous problem and take action to fix it! No more “57 states!” No more “lipsticked (stuck?) pigs!” That’s what we need in a president. Problem solving. Though…
Obama, on the trail in New Mexico, had this to say of McCain:
“And today he accused me of not supporting what the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank did with AIG despite no evidence whatsoever that that’s what I had said.”
To recap, when I wrote earlier today that Obama supported the bailout, I quickly was instructed by his staff that this was not the case. He just didn’t oppose it, I was told.
Now he’s so adamant about not opposing the Fed’s move that he’s complaining about McCain’s portrayal.
Where, I wonder, is the line between not opposing and, ya know, supporting.
Got a feeling there might be a couple of used TelePrompTers for sale by the Obama camp in the near future. That is, if those polls don’t hold.
Warning: The first clip is Obama’s two minute ad re: the economy. I don’t know about you, but it was easier for me to read than listen to. Given it’s length, I think it should come with a 2-minute warning.
Last night, I put up a post about outside groups doing ads against John McCain on behalf of Barack Obama. To be sure, one of the groups involved in the pro-Obama push, Democracy For America, is not an “outside” group at all. Founded by Howard Dean almost immediately after his famous scream ended his presidential hopes, it is currently chaired by his brother, and also tagged Barack Obama as one of the first of Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch. That’s about as “inside” as you can get.
The American Issues Project was founded to champion the conservative values that have made the United States of America a blessed nation: smaller government, a strong and ready national defense, lower taxes, and a government that encourages entrepreneurship and new job creation in America. We also know how critical it is for America to win the war against the radical Islamic extremists abroad so we do not have to fight them here on American soil.
“Do You Know Enough To Elect Barack Obama?” seems to be the group’s first effort. Not so for the second, more enigmatic entity with a provocative video. This one is not even technically an “ad,” it’s more of a “viral video” posted on You Tube and the creator’s website. “weneedmccain” says this, in his You Tube profile:
Dedicated to promoting the McCain/Palin 08 Campaign and exercising my freedom of speech to speak my mind over matters critical to the future of this nation.
“Dear Mr. Obama: Who Are You?” is his latest video, preceded by “Dear Mr. Obama: Economics 101″ and the first, entitled simply, “Dear Mr. Obama.” Though not much is known about the videos’ producer, a Google search of “weneedmccain” does lead one to some info, however. techPresident.com’s, Micah L. Sifry, whoever he is, appears to have tried to dig up something on whoever “weneedmccain” is, with mixed results.
“Dear Mr. Obama” was posted on YouTube by someone using the handle “weneedmccain.” When I emailed that person asking for information about the making of the video, I got this reply:
“I wish I could currently spend some time with you, but this can’t be about me right now. Too much going on.
I may be doing an interview with the soldier, who he is, what he believes, some Iraq stories and his parents views in the near future.”
More e-mail correspondence gave techPresident the filmmaker’s name: Michael Brown. His piece is worth a read, but does not defeinitively answer the questions, “who is Michael Brown? who does he work for? Is he a Mccain campaign GOP sanctioned operative, or a staunch Republican with video studio access and time on his hands?” techPresident has a follow-up article on the subject, suspiciously dated the same day as his first, which seems to lead Sifry, after a phone conversation with “Michael Brown” to the gut-feeling conclusion that the video is voter-generated.
Whoever produced and distributed these ads, here they are:
Every time Hillary Clinton makes an appearance on behalf of Barack Obama, she makes him look bad. She doesn’t do it on purpose. It’s not even her fault; she says and does all the right things, with much more sincerity evident in her demeanor than one might imagine possible. The problem for Barack is, she just looks so damned impressively presidential doing it.
Every time she offers a suggestion about how a Democratic presidential candidate should handle an issue, it highlights another Obama deficiency. Those rabidly suffering wretches infected with virulent cases of Clinton Derangement Syndrome will, of course, suggest that she’s doing it on purpose, just to make Obama look bad. Once again, the Obama Delusionally Faithful give their Messiah way too much credit.
Hillary Clinton is the superior candidate. To Barack Obama. To John McCain. To Bill Clinton. That’s what her supporters saw, and what made us vote for her. That’s what made the sexism and downright mysogyny directed at her so infuriating. That’s what made the bogus racial exploitation by her opponent, with the blessings of the greedy, misguided Democratic leadership, so egregious.
While Obama flounders in the waters of his own political undoing, further fouling his prospects for rescue by pissing in the pool, he might want to consider that deploying Hillary Clinton to do his dirty work is like asking someone to throw you a cement lifeline. Even a sincere desire to fulfill your request puts you down.
Hillary’s GMA interview this morning was bittersweet. She looked relaxed and comfortable, sounded poised and composed, and, as always, had a firm grasp of the issues. She handled the questions easily, even the attempted “gotcha” ones about Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. She expressed her disappointment with the outcome of the primaries while imploring her supporters to vote Democratic. She said she was excited to work for an Obama/Biden ticket, and in the process of doing her very best to make them both look good, made them both look pitiful.
The DeaNC, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, et al, should have remembered something I’m sure Donna Brazile’s mama taught her:
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get stuck with it.
Democracy for America is our nation’s largest progressive political action community. With over 725,000 members nationwide, DFA is a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom-up. We provide campaign training, organizing resources, and media exposure so our members have the power to support progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot. Join us in the fight to take our country back!
an organization, now chaired by his brother, James, in conjunction with Brave New Pac, has a new Swift Boat-style ad aimed at John McCain. The ad features former Navy Midshipman Philip Butler, who was imprisoned with McCain, claiming that McCain’s “volatile” temper makes him “unfit to lead.” DFA is already planning for a second ad:
Thanks to your support, our ad featuring former POW Dr. Phillip Butler is already making a splash and exposing John McCain as “unfit to lead.”
This is just the beginning of our aggressive, hard-hitting ad campaign to expose the real McCain. It’s time to take it to the next level.
For our next ad, we want to hear your ideas. DFA has always believed in the power of the grassroots over Beltway consultants. We need to continue unmasking the real McCain. The ad should be aggressive, creative and truthful.
Fox News reports that the new “527’s are okey-dokey” attitude of the Obama camp seems to be encouraging other outside groups to jump into the fray:
The Service Employees International Union, a labor group backing Obama, launched its own ad campaign Sunday, announcing a $2 million ad buy in targeted markets in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Iowa.
The ad, titled Family, features a mother talking about the strain of trying to provide for her family in an economy defined by higher costs, lower wages and lost jobs, and draws distinctions between Obama and McCain on their approach to the economy.
Marc Ambinder reported on Camp O’s new thinking in The Atlantic on September 9:
The upshot: Obama’s campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. “I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well,” another senior campaign official said.
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean, Founder
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
In early 2005, DFA ran a people-powered campaign to elect Governor Dean to chair the Democratic National Committee. Democrats nationwide badly wanted reform and found the answer in Dean. In February 2005 Governor Dean resigned from the leadership of DFA to take his new post as chair of the Democratic National Committee.
One of Democracy of America’s first acts was to name Barack Obama one of the newly initiated Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch.
Maybe the two guys running for president, John (He Did Say That) McCain and Barack (At Least I’m Not The Other Guy) Obama, should just use the feet they both have stuck firmly in their mouths as pacifiers and suck on them like the big babies they are and keep quiet. On Good Morning America today, Obama proved he can’t even defend himself right. Asked about negative ads, Obie said:
“If we’re going to ask questions about, you know, who has been promulgating negative ads that are completely unrelated to the issues at hand, I think I win that contest pretty handily,” Obama said.
Hey, who am I to argue? Meanwhile, AP reports that in Jacksonville, Fl., McCain commented about his Lipstick/Pig-gate ad:
Did Barack Obama really call Sarah Palin a pig, as a John McCain ad leads people to believe? “No,” McCain said Monday. The Republican presidential nominee defended the ad anyway, saying Obama “chooses his words very carefully.”
So, I guess that while Obama didn’t call Palin a “pig,” he implied that she was. Any way you look at it, a pig’s a pig, right?
Geez.
These are our only two choices?
Of course, there’s always Joe (Somebody Rescue Me) Biden, a guy you can count on to speak his mind, whether you want him to or not:
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, campaigning in North Carolina where black votes could help swing the state to the Democrats, said today that electing a black person to the White House would be transformative.
“That will be a transformative event in American politics and internationally,” Biden said. “That all by itself will be significant.”
Now, vote for the black guy, dammit, transform America. Tell ‘em Joe said so.
Hillary Clinton, good little trooper that she is, once again hit the campaign trail for Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, emploring her supporters to vote for him.
“This election is going to be a game-changer,” Clinton said at Lorain County Community College, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. “We have the opportunity to go beyond the failed policies of the last eight years.”
The Washington Post, reporting on the same event, the first of two in Ohio, says Clinton concluded her remarks with this:
“Those who supported me, I ask you to support Barack Obama.”
Nope, can’t do it, Hillary. Doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, either. According to CQ Politics, I am not alone.
Pollster William Arnone, a former Clinton adviser, has found that many of the New York senator’s backers are still at risk of defecting to McCain. He surveyed 328 of Clinton’s “most fervent” supporters during the week of the GOP convention in St. Paul and found that 77 percent planned to vote for Obama, 11 percent back McCain, and the rest are either undecided or plan to stay home.
The article quotes Women Count PAC founder Rosemary Campsano, who says her organization, though they backed Clinton in the primaries, is now not going to endorse anyone.
“Our membership is very skewed in how they are going to go,” Camposano says. “By far most will remain loyal to the Democratic Party, but a lot of women feel the Democrats abandoned women and women’s issues. They are mad enough to abstain, write in Hillary Clinton or vote for McCain.”
Another women’s group mentioned has their own plans:
Meanwhile, another group of Clinton backers, calling themselves Democrats For Principle Before Party, has already bought space for a print ad in the battleground state of Michigan aimed at undermining Obama, and is pledging more to come. “Can the country trust a presidential candidate who is the product of a corrupt process?” asks the ad, which ran in the Lansing State Journal.
They also highlight Heidi Li Feldman’s efforts to have HRC appointed Senate Majority Leader after ousting Harry Reid.
All the energy the group put into winning Clinton a convention vote “is now going to be channeled into making sure the Democratic Party does not inherit such incompetent leadership as we have had to endure this election season,” she says.
Lynette Long, who has chronicled voter fraud in the primaries and caucusses, has a more in-depth look at the issues inherent in women switching to McCain/Palin. She has another one in the Baltimore Sun today.
All of those things are A-OK with me, but joining a group to oppose Obama is not something I feel the need to do. Sure, I pledge allegiance to the principles of the loose coalition of PUMA, but even if there was no Just Say No Deal or Denver Group, I still wouldn’t vote for Obama. That decision has nothing to do with any of those people or groups, or Sarah Palin, or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. Also, I don’t know about other women, but the last thing I need is another scary Roe v. Wade article or lecture. I support a woman’s right to choose wholeheartedly, I just support a voter’s right to an honest choice more. I decided almost two years ago that Barack Obama was an inferior, unacceptable candidate. That’s why I never supported him. Nothing I’ve seen, or anybody has said since, has encouraged me to change my mind. In fact the more I see, the stronger my resolve. So, Hillary, you can ask me to vote for Obama a million more times and the answer will remain the same, no. Not gonna vote for McCain/Palin, either. None of the above, that’s what my vote comes down to.
He reached the $66 million mark with help from more than a half million new donors.
These are unofficial numbers, of course.
More details about the campaigns’ finance are expected later this week, when their monthly financial reports are due at the Federal Election Commission
So, the numbers aren’t due out until next week, but Camp O felt the need to release the $66 mil from half a mil small donors now. Why? It’s still less than he needs.
Obama’s fundraisers have estimated that he still has to do better in September and October, than the August haul of $66 million, to remain on par with McCain and the Republican National Committee. The RNC has more money to spend on McCain’s behalf than the Democratic Party has to aid Obama.
Reuter’s says that McCain might actually be in better financial shape given his option to accept public financing and the financial and the fundraising prowess of the Republican Party. Obama, on the other hand, will actually have to work for his money:
Despite his prodigious private fundraising, Obama may not have as much of an advantage as he would when it comes to the amount of money he will have available to spend on advertisements and get-out-the vote efforts.
McCain benefits from money contributed to the coffers of the Republican National Committee, which has been more successful at raising money than the Democratic Party.
The need to raise money privately also means Obama needs to take more time off the trail to headline events with donors. On Tuesday, Obama is attending a glitzy Beverly Hills fundraiser that will include a performance by singer-actress Barbra Streisand, a long-time Democratic activist. That event could be one of the biggest Democratic fundraisers of the election cycle.
The Obama campaign said its cash on hand at the end of August was more than $77 million and that its total number of donors is now 2.5 million.
So, Obama raised $66 million in August, but he only has $77 million on hand now. That means out of the gazillion total he’s raised so far, he’s already spent most of it. There’s also the question, at least in my mind, who are these “small donors?” Where do they come from? How much have they donated? How much of the $66 mil comes from large donors? Unfortunately, the last question is the only one Obama has to answer. The rest of these 2.5 million donors can remain forever anonymous, sending 5, 10, 20 dollar donations forever and we’ll never know any details about them. I guess, like the caucus system, Barack Obama’s practices highlight the need for campaign finance reform, too.
So, to recap, Obama has spent about, what, 90% of a gazillion dollars (okay, I’m guessing here, but you get my drift) from 2.5 million donors and he’s kinda tied in the polls. I wonder how much it’s going to cost to actually win. And where, oh where, will all those new, unnamed “small donors” come from?
What issues do John McCain and Sarah Palin support? I didn’t really know so I took a look around their official website to get a feel for where they’re coming from.
Roe v. Wade:
John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.
Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.
However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion. Once the question is returned to the states, the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion – the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby. The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening faith-based, community, and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion. These important groups can help build the consensus necessary to end abortion at the state level. As John McCain has publicly noted, “At its core, abortion is a human tragedy. To effect meaningful change, we must engage the debate at a human level.”
Doesn’t seem to be much room for debate in that viewpoint, does it?
Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.
“Suppose for example you’re a voter. And you’ve got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom would you vote?”
“When I’m President, I will appoint judges to our courts who understand that Roe v. Wade isn’t just binding legal precedent, it is the touchstone of our reproductive freedom, the embodiment of our most fundamental rights, and no one – no judge, no governor, no Senator, no President – has the right to take it away.”
With a deadly hurricane aimed at Texas, Barack Obama cancelled his appearance on Saturday Night Live this evening, spokesman Jen Psaki in a statement.
“In the light of the unfolding crisis in Texas, Senator Obama has decided it is no longer appropriate to appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow evening,” she said.
Gee, I’m thinking it might have been very appropriate to appeal for help for Hurricane Ike victims in front of such a large audience. But, hey, what do I know? He did appeal to his supporters for help at a rally in Manchester, N.H. that his previously also-scheduled-to-attend running mate, Joe Biden (who?) didn’t:
Barack Obama urged his supporters Saturday to help victims of the monstrous Hurricane Ike but also vowed to work for all hard-pressed Americans suffering “quiet storms” in their own lives.
edit
“Even as we think about this enormous hurricane that’s moving its way through the Gulf, one of the things I’ve learned over the last 19 months is that a lot of people are going through their own trials and their own tribulations,” Obama added.
“There are a lot of quiet storms that are taking place throughout America,” he said pointing to rising job losses, home seizures and a healthcare crisis — to all of which, he said, McCain had no answers.
Though damage is widespread, the latest reports are that it will be less than feared. Obama has said he will honor the severity of the situation by refraining from attacks on his rival, John McCain, says Ben Smith:
AFP reports that campaign aides say they will “scale back his savage attacks on McCain of recent days to avoid a show of overt partisanship in Ike’s potentially tragic trail.”
Huh?
What will Obama do instead of SNL?
Obama planned to return to Chicago after the New Hampshire rally and spend the rest of the weekend at home.
Barack Obama put out an “attack” ad that should be pulled immediately. Not only because it is insensitive and wrong; because it is stupid. It is also the wimpiest “attack” ad ever produced and shown, and everyone associated with it should be fired.
That being said, it is also insensitive and wrong. The ad was meant to demean John McCain’s lack of internet expertise, thereby casting him as “out of touch” with the approximately 72.5% of American internet users. If that was the only problem, it would still be a big one since McCain doesn’t have to personally operate a computer to have access to it’s resources.
But that’s not the only problem, not by a long shot. Those aforementioned internet users will be Obama’s undoing, even the ones who don’t necessarily support McCain. As it stands now, the political blogosphere is comprised of two main factions, those who hate Obama and those who don’t. No more Republican vs. Democrat or left vs. right, it has now come down to pro-Obama or anti-Obama. Period.
McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan – Ted Williams is his hero – but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.
Then, there’s this New York Times piece where McCain explains his internet relationship:
Q: What websites if any do you look at regularly?
Mr. McCain: Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes.
(Mrs. McCain and Ms. Buchanan both interject: “Meagan’s blog!”)
Mr. McCain: Excuse me, Meagan’s blog. And we also look at the blogs from Michael and from you that may not be in the newspaper, that are just part of your blog.
Q: But do you go on line for yourself?
Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need – including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.
Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?
Mr. McCain: No
Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.
Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone. I have the luxury of being in contact with them literally all the time. We now have a phone on the plane that is usable on the plane, so I just never really felt a need to do it. But I do – could I just say, really – I understand the impact of blogs on American politics today and political campaigns. I understand that. And I understand that something appears on one blog, can ricochet all around and get into the evening news, the front page of The New York Times. So, I do pay attention to the blogs. And I am not in any way unappreciative of the impact that they have on entire campaigns and world opinion.
Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year’s crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard. But McCain’s job as chairman of the Senate commerce committee forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him. Well before he announced his exploratory committee, McCain had assimilated the notion that the Web could be vital to the kind of insurgent, anti-establishment campaign he wanted to run. In December 1998, he sent his longtime political aide Wes Gullett to Minnesota to study Jesse Ventura’s successful gubernatorial campaign, which was the first to use the Web in an effective and innovative way. “Wes went up to Minnesota and talked to Ventura’s people,” McCain told reporters on the Straight Talk Express yesterday. “That’s really where we got the idea.”
Most of these anti-Obama bloggers come to the conclusion that Team Obama “elitism” is the cause of it’s latest miscalculation, but I beg to differ. Sure, they’re elitist, clueless and more than a little stupid, but that’s not how they got into this mess. The simple Google search so many people recommend as a solution-in-hindsight would not have worked. In fact, such a search just might have been the tour guide down this particularly unfortunate garden path.
Site after Google site mocks McCain’s lack of internet savvy. Condescending, rude pro-Obama bloggers paint him as an out-of-touch dinosaur unfit to lead America in the 21st century. Even the “ladies” on The View tried that tack this morning. Didn’t really work, McCain said if he needed help using technology to reach out to young people, he’d ask his kids. Besides, the Obama ad was out by the time the show aired, anyway.
You’d think that since Google is one of Obama’s biggest donors, they could have pulled his coat about the huge pile he was creating for himself to step in with both feet. I mean, even though you would have had to search pretty hard to find these debunking stories on Google before the anti-Obama bloggers responded (which leads a reasonable person to consider the possibility of a clever setup by the Straight Talk Express) a well-timed phone call from Camp O to Mountain View should have done it. Too bad nobody thought of it. Like the lipstick/pig/hockey mom flap, whether they intended to be viciously bitchy or not doesn’t matter at all. They deserve to go down because they should have known better.
If you’ve only been paying as much attention to the election as say, you would to a ringing telephone in the next apartment while you’re on the toilet, you would still know that Barack Obama’s campaign message is that he’s not John McCain. John McCain is George Bush. Got it? Good. Now, you’d think Camp O had been perfectly clear enough on that score, but noooooo, some whiny old wimpy downticket Dems, worried about their own asses, want Obie to stop with the wussy “hopey, changey” stuff that’s got him this far, and get tough. Happy to oblige, this is what the O Team came up with.
Enjoy.
Of course, old Johnny Mack has an attack ad of his own, doncha know? I don’t know, maybe Obie should watch wrestling or something for tips. Or hire McCain’s pr guys. This is what a tough ad looks like.
The candidates running for president and vice-president pretended to take the day off from campaigning to honor the memory of the victims claimed on 9/11/2001, but they really didn’t.
Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama made ground zero their common ground for one rare day, free of politics and infused with memory. Putting their partisan contest on a respectful hold, they walked together Thursday into the great pit where the World Trade Center towers once stood and, as one, honored the dead from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Since neither candidate ran ads today, the “non-campaigning” thing holds up. In an alternate universe kind of way. However, at a televised community service forum, they did mention campaign stuff. I guess if 9/11 victims and their families attend, it doesn’t violate the “no-campaigning” thing.
Republican John McCain declined to disavow Thursday the tough criticism by his campaign of his Democratic opponent’s experience as a community organizer, saying politics is “tough business” even as he praised Barack Obama’s service.
“Our campaign from the beginning has been about changing government,” he said, recalling some great accomplishments of American government: Civil rights legislation, the interstate highway system, and the National Park system.
Obama would, he said, “transform Washington” and “make government cool again.”
“This is not about politics today,” Biden said, seated on a stage alongside five first responders. “This is about remembering our fallen heroes and remembering that there are a whole lot of people like the people I’m sitting with here today and many of you who will and are ready to God forbid respond to anything that would happen.”
Not about politics, huh? Suuuurrre, we all went to an American Legion hall today, Joe. Joe also was supposed to show up at the forum, but it seems like either nobody noticed, or nobody cared, since nobody mentioned him. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, spent the day sending her son off to the military at a “non-campaign” deployment ceremony.
“We’re going to miss you,” she said at Fort Wainwright, a large Army installation near Fairbanks. “We can’t help it. We’re going to miss you.”
“With our prayers and with great pride, we are sending off these brave men and women,” she said.
Since this appearance had been scheduled before she was tapped as McCain’s veep pick, she deserves some slack. Besides, she was sending her kid off to war, for Goodness’ sakes, or else she’d be 9/11 sham scum in my book, too, just like the fellas. On second thought, her Charlie Gibson interviewwas taped shortly before the ceremony, so maybe she is 9/11 sham scum, after all.
“I predict that Sen. Obama will win and win pretty handily,” he said.
Obama added: “You can take it from the president of the United States. He knows a little something about politics.”
Let’s just say, this is the first time I’ve disagreed with the former president. Mainly because when he was in office I didn’t pay much attention to politics at all. It was the 2000 contest that began to pique my interest. Something never seemed quite right about George Bush to me, and I desperately wanted him to lose. Both times. He didn’t, so, here we are now.
Sure, I was aware of Bill Clinton as president. To tell you the truth, what I knew about him, I liked. It wasn’t necessarily his politics, though; I’m still no political maven and was about 100 times less so back then. No, it was his “aw shucks” demeanor, his “two-fer” candidacy, his gay and lesbian advocacy and his promise of health care reform that got me. And, to be perfectly honest, I just liked the guy.
I never understood the rabid Republican anti- anything Clinton stance, either. Okay, the homophobia and fear of real reform of the health care industry I get, but the “Hillary hatred” always seemed over the top. What was so bad about an Alan Alda, Phil Donahue-ish marital stance being representative of American manhood? Hillary always seemed more than competent enough to justify it, in fact, she always came across as the real “power-behind-the-throne.”
Everything surrounding Bill Clinton’s presidency seemed over-hyped to me. His “Sister Souljah” moment could probably have been handled better, but so could Sister Souljah’s statements that set off the media firestorm in the first place. The media was also being pretty irresponsible at the time, if memory serves. Gays should be allowed to serve equally in the military, bullets kill them just as dead as they kill straight people, so why discriminate when enemy fire doesn’t? The fact that every American deserves affordable health care is so obvious that any objection has to carry an ulterior motivation. Bottom line is, I never understood why Bill Clinton got so much grief.
Okay, so he had an affair or two, or twenty. Not my business. It certainly wasn’t the first time in my living memory that such a thing happened. Why were Clinton’s transgressions impeachable when none of the Kennedy brothers’ were? Quite the opposite, in fact, their extra-marital activities were held up to the world as sure fire-signs of All-American male virility. Why was Hillary Clinton’s defense of her husband lamentable when Jackie Kennedy’s tacit approval was laudable? When JFK’s mistress sang him “Happy Birthday” on national TV, it was a ratings bonanza even though the first lady, for some reason, urgently felt the need to take that opportunity to take the kids on an imperative horse-riding trip. Was Kennedy’s fondness for movie stars and glamor girls enough to excuse his behavior, while Clinton’s more “ordinary” tastes were not?
Who knows? Anyway, I never thought he should have been impeached for a marital indiscretion. And don’t give me the “he lied” bullshit. There never should have been an official interrogation on the subject in the first place. Besides, what would you expect any married man or woman facing that question to say? Oh, sure? The Clinton witch-hunt by the Republicans is a big part of the reason I’m skeptical of that party to this day. My memories of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Oliver North and Clarence Thomas, among others, don’t help allay my concerns. Not to mention the Bush administrations, all three of them.
Fast forward to today’s meeting between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton says Obama will win handily. That may or may not be true, but Clinton’s implication that Obama should win, if it exists, is what bothers me. Yes, Obama “beat” Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Right. Whatever. But it’s not my disappointment that HRC didn’t win that motivates me now, it’s the fact that Barack Obama did that gets my jaws tight. There’s a difference.
I wish I could support this black man for president. His nomination is indeed a milestone. But I don’t want a government made in Obama’s image; I’m not even sure what that would be. I don’t want a president so racially cavalier that he will exploit black people when it benefits him and ignore them completely for the same reasons. A gaffe-prone, seemingly weak, wishy-washy, scared to make waves kind of guy is not my ideal first black president. Why can’t he be decisive? Why can’t he have principles? Why can’t he get angry? Of course he could and should; Obama’s inherent personality flaws drive the media and campaign created pr narrative that he shouldn’t.
So, for all those who want to tell me that I owe allegiance to Barack Obama because we’re both black, screw you. I’d rather have a good president than a black one. And to those who claim that now that the race is down to the Democrat, Obama vs. the Republican, McCain, I should vote for the Democrat by default, screw you, too. I don’t have to vote for either one, there are third party choices and I could always exercise my right as an American to decline to participate at all in an election I feel to be non-representative. Lastly, to you, Mr. Clinton, if you are indeed suggesting that Barack Obama should win, handily or otherwise, then…well…let’s just say I strongly disagree, and leave it at that, okay?
And, oh, Bill? I hate to break it to you this late in the game, but in my opinion, you’re no Hillary.
“I’m not sure I’d advise everybody to run for president,” Obama said with a smile. “I’ve been sleeping out of hotel rooms for two years now and I miss my kids.”
He also told them that at their age he was a “goof-off.” No mention of the “Junkie. Pothead” thing, though. Meanwhile, Joe Biden said Hillary Clinton “might have been” a better VP pick. You get the feeling these guys know they’re in way over their heads and are ready to pack it in?
We can only hope.
Maybe if these two would just give it up, we could talk the “better pick” than either of them into rescuing us all from this increasingly farcical travesty of a campaign.
“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”
Whether Obama was talking about Palin directly is immaterial, the timing sucks. Either he was being sneakily sexist, or he’s stupid. On The David Letterman show he explained:
“Keep in mind that, technically had I meant it this way –- she would be the lipstick!”
“The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig,” Obama says. “I mean, just following the logic of this illogical situation.”
Logic? No, Senator O, if logic were involved, you’d take your buddy Joe and go home. Leave the politics to the grown-ups. They’re always the “better pick,” and they usually know exactly what to say. Surprisingly, I do agree with you on one thing, though, B.O.
Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.
According to Rasmussen Reports Dems don’t think they’re trying to help the other guy either.
Interestingly, while 83% of Republican voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama, 19% of Democrats agree, one percentage point higher than the number of Democrats who believe they are trying to help McCain. Unaffiliated voters by a 53% to 10% margin see reporters trying to help Obama.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats say most reporters are providing unbiased coverage in the current presidential campaign, but only 20% of unaffiliateds and nine percent (9%) of Republicans agree.
So, there you have it, proof that Obama supporters are delusional.
“John McCain says he’s about change,” Obama said, before listing issues on which he said Arizona Senator McCain had the same position as Bush. “That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”
Obama-One-Note has been hyping “change” his whole career. The sad thing is, he’s sincere. Obama seriously believes that if Washington/Chicago/The World would just “change,” he and others could “get things done.” Unfortunately, whether he wins or loses, he’s going to find out that’s not how things work.
His “community organizing” days should have taught him that lesson. Though I left Chicago a hundred years ago, it seems, even I know better than that. Nobody wants somebody to come to them and tell them that if they would just do things his way, everything would be cool. Anyone who tries that approach will likely find himself talking to the hand, then the back, then an empty room. What people in Chicago expect of “community organizers” is for them to be “a guy who knows a guy who can pay a guy” to do stuff for them. The natural response of a Chicagoan to a suggestion that something can be fixed is, “how much is it going to cost me?” The reason they expect this is simple, it works.
The famous “we don’t want nobody nobody sent” line ascribed to Chicago politics is true. When you’re looking for somebody to grease the system on your behalf, you want to be able to trust them. Plus, if it doesn’t work out, you need to have a name of somebody to go to who can make things right.
This is how all politics work. People in Chicago and Boston, Philadelphia and New York simply see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet, upon meeting this reality, instead of adjusting his impractical ideologies to the process, Obama refused to play along while stubbornly insisting that his failure was the fault of the system. The system exists because the system works. Obama’s failure in it is his own.
Sure, he has had to compromise his idealized principles along the way, but only to the extent that it moves him along the path he’s chosen to prove himself right. Sooner or later though, he’s going to have to adjust. As Steely Dan said in their hit Show Biz Kids,
“While the poor people sleepin’ with the shade on the light
While the poor people sleepin’ all the stars come out at night
Stars, snakes and all manner of predators work best in the dark. While everyone benefits if the predatory beasts are fed, no one wants to actually see them feed. Or take a chance on becoming dinner themselves. Rather than being duped, the “poor people” are active participants in the process; as long as the Washington snakes are making their sausage in the dark, the “poor people” can sleep easy until they need to “find a guy.”
To be sure, there are things that need to change. As Hillary Clinton discovered when initially attracted to the Alinsky-style organizing Obama seems to embrace, sometimes its more practical to make small changes to the system from within. Obama on the other hand, seems hell-bent on working up the system for the purpose of over-hauling it, stripping it to it’s bare bones then remaking it in his image. The flaw in this ointment is that while he may have the best interests of the “poor people” in mind, the “movement” required is not being driven by them, it is being manufactured and exploited by Obama. Thus his “people powered” government plans of public service, including civillian defense are likely to be met with the same hand, back, empty room sequence his small scale organizing did. After all, if I’m going to do all the work, what do I need you for?
America, including black America, is not eager for a revolution of the type Obama envisions. Letting the black guy from Chicago run things for a while is about as much “change” as they’re looking for. If Obama was really smart, he’d try to be “the guy” and stop trying to “change” the “poor people” who are looking for “a guy of their own” to help them while they sleep “with the shade on the light”.
Be the star, Obie, stop trying to bring the light.
Yesterday, facing questions about Barack Obama’s shrinking poll numbers, Camp O went into full “We ain’t ‘fraid of no polls!” mode:
“The notion that people are swinging back and forth in the span of a few weeks or a few days this wildly generally isn’t borne out,” Obama told reporters during a campaign stop in Riverside, Ohio.
David Plouffe, responding to a Washington Post reporter about the WaPo/ABC News poll indicating white women were abandoning his boss in droves, went on the attack:
“Your poll is wrong.”
It remains to be seen whether the WaPo/ABC poll, along with all the other polls showing a dip are wrong. But there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the Obama forces are scared. And rightfully so. Sarah Palin is a nightmare of the Obama camp’s making. For some reason, it’s taken them and the media this long to realize what any PUMA could have told them months ago: since white women have never liked him very much, this is what you could expect without Hillary Clinton on the ticket.
Quinnipiac University Polling Institute Assistant Director Peter A. Brown said the Obama campaign is fooling itself if it discounts the importance of the problem. “This isn’t about Hillary; it’s about Obama’s problem with white women voters,” he said. “Hillary won about 10 million votes from women voters in the Democratic primaries — there are 52 million women voting in the general election.”
Like most frightened animals, Team O has predictably lashed out at both the source of their fear and those who call them on it. Like most frightened animals in this predicament, they’re apt to make potentially fatal mistakes.
Today, Obama fell into the trap of trying to extricate himself from a trap by yelling at the trap. Never works:
Speaking at a high school in Norfolk, Obama took a few moments to address what he calls “the made-up controversy” of the day, Amie Parnes reports.
Obama said the McCain campaign moved to “seize an innocent remark and take it out of context because they knew it’s catnip for the news media.”
Of course, The Mac Attack was just waiting to pounce:
“Barack Obama can’t campaign with schoolyard insults and then try to claim outrage at the tone of the campaign. His talk of new politics is as empty as his campaign trail promises, and his record of bucking his party and reaching across the aisle simply doesn’t exist.”
Speaking on the House floor, Tennessee Rep Steve Cohen sought to defend recent attacks over Obama’s stint as a community organizer by picking up a recent blogger refrain, that “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus.”
Al Capone and the Black Panthers were community organizers, too.
Face it, Barack, you’re toast. Running as a gimmick in Howard Dean’s revenge scheme might have seemed like a good idea in the beginning, but it was always doomed to fail. Sure, it got you through the early primaries and caucuses, but it faded pretty quickly, and by the convention, you were really dragging ass. If it wasn’t for Dean’s maniacally desperate need to prove himself worthy (a nearly impossible task,) along with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi’s desire to prove themselves relevant (equally undoable) and Donna Brazile’s bet with her BFF, Karl Rove, you never would have even been invited to Denver. To be fair, the self-interests of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and James Clyburn played a role too, but it wasn’t as significant as even they would like to believe.
All the polls show you spiraling downward and the word on the street is that your fundraising is lagging. Whether the abandonment by the early Republican mischief makers you and Dean so obviously exploited is now playing enough of a major role in your imminent demise to be definitive, and/or other equally devastating miscalculations by you and your crew are to blame, the bottom line is, you’re screwed.
Being black when convenient works to an extent, but it’s not sufficient to win the big game. The truth is, there are people who will vote for you because you’re black and probably an equal number who won’t for the same reason. However, that’s never been the sole reason you can’t win, and the new developments in the contest have nullified any imagined advantage you might have had in that regard.
You’ve been played. See, the “bro’s before ‘ho’s” mentality is wrong on so many levels that if even one of those levels comes into play, you lose. Too bad that now they all are. Hillary beat you, Barack. You, I and everyone else who’s been paying attention knows that. For one thing, there are just more “‘ho’s” than “bro’s.” And to make bad matters worse, at least some of the “‘ho’s” come from the “bro” side. That’s one problem. Another is, McCain, that savvy old pro, along with his team, knows the game, too, and by picking Sarah Palin, he steals some of your “‘ho’s” and gives some of your racist foes a convenient place to park their racism. See, they don’t have to wear the big “R” on their cowboy hats to vote against you. They can plaster the big “F U” of feminist understanding proudly across their chests.
So, yeah, Palin’s a gimmick, too. But unlike you, where a lot of people in your party really, really don’t like you, primarily for the way you’ve played the game, her side sees her as the ace in the hole that trumps you. They love that. And as for those “bro’s” you thought you could count on, some of them are not going to be there for you, either. See, you’re not really there for them and they know that. You put them down, call them “Pookie;” lazy boys who can’t be depended upon to man up to their responsibilities, and believe it or not, a lot of them plain don’t like that. Go figure. Just the fact that you would exploit the “bro” thing subliminally rankles, too, Barack. Black men usually don’t even refer to each other that way. I’ve never heard it, and I’ve been black longer than you. The word is “bruh.” The fact that you and your t-shirt making cronies don’t know that, may seem like a small thing, but it speaks volumes about on whose behalf you put black people down.
Oh, yeah, bruh, you’re gonna lose. And racism nor sexism will be the cause. Those two gimmicks cancel each other out in the long run. The reason you don’t have a prayer is because you and your “sell-out-the-base-for-a-pipe-dream” crew just aren’t as good at the game as the other guys. Clinton offered you the best deal going early on; her running mate. Sure-fire win. No gimmick from the other side plays against that dynamic ticket. But you and your boyz got greedy enough to convince yourselves you were not only better than the other teams you would face, but that you were better than you actually are. That’s clearly delusional thinking on the part of people who can’t even do basic math. “Bro’s” vs. “ho’s?” “Ho’s” win, hands down.
Matthew Weaver, posting on No Quarter is asking the question, “Where’s Hillary?” Matthew wants to know what Clinton’s role should be for the remainder of the election:
Should she be a nice girl and keep her mouth shut and campaign for Obama and/or down ticket candidates? (That might work for expediency but there is there future upside to this course, whether Obama wins or loses. Importantly, if she says nothing of the hate, does this mean it is okay to use hate against another party but not within the party?)
Should she punt and say that this is not her fight? The party rejected her and she’ll just sit out the campaign, thank you. (Just take a break for a few months. Return after the vote in November to help rebuild the defeated party.)
Should she fill the moral and leadership vacuum and say no, this campaign of hate has gone on far too long, enough-is-enough, I want no part of it? (My preferred choice as leadership requires grownup action, whatever the cost. Right and wrong are important judgments that are not a matters of expediency and convenience.)
Don’t talk about it as all we do is feed the critics.
Personally, I believe Clinton should not do anything to help Obama in any way. He’s the one who said,
“I am confident I will get her votes if I’m the nominee,” Obama stressed. “It’s not clear she would get the votes I got if she were the nominee.”
Let him try. He stole the election fair and square, now let him rape the country’s women by himself. That’s the American way, right?
“I don’t know how many, but I can tell you, with all due respect to previous administrations, it is not going to be a single, ‘Well, we have a Democrat now,”‘ McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
One obvious McCain pick would be Joe Lieberman. But he faces a backlash from Dems, even though he’s technically an Independent. An equally obvious McCain pick, given their friendship and history, would be Hillary Clinton. However, to avoid a possible Lieberman-esque situation requires a delicate political dance. I don’t know if Clinton hears the music, but supporting downticket Dems while avoiding Palin-bashing seems like the most sensible first move in an intricate bipartisan two-step to me.
I think that should be a viable ballot option. It’s the only thing in this election I would want to votefor. Nobody is running for anything anyway, everybody’s running against.
“If they like what they’ve had over the last eight years, then they’ll go with McCain. And if they don’t like it, hopefully they’ll go with me,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Both candidates talk a lot of hooey about change, but the truth is, no matter who wins, the president will change and little of anything else will. The pundits and strategists implore voters to vote on issues, forgetting that we tried that in 2006, “changing” the hell out of things, and as far as we can see, we’ve been royally screwed; no less and no more than we were in 2005. The Washington Post claims that we voters are not as smart as everybody seems to think, but I think, as a whole, we’re a lot smarter than the Washington Post. We don’t need fancy degrees, high-priced experts or libraries full of poll data to show us who’s lying and who’s not. They all are.
Most of the coveted unregistered voters that the Obamacrats are so desperately courting are pretty smart, too. That’s why no matter how many are actually added to the rolls, it won’t matter much. Those voters not only know that their votes don’t really count, they know that no matter who is in office, their lives won’t change. They might be black, Obama might be black, but those black voters know what the South Side of Chicago looked like before Obama got there, and they know what it looks like now.
Most Americans are not blind, either. We can see that McCain is not George Bush; in fact, when it comes to experience and the snake oil Bush pushed to get elected, Georgie’s got a lot more in common with Obie than Johnny. We know that Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton, too; but that’s not the problem. The problem is, Barack Obama is no Hillary Clinton, either. Like Hillary or not, by the end of the primaries you not only had to admire her, you got the feeling you could trust her.
I don’t trust John McCain or Barack Obama. Nobody cares about Joe Biden one way or the other. Sarah’s a woman, and that’s about all I can say in her favor. I don’t want to hang out and have a beer or any other food or beverage with any of them. I don’t want any one of them running my country, either. The other candidates running don’t have a real shot, maybe that’s too bad, maybe it isn’t. But none of them have made me want to vote for them any more than the major party candidates do. I should be able to vote, dammit, and express my displeasure with the process at the same time, without rewarding an unworthy candidate with a vote they don’t deserve.
NONE OF THE ABOVE.
That’s who I want to vote for now.
Every other disaffected voter who agrees with me should do the same. Hopefully, that would include just about every voter in America. Let all the remaining votes cast cancel each other out. Why should we be the ones to have to flip a coin?
Whoopi Goldberg is not only “aggravated” by Sarah Palin, she thinks the woman is “very dangerous.” On the View and in an article on the website, WOW (Women On the Web) Ms. Whoop let it be known that when it comes to Sara P., Whoopi got issues. She said Sarah gave an “amazing speech,” she’s a “tough chick and a babe” and a “mom” who gave the Republicans the “message they wanted to hear,” which I suppose, was all well and good, until she stepped over the line.
“…I thought once she began her discussion about community organizers and that they don’t have real responsibilities … I guess I can’t say I don’t know where she’s been living, because she’s been living in Alaska and maybe they don’t have community organizers there but they do in Chicago. Anyone who leaves their gig from school and goes to the people who most need help, that seems to me an admirable American way of thinking. It used to be in America that you helped people if you could, you organized them you made sure their rent was paid, made sure they had heat and all those other things and that helps to build character. If you want to become a politician you can at least say, “I understand how people live, I understand what happens when people lose everything and this is how we can work on it.”
WOW is right! There are so many things wrong with this take on things, I don’t know where to start. In the proverbial “interest of full disclosure,” let me be very clear, I am not a Republican. I don’t think I could possibly care less whether Sarah Palin is John McCain’s running mate or the next contestant on Dancing With The Stars. (Okay, I would care about that, but you get the point.) On the face of it, given that I am a black woman with a pretty good sense of humor, you’d think I would have much more in common with the Whoopster. But not on this.
Second, Palin’s point was not that community organizing is not worthwhile, it was that it is not as demanding as being mayor of even a small town. Given that Obama’s efforts affected relatively small enclaves of a large city, with no governing responsibility, I don’t see how you can argue with that.
Another thing that got Whoopi’s panties in a bunch was Palin’s assertion that her daughter’s pregnancy is a family affair, which Whoopi agrees with, but kinda doesn’t because if it was a black teenager or Chelsea Clinton, it would be different. Okaaaay. She goes on and on about that.
Whoopi also said on The View that McCain’s POW experience is no more “adverse” than the crises Obama, Biden or any other American has had to face in life. I’m not sure I buy that, but I don’t think that was Palin’s point, anyway. In relating McCain’s experience, she was saying that the only guy in the race who has had to put his life on the line for his country was John McCain. As far as I know, neither Biden or Obama served in the military.
There are many reasons not to support Palin. She’s a Republican who supports the Republican platform. That does it for me. But as far as I’m concerned, she’s no more “dangerous” than Obama. And he’s running for president.
Whoop, that makes all the difference in the world.
Politico just posted a story that could best be called, “catty.” It certainly isn’t “newsy.”
While Sarah Palin’s supporters tout her personal warmth and openness, the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee can be brusque to allies, advisers and employees who fall from her favor.
That’s the lead paragraph. I kid you not. Oooooooo, some people don’t like Sarah. Oh, my. Whoda thunk it? Maybe it’s because she fired them.
Palin has unceremoniously ended relationships with an aide who was dating a family friend’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda, a local political mentor who she felt represented the “old boys’ network,” a police chief who she said tried to intimidate her with “stern look[s]” and a state commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband.
Believe it or not, this article goes on. And on. And on. Full of earth-shattering revelations like this one from some guy named Bitney:
Still, Bitney took a line from the “Seinfeld” character Elaine, deeming Palin “a bad breaker-upper.”
A “bad breaker-upper?” How many people did they have to talk to to get that dirt? For sure, they didn’t get any help with this expose from Mac and Sarah:
The McCain-Palin campaign declined to answer questions about Palin’s personnel moves or personal rifts.
No fools they. The media whores schmoos have been bitching all day about Republicans bitching about the media. Even Merdith Viera, who I love to death, was rather unreasonable on the Today Show this morning, saying only bloggers went after Palin. Those “fair and balanced” blogger guys at Newsbusters “question” that. Yesterday, Obama’s personal news network, MSNBC, couldn’t wait to de-bunk the “media’s picking on Sarah” notion, saying Obama and Biden didn’t say anything out of line, some guy who works for them said it. Like that’s news. And what does that have to do with the media? McCain/Palin said Obama/Biden Democrats were picking on them. Democrats, like the schmoos, maybe?
I guess stuff like this, and this and this really is newsworthy. To somebody. Maybe it was only bloggers like this and this and this that wrote stuff that made it seem like this chick running for veep had to be hiding something.
What these schmoos don’t get is that it doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong, or if they’re leading the pack or following it. It only matters what the public thinks; and it seems that the public just might be on Palin’s side.
Us Weekly, which unlike People and OK!, chose a rather caustic cover line (“Babies, Lies and Scandal”) is said to have lost thousands of subscribers in just the first 24 hours following the printing of the issue.
“I’m hearing it’s 5,000, maybe more,” says one well-placed source in the industry. Another source claimed that as many as 10,000 readers have already cancelled their subscriptions. A spokesperson for Wenner Media, which publishes Us, says “it is completely false that we are losing 10,000 subscribers.” As for the 5,000 estimate, the spokesperson only said “that is false, too,” but wouldn’t comment further.
I guess those subscribers just don’t get that the media’s just doing their jobs. It’s those damned bloggers ya gotta watch out for.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has no intention of becoming a Sarah Palin attack dog — but has no qualms going after John McCain, people close to the former first lady say.
“She’s not the answer when it comes to winning conservative women — she never was — and we’re not going to be anybody’s attack dog against Sarah Palin,” said a Clinton insider. “To be fair to Obama’s people, they haven’t asked us to do that.”
Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and bolstering his plan to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said Thursday.
However, lest anyone be unclear about HRC’s position, “her people” went on to say:
Slamming Palin to win back women already hostile to Obama is pointless, the insider said, because Clinton’s most loyal base is working-class voters, not women in particular. “Attacking Palin is checkers, attacking McCain on the economy is chess.”
Uh, guess you’re in check, Barack.
The former first lady, who is due to appear at an Obama event in Florida on Monday, hasn’t gotten back to them yet. When she does, she’s likely to add a few stops of her own — fundraisers, including at least one in Texas to help her repay more than $20 million in debt incurred during the primary.
“They probably don’t want her in Texas, but, hey, that’s where the money is, so that’s where she’s going to go,” said a source familiar with travel planning.
Prominent Clinton backer Lynn Forester told The Times of London quote, “He has provided her with a pittance compared to what the Clintons have given Obama. Her debt could have been cleared within 10 days. It’s ungracious.”
Damn! Too bad John McCain’s a Republican. I like the guy. He came across as a viable candidate for president, something I normally would never, ever, even consider. He’s a Republican.
Yeah, he’s got a reputation as a maverick, and maybe he is. That’s cool. Maverick was one of my very first favorite TV shows as a kid. James Garner was so handsome and strong; looking back he was probably my first crush, if such a thing can be said about a 5 year old. But I’m a long way from 5, and Johnny Mac is no Rockford.
He’s a Republican.
That’s a such a big deal for me that even listening to his speech represents a huge deal. But serious disillusionment with your former political party will do that to you. Too bad it won’t let you accept what you have found unacceptable for a lifetime.
I listened to John McCain tonight with a mind as open as I could get it. To be honest, we’re probably not talking about a very wide brain hole here. And that’s what it would take to get me to vote a Republican ticket into office, a hole in the head. He says he’ll work across the aisle, he says he will fight for me and asked me to fight with him. Being a war hero and having a long record of service to this country mean a lot to me. The fact that he chose a strong woman as his running mate is a big point in his favor, too. But I will always be a Democrat at heart. So, even though John McCain said, “America First” and I believe he believes that; even though my former party has let me down in a way I find unforgivable; and even though I still really, really like James Garner, I can’t vote for John McCain.
Everybody wants a piece of the Republican VP-in-waiting, it seems. Giving the phrase, “working both sides of the aisle” new meaning, it looks like Ms. Palin is a real money maker. Bloomberg News reports:
Barack Obama reported raising at least $10 million from more than 130,000 donors today after Palin, the Alaska governor, addressed the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, and criticized the Democratic presidential nominee.
“Sarah Palin’s attacks have rallied our supporters in ways we never expected,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said.
The very next paragraph shows Mr. Burton to be a bald-faced liar, however.
The money followed an e-mail solicitation campaign manager David Plouffe sent out right after Palin’s speech.
So, unless David Plouffe is sending out secret correspondence, Obama’s supporters expected the hell out of making money off of Sarah. But the elephant boys don’t mind at all.
McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, raised $10 million after Palin was selected as his running mate Aug. 29, part of his record $47 million haul last month.
“She’s energized the base,” said former New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who has raised at least $250,000 for McCain, 72. “Money will not be a problem.”
The Mac Daddy Attack had Sarah send out her own e-mail:
The McCain campaign sent out an e-mail from Palin, 44, today seeking additional donations. “We must have the finances to respond to the latest attacks the Democrats have launched at us,” she wrote.
Go, Sarah, you work that thing, girl.
I guess everybody’s using the word pander in it’s non-political sense, too.
Barack Obama has to be asking himself that question today. A new CBS News poll says it’s gone.
The presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain is now even at 42 percent, according to a new CBS News poll conducted Monday-Wednesday of this week. Twelve percent are undecided according to the poll, and one percent said they wouldn’t vote.
The favorable/unfavorable results are similar for the two candidates:
Thirty-eight percent say they have a favorable view of Obama, compared 34 percent unfavorable and 27 percent undecided. For McCain, it’s 37 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable and 27 percent undecided.
46% say McCain would very likely be an effective Commander in Chief, only 24% feel the same way about Obama. And the PUMA presence is slipping, but still strong:
The poll also shows that the majority of Clinton supporters continue to support Obama – 67 percent in this poll, up from 58 percent last weekend.
While Gallup has Obama +7% And Rasmussen has him up 5%, the CBS poll is significant because last week he was up 8%.
Oh, and all of them were completed before Sarah Baracuda took a bite out of that…candidate.
You done good tonight, lady, real good. But you’re no Hillary Clinton. Now, I know that’s not your fault, I mean, who is? It is a problem for you, though.
See, I supported Hillary Clinton because she supports me. She believes in the things I do, and I believe she can accomplish the things I’d like to see done. You seem like the kind of person who can do things too. But…you’re not Hillary.
I want universal health care and the right to chose. I want a responsible foreign policy; compassionate, but firm. Basically, I want the same things Democrats say they want. I’m just not sure the ones selected to lead the party can really do them. Sometimes, I’m not even sure they want to.
I don’t like the way they were selected, either. So, yeah, I’m mad at them, mad enough to not reward their unethical actions with my vote, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and vote for you and John McCain, either.
The fact that you’re a woman is a plus, but it’s one plus against a long list of minuses. So, even though you’re the kind of woman I could see myself having lunch with, I won’t vote for you. I won’t vote for Obama, either, even though we’re both black. Gender and race are things none of us can chose or change. But the things youcan chose and change are not the things I want changed or chosen . I guess what I’m saying is, it won’t work out between us, so let’s just be friends and leave it at that.
BTW, good speech (and the no-pantsuit thing was a nice touch.)
Maybe it’s just me, but not all of these poll numbers seem so great for Camp “O.” The headline of a Yahoo News article claims “U.S. Women Turned Off By Palin Pick: Poll” then reports findings like these:
But 52 percent of voters polled in a survey for the women’s activist group Emily’s List said they would vote for the Democrat ticket of Barack Obama and his VP choice Joseph Biden, against 41 for the Republicans.
Okay, so far, so good.
The poll, carried out by random dialing of 800 women on Sunday and Monday, shows that 50 percent of women voters felt McCain picked Palin out of political expediency and not because he believes she has the experience to do the job.
All right! Let’s see, Emily’s List, women voters, got it.
The poll also showed that Palin would fail to sway disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters still angered that she was locked out of the Democratic ticket.
Some 45 percent of Clinton fans thought Palin was not very attractive as a candidate, and 55 percent said they would not be voting for McCain.
So, fifty-five percent of Hillary’s female supporters won’t vote for McCain. Doesn’t that mean forty-five percent will?
Only nine percent of Clinton supporters said they thought they would vote Republican because Palin was on the ticket.
I guess the other thirty-six percent of female Clinton supporters are voting for McCain just for the hell of it. Must be at least a small comfort to the Dems.
Democratic presidential nomineeBarack Obama has canceled a planned overnight stay in Milwaukee to return to his Chicago headquarters and monitor Hurricane Gustav’s damage to Gulf Coast states.
The campaign said Monday that Obama may revise his plans to campaign mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio later this week. He canceled plans to spend Monday night in Milwaukee and to hold a small event there Tuesday morning.
Obama’s 16 campaign offices in North Carolina solicited non-perishable goods for Gustav’s victims. Other state campaign organizations may do the same, Obama spokesmen said.
As Mr. McCain traveled to Mississippi on Sunday, Mr. Obama decided to monitor the approach of Hurricane Gustav from afar. Mr. Obama was briefed on the evacuation in a telephone call with Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, on Sunday afternoon, as well as conversations with the Louisiana governor, the New Orleans mayor and other officials.
Mr. Obama told reporters that he might visit the Gulf Coast after “things have settled down.” He and his advisers discussed making a weekend trip to the region, but they concluded that visiting the area before the storm would complicate the efforts of the authorities there.
CNN is reporting that the Democratic National Coronation yielded Barack Obama no discernible “bounce” in the polls. Duh.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Sunday night shows the Obama-Biden ticket leading the McCain-Palin ticket by one point, 49 percent to 48 percent, within the statistical margin of error.
edit
A previous CNN poll, taken just one week earlier, suggested the race between McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, was tied at 47 percent each.
Seems the convention and Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate announcement cancel each other out. Double duh.
“The convention and particularly Obama’s speech seems to be well-received. And the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP running mate, also seems to be well-received. So why is the race still a virtual tie? Probably because the two events created equal and opposite bounces assuming that either one created a bounce at all,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
I know in this economy everybody needs their jobs, but come on, do we really need “experts” to tell us that these two particular candidates are running neck and neck, and why? Does the phrase “six of one, half-dozen of the other” mean anything to you? How about, “none of the above”? “Okay if I have to pick one…?” Those reasons make just much sense as all the “poll data” in the world. More. Sheesh.
Barack Obama may have thought he had put Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s famously stated dilemma behind him, but he was wrong. A January 4, 2008 story in the Wahington Post quoted Jackson, The Younger:
“The natural reminder here is O.J. [Simpson] — how does an African American candidate attack a white woman?” said Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), a fellow Chicagoan whose father ran for president twice in the 1980s but was never as close as Obama is now to securing the Democratic nomination.
Yahoo News has noticed Obuhbuh’s reluctance to engage:
Barack Obama seems to have only one problem with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president: She holds the same positions as John McCain, the GOPpresidential candidate who tapped her.
That may seem like a “well, duh” observation on his part, but Obama has tiptoed carefully around Palin as he tries to attract female voters. So far he has criticized her only for her ties to McCain.
“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The “she’s not experienced” argument is unlikely to work, no matter who makes it. Bloomberg News says even fellow Alaskans are skeptical:
“She’s not qualified, she doesn’t have the judgment, to be next in line to the president of the United States,” Larry Persily, who until June worked in the governor’s Washington office as a congressional liaison, said in a phone interview yesterday.
“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he’d bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”
While America plays, “he’s more experienced, no she’s more experienced” games, Hurricane Gustav is illuminating a judgment gap between the presidential candidates.
White House hopefulJohn McCain urged all Americans to reach out and help those caught in the path of deadly Hurricane Gustav Sunday after touring an emergency response center in the coastal state of Mississippi.
“America needs all of us to do what American have always done in times of disaster and challenge, and that is join together and help our fellow citizens,” McCain told reporters.
The other promises to ask his donors:
Obama said Sunday he will mobilize his vast donor list to send money or volunteer to help with recovery efforts.
“We can activate an email list of a couple million people who want to give back,” Obama told reporters after attending church in Lima, Ohio.
Notice, one guy travelled to the region, the other:
Obama said was planning to “stay clear of the area until things have settled down and then we’ll probably try to figure out how we can be as helpful as possible.”
One guy gets it:
“I pledge that tomorrow night, and if necessary, throughout our convention if necessary, to act as Americans not Republicans, because America needs us now no matter whether we are Republican or Democrat,” McCain said.
The other, is Barack Obama:
“We just hope that by the time this storm hits land that it has dissipated somewhat. Right now that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
I’m not a Republican and it would probably take an Act of God to make me vote for him, but right now, the old man’s got it goin’ on.
You reacted to all of Clinton’s feints and are just lucky she was never allowed to hit back, what with Nancy Pelosi pinning her arms behind her. You fell for McCain’s feints, too, and even let him lull you to sleep before he sucker punched you. Ha, ha. Welcome to combat, brother. Doesn’t do much good to stack the race deck, just to build a house of cards, now does it? This is high-stakes poker, for all the marbles. You blinked. You blew.
Checkmate! Yeah, I know it’s two different games, but so what? This whole election cycle so far has been completely divorced from reality, so I figure, why not play along?
“Whacha got?”
“I got an inexperienced black guy and a big mouth. You?”
“I got an old guy.”
“C’mon. Ya gotta do better than that! I got hokum in the hole!”
Well, Real Clear Politics thinks it is. In a story on their website, they refer to a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs ( a joke in itself; the study, not the Center, but that’s debatable ) which finds that the “presumptuous nominee” of the DeaNC is not a barrel of laughs. Who knew? In a press release, ( seriously ) the Center touts it’s findings:
Barack Obama still lags far behind Hillary Clinton and John McCain as the most joked-about presidential candidate in opening monologues by hosts on the late-night TV talk shows, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. However, the study finds that Obama attracted the most jokes on Comedy Central’s “fake news” shows. (The study period does not include recent revelations about Senator John Edwards’ sexual indiscretions.)
They didn’t do Edwards!? What kind of quack study is this? Who are these people, anyway? Well, whoever they are, they broke down the number of jokes per comedy show, per candidate. Don’t these people have real work to do? They even list some of the “jokes” themselves ( I’m not kidding ) most of which are duds. The funniest lines mentioned are Leno’s:
McCain:
The only way McCain could get less coverage is if he got a primetime show on NBC. – Leno
Obama:
Obama said he’ll visit Iraq and Afghanistan because he wants to see an area overrun by violent extremists. So it sounds like he already misses his old church. — Leno
Clinton:
Only in America could a woman who’s married to a man from Hope go to a town called Unity and fake something called Sincerity. – Leno
Those were the highlights, did you hear the rim shots? I’ll give you a minute to collect yourselves before I continue…
…okay, ready?
Now, I beg to differ with these scholars of comedic intellectosity, but, Barry O is a hoot. He does impressions:
He sings:
You did catch the smooth dance moves, di’ntcha? He’s always been good for a laugh, I tell ya.
Those guys at that phony baloney Center need to buy a clue, huh? I could go on, but…you get the idea.
Hillary Clinton is winning the presidential race, and she’s not even running! Handcuffed by the DNC and the MSM during the primaries, she still won the popular vote. With both hands tied by her own party she still beat their coddled and cuddled “selectee.” And now, she’s kicking everybody’s butt from the comfort of her living room.
Buried deeply within yet another story about yet another poll showing Obuhbuh tanking, is this little gem:
It’s also worth noting that while Obama leads McCain by three points in the poll, Clinton edges the Republican by six points in a hypothetical match up, 49 to 43 percent. But she remains a polarizing figure: 49 percent say they don’t want to see her as president someday, and 42 percent view her favorably versus 41 percent who see her in a negative light.
So what if she’s polarizing? She’s winning! From a freaking Barcalounger! These two yoohoos have been running like the Dickens against each other for months and neither one of them can beat the chick that’s been chilling with her old man and kid ( when she wasn’t being exploited by the schmoo running in her rightful place. )
Not only that, despite Senator Clinton’s best efforts ( and I mean that sincerely ) Obonehead can’t even convince her supporters, his own flipping party members, that he deserved to win. Because he didn’t.
…Yet perhaps the biggest factor keeping the presidential race close has been Obama’s inability to close the deal with some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters. According to the poll, 52 percent of them say they will vote for Obama, but 21 percent are backing McCain, with an additional 27 percent who are undecided or want to vote for someone else.
What’s more, those who backed Clinton in the primaries — but aren’t supporting Obama right now — tend to view McCain in a better light than Obama and have more confidence in McCain’s ability to be commander-in-chief.
As I have written before, Obama didn’t even win the nomination. Technically, the DNC does not really have a presumptive nominee. And considering all the other info in this MSNBC story, they need to stop pretending that they do.
Overall, Obama holds a three-point lead over McCain, 45-42 percent, which is within the survey’s margin of error. That’s down from Obama’s six-point advantage last month, 47-41 percent.
For some stupid reason, people like Peter D. Hart, the Democratic pollster who, with Republican Neil Newhouse, conducted this poll, keep putting all the onus on Hillary.
For these reasons, Hart believes that Clinton’s speech on the Tuesday night of the Democratic convention will be a significant event. “The Democratic convention is more than a coronation,” he says. “It is an event where the words of Hillary Clinton are probably going to be exceptionally important.”
Hey Clueless, this is NOT Clinton’s mess to fix! The DeanNC picked, pushed and tried to shove his lousy candidate down everybody else’s throat, and if the lousy candidate can’t close the freaking deal, too forking bad! There is one thing the Keystone Kops running things can do to make things right, put it to a vote. Let the convention proceed by the rules and spirit for which it was intended. My girl will beat your guy with both hands tied behind her back. And spot him a 2 month head start. C’mon, I dare you. Ya buncha schmoos.
Barack Obama is one tough guy, buddy. Don’t you dare forget it, either. I know, because he said so. Even though he seemed kinda wimpy when he and McCain appeared together at the Saddleback conference in California, to be fair, the questions at the Faith Forum wereabove his pay grade. But with the benefit of distance, he set Mr. McCain straight. At a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama drew down.
“Our job in this election is not just ‘win,’ although I’m a big believer in winning,” Obama said during the rally. “I don’t intend to lose this election. John McCain doesn’t know what he’s up against.”
“He can talk all he wants about Britney (Spears) and Paris (Hilton), but I don’t have time for that mess,” Obama said.
You hear that, Johnny Mac? He “don’t have time for that mess.”
Obadass took on McCain at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Orlando, Florida earlier in the day, too.
“Let me be clear: I will let no one question my love of this country,” Obama said to applause.
McCain, of course, wasn’t there at the time, having spoken to the group the day before. But I bet he was scared when he heard about it. And he’d just better watch himself, too, if he knows what’s good for him. You do not mess with Barack Obama, Mackie. He bad.
First of all, I did not watch the Saddleback conference for one simple reason. I intensely dislike both presidential candidates, and evangelicals, too. There are very few imaginable circumstances ( read: none ) under which I would willingly subject myself to the torture of any sort of experience involving one or two of those entities, much less all three.
In reading (reluctantly, but dutifully) a Politico summary of the debate? conversation? waste of time, money and effort? ( ding! ding! ding! ) I came across a relatively interesting quote from McCain in response to a question about the wisest people in his life:
McCAIN: First one, I think, would be Gen. David Petraeus, one of the great military leaders in American history, who took us from defeat to victory in Iraq, one of the great leaders … I think [civil rights leader and Democratic congressman from Georgia] John Lewis. John Lewis was at the Edmund Pettis Bridge [civil rights march in Selma], had his skull fractured, continued to serve, continues to have the most optimistic outlook about America. He can teach us all a lot about the meaning of courage and commitment to causes greater than our self- interest.
Score, McCain! Now I don’t like McCain ( he’s a Republican ) but that was a greeeeeaaaaaat dig. Smooth and slick, he called Obama a liar in the middle of a faith conference. And seemingly, didn’t even break a sweat. I mean, who can forget these immortal words from The Great Self-Important One?
This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.
Now, it doesn’t take Columbo to figure out that an event that happened in 1965 ( Selma march ) had nothing to do with an event that happened in 1961 ( the holy birth ). However, in one smooth, seemingly unrelated statement, McCain, even with his lousy record on Civil rights, smacked Obuhbuhbuh upside the head with his own lie. Slick.
The McCain camp has proven itself adept at exploiting Obie’s many weaknesses. The ads they’ve created and run on You Tube are classic fun, especially because they’re so successful at getting under Obequiet’s skin.
The silliest response to the Britney Hilton ad came from shameless Obie suck-up, Bob Herbert.
Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.
Sure you wanna go there, Bobby? I mean, while you’re grousing ( unreasonably ) about McCain’s alleged attempt to unfairly connect nubile young white women to a black man, you’re conveniently forgetting that Obama himself is a living testament to the fact that a black man and nubile young white woman got him born.
It seems like the sheer number of people who, like me, just can’t seem to wrap their heads around this Obama/Peace Prize thing, is starting to get under the formerly esteemed Nobel folks’ skin and majorly piss them off. Duh. And, they’re surprised because…? The Associated Press is reporting that, in an “unprecedented move,” the jury what voted for to put the Pretendident in the company of greatness, is speaking out in justification of their mind-blowing decision. And, in the real spirit of their phony “unprecedented” honesty, let me be the first to go on record as saying, methinks the Nobel Publisher’s Clearinghouse Peace Prize jury is full of shit:
We be black. We was black befo’ Obama got elected, and we still black, nah. Summa y’all don’t like dat, an’ it piss y’all off. Y’all be trippin’. Y’all suck. Chill.
cannot see the same sort of racial bias right in front of their eyes. Though they are not only adept at recognizing overt discrimination directed towards them, but quite skilled at ferreting out intended sexism no matter how cleverly couched, even correctly identifying incidences where deliberate bigotry is intentionally dressed in politically correct clothes in order to escape detection, no such leeway is accorded those who empathize with those of us who suffer racially. 
Okay, where to begin? First of all, I admit to being one of the most vocal opponents to Republican AstroTurfing of TEA Parties, townhalls and Recess Rallies against any and all things Democratic under the guise of being anti- anything Obama. And, exposes like this 
One need only assess the sorry state of modern feminism today to realize the movement is in pretty total disarray. From the schism between so-called second and third wavers 
*UPDATE: Here’s the transcript of Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Caesar!)’s
News
Is Angie Harmon, formerly of 
I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet. The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence. I know that. However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself. And frankly, I’m sick of it.
Why is Barack Obama 
Forget 
As I watched last week’s PBS special about the financial crisis, “
Eric Holder, America’s first African American Attorney General under America’s first black President, said in a speech to Department of Justice employees celebrating Black History Month, that we are a “
Let’s face it, most PUMAs are sick to death of Barack Obama. We recoil from the sight and sound of him stumbling through ghost-written, TelePrompTer read speeches on our television screens, tens, that feel like thousands, of times a day, droning incessantly about something that only he can so successfully make seem like nothing. And vice-versa. However, where we once railed against the excessive exposure, shouting at our computers and TVs every time he, his name or likeness popped up in yet another puff or fluff piece of a sad excuse for a print “news” article or op-ed column, or tedious You Tube lecture, or “get your very own useless Obama trinket” commercial, we now just sigh.
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
News flash?
