On CNN’s “State of the Union” with John King yesterday, Democratic strategist, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s phone buddy, James Carville, in an appearance with his wife, Republican strategist, Mary Matalin, said that the expected outraged liberal response to the Pretendident’s Afghanistan troop surge has been surprisingly muted, and in his opinion, BahRock Whosayin’ YoMama had dodged a bullet on his way to having a pretty good week overall. I don’t have an actual quote to post here, but, I know he said it; I heard it with my own ears. However, when I search online for video or a transcript, all I find is Carville’s railin’ on Palin’s lack of qualifications while slobbering over her body, and Matalin comparing the Celebritician to the celebritician who preceded him. Along with CNN’s poll that says the most Americans see the surge Obie’s way, natch.
What’s up with that?
As has been noted here and elsewhere, Carville, along with his pundit buddies Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos, has a direct line to the White House via daily early morning confabs with their other veteran of the Clinton era wars pal, Rahm Emanuel. Which begs the question: was the Ragin’ Cajun’s criticism of Obama a thinly veiled call-to-action dog whistle nugget deliberately dropped, or, did he go off-message; and, either way, are his comments now being glossed over in an attempt to bury them, or inadvertently overshadowed by media emphasis on his heavy-handed Palin “jokes?”
Whatever the case, it seems curious that little of the Carville/Matalin segment on Afghanistan is getting any media play while the Palin stuff gets pumped, especially considering that the “dodged a bullet” remark was the only remotely unpredictable comment either of them made. It doesn’t take an evil ventriloquist with his hand up either party’s ass to make her say that Obama’s plan is just like Bush’s, or him to pant and drool about Sarah’s heat. Of course, Matalin’s observation about Palin’s funny feminine feminism being a lot to pack in one pretty package quite obviously lead her hubby horse to that particular pool of drinking water. Read the rest of this entry »
First of all, I know I said I’d read my overpriced, cheap at any cost, copy of “Going Rogue,” and I will. As soon as I can overcome the ominous, pervasive, palpable sense of gloom and impending doom emanating from the book like a darkly glowing, throbbing anti-aura surrounding a pulsating black hole made by Hoover. However, every time I gather enough courage to try to sneak up on the thing before it gets me, I’m overwhelmed by the realization of my suddenly intense preference for French kissing a homeless person after they’ve had their first lunch in weeks of unpeeled garlic heads and raw liver and gone down on a bus station urinal. That being said, the good thing about Ms. Palin’s literary effort, for me, is how attractive it makes other chores seem in comparison. But, alas, since I’ve already filed my toenail clippings in alphabetical order, cleaned out the gutters, (I live in a sprawling apartment complex) and am really rather ambivalent about setting my pubic hairs on fire, despite the fact that my sense of self-preservation is being forced to take a backseat to my sense of duty, and my sense of foreboding has been ratcheted up way past eleven and on beyond zebra, I will, as I promised, get into it later today. Or, tomorrow. Or, sometime later in the week, or, in the very near future. I will. Really. I think. It’s just that…the damned thing mocks me. I’m not kidding. I swear, when I turn out the lights and try to sleep, I can hear it…humming…like electricity…or…something…it’s fucking creepy. But, I am gonna read it. Sooner or later.
Anyway, I’m convinced that there are only two kinds of people in the world; people who are certifiably stupid, and people who think the rest of us are. And, since I’ve spent most of the past week, not to mention the last coupla years, collecting links to news stories that prove that point beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s getting harder day by day to tell who’s who. Read the rest of this entry »
Okay, pray for me, I’m going in. At great personal peril, I’m gonna do it. Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it, my mind is made up. No matter what it takes, I’m committed. Yes, I’m about to read “Going Rogue.”
After having slogged through more articles, websites, opinion pieces, videos, facts, and factoids re: the Lady Sarah than any human being who has not been convicted of multiple crimes against humanity resulting in murder, mayhem, mass destruction and grievous bodily harm to small children and fuzzy animals should ever be forced to endure, I’m completely aware of the imminent danger inherent. And, though I don’t find the completely ordinary woman best known for celebrating her ordinarity (yes, ordinarity) the least bit compelling, (in fact, she bores me to tears) I’m determined to keep trying to find out why so many other people do.
I admit it, I don’t get it. In fact, I’m thinking bumper stickers with that saying and her picture plastering my automosheen would be a statement worth making on the highways of my life. Some people hate her, some people love her, I get that. But there just have to be others, like me, who simply don’t care a flying fig of a whit about her at all. The fact that I can’t seem to find any totally fascinates the hell out of me.
Far as I’m concerned, Sarah Palin is the reverse mirror image of the blank screen that is Pretendident BahRock Whosayin’ OHollowgrama. To steal a line from Anita Baker completely out of context, they’re both “misty vision(s) in a midnight dream.” A faint wisp of a hint of a pothead’s memory of an inconsequential thought of an overactive imagination allowed to run amok during a Snickers fueled nod. As politicians, they’re insubstantial, as celebriticians, they’re wildly, and as equally inexplicably, popular setups to punch line deprived jokes, as are any other mildly talented in a “maybe one day when they grow up” kinda way, Pop Culture of Personality icon on the scene today. Metaphorically, if they were the last meal of a condemned prisoner, they would be a Joe Arpaio’s revenge bowl of dry Cocoa Puffs and a stale Marshmallow Peeps served on fine china; unsatisfying, insulting, and strangely menacing at the same time. Comparing the two is like trying to determine the greater weight between a whisper and a blow kiss; even if you could quantify it, who the fuck cares? Read the rest of this entry »
So, it seems the holiday season has so far been filled with snarky goodness fodder and Black Friday flat panel TV clunkers-to-be loss leader giveaways news. In fact, one of the sources for this piece is a website called Snark Food, just one of the many TMZ wannabe’s trying to get to the bottom of Tiger Crashgate.
In fact, let’s face it, the two previous sentences are just chockablock full of snark-in-waiting right there. The notion that attorney, (yes, attorney) Harvey Levin (yes, People’s Court guy Harvey Levin)’s webloid is a standard bearer for other TMZ-lite online celebrity gossip sites and webarrazis-in-training is gutbustin’ post-worthy all by itself. The idea that the government, our government, of us, the people, is working its way down the list of hockable consumer goods it is willing to consider taking in trade in lieu of actually saving or creating jobs promised us in return for stimulating Wall Street to orgasm, and has been planning to do so for months, could easily be the premise for a what-passes-for-comedy-nowadays made-for-TV movie. Just add fart jokes and voila! Bob’s your uncle!
Anyway, apparently, everybody’s favorite golfer has reportedly been getting busy outside of hearth and home, and the lady of his manor don’t play that. So, in an act of poetic justice, seems she took a golf club to his head, possibly mid-drug induced nod, forcing him to beat feet to the Escalade to take cover. Once inside the luxury truck, the hapless, clueless, poor, misunderstood paragon of virtue slowly came to realize that a stationary vehicle is a potential death trap in the path of a woman done wrong wielding a nine iron, and certainly no refuge. Thus, Tiger’s razor sharp reflexes literally went into overdrive as he instinctively floored it in retreat without bothering to wipe the blood from his eyes so he could see where the fuck he was going. Backwards. Into a fire hydrant. Then, hastily forward. Into a tree. Where his wife proceeded to beat her way into the now immobile car and drag his ass out to the pavement where she forced him to lay still under threat of even more bodily harm while they concocted a story for publication. At least, that’s the plot I would write to sell to the networks. Read the rest of this entry »
Well…I know it’s been a while, but, frankly, the events of the last few days (weeks? months? coupla years?) have really gotten to me. So, rather than jump aboard any and everybody else’s Knee-Jerk Express, I decided to make like a Thanksgiving turkey and stew in my own juices for a bit. I’m still ruminating on a few things, but, hey, it’s this blog’s second Thanksgiving, and I’m in a reflective enough mood to share. Pre-festivity libations will do that to ya. However, Thanksgiving is a day of…uh…(burp!)…(hic!) ’scuse me!…giving thanks. Anyway, being the first holiday after the debacle of the Culmination of the Kool Aid Predestination Indoctrination of ‘08, Thanksgiving will always have special meaning for me. So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of thanks I can’t wait to give away. Mind you, this is not my pre-Christmas wish list; that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of snark.
Number one: I would like to thank Barack Obama for being the uber qualified Spokesmodel-in-Chief, (and nothing more) that I always thought he was. I’d like to thank him for that, but I can’t. That sucketh too much for thanks. Even though he has proven himself to be far more qualified as a TelePrompTer reading vacationing front man and party host than his predecessor, that bar was set low enough for Munchkin babies to limbo under, so that ain’t saying much. Since I hate to be wrong, I am proud of the fact that I had him pegged all along, and said so every chance I got, so it’s not my fault the country screwed itself in the ass by (s)electing him. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the country has exercised its right to vote as an act of contortionary masturbation, and probably won’t be the last. Read the rest of this entry »
In Hollywood, it’s “let’s do lunch!” In girl talk, it’s, “let’s get together for coffee!” Either way, it means, “yeah, sure, when hell freezes over.”
If such meetings are ever forced to come to pass, they are usually filled with air kisses, strained smiles, polite, inconsequential small talk, and furtive glances at timepieces. They are generally ended by pre-arranged cell phone calls received by one, or both of the attending parties, declaring some state of emergency foretelling impending global doom that only the callee can potentially rectify. At least, that’s what their lunch partner is supposed to deduce from the overheard end of the conversation. What is probably being said by the the caller is likely more along the lines of, “is the bitch still there?”
In two separate Sunday morning news show interviews, ABC’s “This Week,” with George Snuffleupagus, and NBC’s “Meet The Press,” with David Gregory, which, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t watch, since Sunday morning news shows tend to give me wicked gas and make my eyes bleed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton obviously handled herself admirably enough, without providing sufficient controversial fodder to feed the ravenous appetites of subsequent Sunday news network rehashes of their morning shows, that the hosts felt compelled by their producers to goad and provoke her by dangling “Sarah said” red meat in front of her face. In the political equivalent of “when she said you looked well rested now that your face has filled out, wasn’t she calling you fat?” Clinton was asked about statements made by Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, and in her book, “Going Rogue,” (subtitled “By Quitting My Job and Writing This Book.”) In a fashion typical of one skilled in the social graces, Clinton replied with what amounts to, “Well, now that I’m not constantly on the go, I have put on a few welcome pounds. I was too skinny before. I’m glad people are noticing.” At least, that’s the way The Christian Science Monitor sees it: Read the rest of this entry »
While there is much in the news to discuss, much of it inter-connected; and I have certainly spent the better part of the week collecting news articles, videos and links in preparation for a post addressing said issues, instead of spending time and energy fanning the “blame Islam flames,” I’m much more strongly compelled to lash out against what I see as the undue timidity of so-called feminist women in the face of coordinated attack, especially when confronted with forces lead by other women.
Lord knows I am not alone in my outrage about the all-too-predictablecapitulation to the Right by our Mighty Morphin’ Majority Democrats for no Earthly apparent reason. Women everywhere are bitchin’ and moanin’ about the seemingly calculated attempts at the Stepfordization of American females. While I see this as the inevitable result of the efforts of that faction of the country’s politics now being fronted by the insidious Bachmann Palin Overdrive, the eager surrender of females on the Left, either because of faith in the illusion of the myth of political expediency, or due to belief in fantasies of sisterhood, unattainable even in legend and fairy tale, as being necessary for success, the end result is the same; when women buy into the “helpless second, weaker, yet, inherently evil sex” patriarchal theory as their self-identity starting position, women lose.
Leaders lead. They stake a position, articulate it, and invite others to join. Whether anybody takes them up on their offer or not, they proceed according to their plan. You cannot lead by consensus, or by whining about who doesn’t see things your way, thereby blaming them for your condition. Constantly complaining about other women who don’t support your vision, and how much you wish they would for everybody’s sake, is a masochistically masturbatory waste of time. If only “she” would think like “me,” “we” could do x, y, z, is a crackhead’s pipe dream. To take it a step further and fantasize that Utopian Nirvana can only be reached by aligning oneself with “her” anyway, regardless of the width of the gulf between your points of view, simply on the strength of shared anatomical features, is a crackhead’s delirium. Read the rest of this entry »
Quick! Somebody get Pat and Vanna on the phone, stat! The Obamaniacs desperately need to buy a clue!
Answer: Clueless in the White House.
Question: What is the constant state of the Obama administration, Alex?
Alex: You are correct. Pick again.
Though many of us have known all along that Barry and the Bus Drivers never had any idea what the hell they were doing, a quick perusal of the weekend news round-up proves that despite Obie’s delusion that he was actually, at least navigating his “historic” course to the Nobel Prize, if not driving his custom, tricked out, re-built, rented GM Fishbowl, and owed his current position to his own aptitude and the acumen of his pit crew, nothing could be further from the truth. No, a careful reading of the “tidbits” contained in David Plouffe!-There-He Goes!’s upcoming tell-nothing-cuz-he-don’t-know-shit “expose” of the behind the scenes machinations of the Axelrovians, Audacity To Win, proves that whoever is responsible for the front man status of the Spokesmodel-in-Chief, it ain’t none o’ these clowns.
According to CNN, reporting on excerpts of the book now running in Time Magazine, Obombo was seriously considering nominating Hillary Clinton as vice-president, unbeknownst to Double David, both of whom were absolutely horrified about the prospect, horrified, I tellya! and thus, majorly relieved when Obie came to the conclusion, all by his lonesome, mind you, that he was too shy about exposing his potentially shriveled-looking, at least one short huevos in a political threesome with Billary to ask his Dream Girl out. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey, gang, still not quite up to the weather, (get it? “under the weather,” not “up to the weather?” never mind, any joke you have to explain is not much of a joke, and anybody who tells it anyway knew that it was more about not “wanting it,” than “getting it,” and that it sucked big, hairy weenies all along. Toldja I didn’t feel good. Waaahhhh!)
Anyway, I’ve been half-watching The Great Fox vs. Obot War in the news with a good deal of merriment, though. What the fuck does the Baranold McBamold clown school of an administration hope to accomplish with this buffoonish declaration of pre-emptive war against the buffoonish rightwing poor excuse for a news organization? Do they, (clueless Obots) really believe that “”no relevance equals “no pow-ah, Cap’n?”
Ha, ha, ha! Oh, how the privates packages must have shrunken en masse once the Obacrats and Demobots who perpetrated this fraud upon the Republic realized that merely serving up Hillary Clinton’s head on a platter as red meat didn’t cause the Fox News hounds to eat their fill, lick their lips, then roll over and play dead at the feet of the Baracus T. Firefly, Coronated Unworthy. Ha, ha, ha! The Keystone Kops Meet the Marx Brothers panic that must have ensued in the halls of Obuck U.’s Chicago Loop think tank, (modeled on Ray Kroc’s Hamburger U.) once the realization that they had no second act sunk in around the KoolAid Kooler, must have been priceless enough for its own MasterCard commercial.
Whadda buncha maroons!
Hath it not dawned upon their collective tiny minds that having been rebuffed by His Arrogance, the Mighty Forces of Ailes will now train their sights, and focus their well-honed Vast Rightwing Conspiracy-esque Attacks of Slings and Arrows, upon the equally bogus and journalistically bereft, Obotified Farces of Ails, aka, MSNBC? Did they, (clueless Obots) really think they (the Dark Side) would stop there? Ha, ha, ha! 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 »
Let’s be honest. The real reason Sarah Palin, now a private citizen not running for anything, at least, not officially, and some of her arguably batshit crazy galpals, engender so much support throughout the largely female PUMAsphere is not merely because they’re women, but, because the equally batshit ‘Bama ‘Bots of Loony Left Cheetosphere and “liberal” Lame Scream Media insist upon bashing them because they’re women. Policy differences do not suffice for these rabid misogynists and the women who love them, for some reason, they are pathologically compelled to impugn female politicians’ worthiness as women.
Yesterday, I once again tried to warn my sisters and brothers of the PUMAshpere against allowing our mutual dislike of Pretendident Bah!Rock Whosayin’ Yo’Mama to lull us into a false sense of camaraderie and solidarity with political factions whose intense, visceral hatred of every principle most of us hold dear borders on the psychotic. Again, I tried to point out that political strategists seeking a political toehold in a bleak political landscape would hitch their political wagons to their female politicians and encourage them to use their feminine wiles to seduce segments of society quickly becoming un-infatuated with their blushing virgin presidential bride by bringing tasty housewarming pastries to the neighborhood meet n’ greets. Of course, bitter knitting haggish victims of prior bad marriages would be easy pickin’s, if they could be persuaded to suspend their natural skepticism of wily snake-like interlopers in favor of common disgust and disillusionment caused by their own experiences with wayward spouses (spice?). Read the rest of this entry »
They say there’s a thin line between love and hate, and, that may, or may not, be true. However, whether or not there is indeed one, I believe that the line between sanity and sheer batshit crazy FrootLoopery is real, and much, much, thinner.
Let’s face it, at first blush, people who are totally Looney Tunes are nearly indistinguishable from normal people, or even from the only mildly deranged. They pretty much function okay on a day-to-day basis, their madness only revealed through sustained exposure. In fact, since the difference between lunacy and passion is “notmuch,” a case could be made that most of us with strong opinions cross the line on a semi-regular basis. It’s only after hearing a given person’s argument over a period of time that one realizes that said person’s passion about something that seems to us to be rather trivial and inconsequential, leads them to become more than a little unhinged on their regular commute home to LaLa Land. 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 »
So, Sarah Palin managed to knock weeklong news reports about Michael Jackson’s death, reminiscent of Saturday Night Live’s running gag about Generalissimo Franco, and the usual compelling Obamessiah stories ranging from his upcoming slap-in-the-face trip to Africa to his predilection for proper name pronunciation, right off the front pages on what’s usually a slow news dump day by announcing her resignation as Alaska’s governor, out of the clear blue. And, to tell you the truth, it pissed me off.
After spending most of yesterday researching and composing what I consider to be a rather interesting, and certainly lengthy, post, I finally managed to publish the damned thing, only to find myself scooped by Palin’s news. What’s up with that, Sarah P.?
Dang that woman!
I mean, really! And, to make bad matters worse, it forces me to admit something sure to put me at odds with my fellow PUMAs. I really don’t care.
Now, I know that to march in lockstep with my anti-Obite sisters and brothers, I should be up in arms over this latest development, but I’m not. Frankly, I don’t even understand the overabundance of SarahLove I see daily in the PUMAsphere. She’s okay and all, and, I certainly respect her pluck in the face of the manufactured adversity she’s had to endure since Day One from the right and left, whether such controversies and attacks were personal or political in nature, but…well, that’s about it. I’m not all emotionally invested like some of my colleagues seem to be about it, though.
Frankly, I find the “support Palin because she’s a woman” stance so many advocate so passionately to be puzzling, and, to tell you the truth, a little hypocritical. The same factions who so adamantly denounced African American support for Obama based solely on skin color, seem all too willing to devote themselves to Palin simply on the basis of gender. I didn’t buy that crap when it was pushed on me about “voting for the brother,” and I won’t buy it on feminist grounds regarding Palin. Seems to me there’s a difference between a willingness to defend any woman against sexist attacks and misogyny, and full-fledged political support for someone whose policies you can’t endorse. Read the rest of this entry »
On June 20, the National Organization for Women elected a new board in what has been characterized in some circles as something of a coup d’etat. Calling it a coup is something of a mischaracterization however, since the old board was out anyway, with the former president, Kim Gandy, stepping down due to term limits. Yet, the victors were successful in labeling their opponents as “more of the same” and continuation of the status quo, due to Gandy’s support for the slate, and endorsement of its candidate for president, Latifa Lyles, who served under Gandy as Membership VP. The incoming slate, headed by Terry O’Neill, former VP of membership before said office became something of a black woman’s glass ceiling, has promised to take the floundering organization in a new direction by returning it to its roots. Stay with me, now, it gets better.
On June 22, Foreign Policy posted an article entitled, The Death of Macho, discussed this morning on CNN’s AMfix, which posits that the testosterone-fueled patriarchy has so screwed the world, especially economically, that they have basically engineered their own demise as a power structure. Which means women are now poised to take the lead by stepping into the void and dutifully, and competently, and, as should be expected, clean up the boyz’ mess, thereby saving the world while effectively emasculating John Wayne. Or, something like that. Of course, the article’s author, Reihan Salam, doesn’t credit feminism for the demise of machismo, he blames the recession, which he terms a “he-cession,” due to its devastating effects on male employment opportunities.
However, though unspoken, one cannot escape the specter of the effects of feminism in all this, and, Salam does not, even though, he truly doesn’t seem to recognize his error:
The era of male dominance is coming to an end.
Seriously.
For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe. Read the rest of this entry »
I am not a bandwagoneer. It takes a lot to get me to go along with anything, or anyone, at any time. Given the way perceptions can be radically shifted by agents employing fairly subtle techniques, I have a hard time accepting things that are reported as “prevailing wisdom,” or “common knowledge,” or anything suggesting that whatever being discussed is something “everybody knows.” Everybody knows shit. Nobody knows squat. However you want to say it, unless you’re under the age of 17 and trying to cajole a parent into granting permission for something you want, but know good and well you shouldn’t have, “everybody knows” has no place in anybody’s vocabulary. Everybody knows that.
When I hear people compare the current power struggle in Iran to last year’s Democratic party primary shenanigans here in the United States, and cast the Iranian dissidents in the role of PUMAs, i.e., disgruntled voters outraged about voter fraud, I can only scratch my head. Trying to cast Mir Hossein Mousavi into the Hillary Clinton part is way too big a stretch for me. Although in the primaries and caucuses, the “establishment” was felt to be unfairly supporting Obama, especially in the case of Michigan and Florida, and it was Obama who bussed shitloads of people to out of state caucuses and gangstered them, not Clinton, and it was Obama who bought off the superdelegates, and strong armed any number of people in order to circumvent a true floor vote at the convention, it was Obama’s camp that threatened to riot in the streets, and, who spread their message through the social media. It was Obama who captured the malleable passions of the latest gullible campus bound Pepsi Generation, and conscripted them into an online army. Read the rest of this entry »
Obamboozlogandizing AstroTurf is the art of of spreading deodorized bullshit, aka, hopium laced KoolAid, to Sheeple, by preaching sanitized nonsense via the media and internet. The goal is to hoodwink said Sheeple, by any means necessary, into believing that whatever claptrap being offered is the fulfillment of an as yet unarticulated dream, satisfying a wish, or need, they may or may not have any idea they had, while doing the opposite, without getting one’s hands dirty.
Of course, this technique is not exactly novel; it is simply an amalgamation of many Sheeple herding tactics from history, gathered under one umbrella, and wielded by Baracko and the Obacolytes. Credit for the biggest block upon which this house of cards, smoke, and mirrors is built goes to Screamin’ Howie Dean, who, but for the shortsightedness of web cowboy Joe Trippi, might well be into his second term right now. You see, Dean Trippi’s shared Achilles heel was their inability to appreciate the vital necessity of The TelePrompTer for pretenditicians seeking higher office. Had Dr. Creeple People had a Trusty TelePrompTer of his very own, chances are the Edvard Munch impression he did would never have happened; and, if it had, he could simply have read a heartfelt, fratboy written, cliche-filled, hackneyed speech by rote the next day and been forgiven by all the teary-eyed bleeding hearts impressed with his Meetup fund raising innovation. Read the rest of this entry »
After taking a couple of days off to deal with the dreaded Real Life Stuff (RLS) I’ve learned a few interesting things. One of the few things that make sense to me lately is this painting of Pretendident Black Whosayin Yomama being eaten by a Hell Burger, done by Dan Lacey, the guy who likes to paint portraits of famous people, mainly politicians, with pancakes on their heads. The main lesson I’ve learned however, is that even with all the stuff consuming the news and the PUMAsphere, such as, the Twitter Revolution, the Obama/DOMA/DADT brouhaha, his firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin, and the Letterman not funny “slutty Palin family” rape joke fiasco/apology, (Go PUMA!) it’s pretty easy to function fairly fully without being overly concerned with any of it. Seeing as how I’ve been immersed in the political process pimping of the Obacrats for he past two years, the realization that the success of Obathugging is dependent upon the triumph of reality over stagecraft is an epiphany.
In other words, people who’ve been paying attention, regardless of party affiliation or anything else, are fully aware of the gamesmanship of the Pretendident’s Obacolytes, and, either fully embrace and support them as necessary and novel, or, reject them as…well, what they are. Cheating. Whether you accept or reject those tactics and/or the man on whose behalf they were employed, depends on your principles, and not so much on your politics. Some Democrats are fully on board, hands out, ready to roll, others are reluctantly riding along, and still others are disgusted that a man who has never won a fairly contested political race in his life is now pretending to represent them, their interests, and their values on TV. Read the ‘Prompter, yadda, yadda, turn head, blah, blah, blah. Republicans are similarly affected, with larger numbers in some camps, lesser ones in others. Read the rest of this entry »
Where’s the outrage from the left? Gays? Women? Uninsured people? That’s the question being asked by Barack’s Bewildered and everybody else nowadays. That, and, “what the hell happened?” The Sheeple are finally starting to “wake up and get it,” and they don’t like it. Not one little bit.
Hahahahahahaha ha ha!!!!!
That’s what they get for electing a guy just because he’s brown.
The outrage is where it’s always been, right here in the PUMAsphere. Yep, us angry old bitter knitters have been righteously indignant for so long it’s almost starting to get old. The only thing that’s fresh is the wind-twisting of the Under The Bussers.” Those finger-pointing, childish, raspberry blowing Nyah Nanna Na Na Crowd are now experiencing the difficulty of trying to navigate their own self constructed labyrinth in shoes on the other foot. Now, the David Letterman jokes don’t seem as funny as they did when Bill Maher was telling them about Hillary Clinton. Where were these people when Jon Favreau was groping Hillary Clinton’s cardboard tit? Predictably defending Obie’s frat boy brain for just being a boy, that’s where. Boys will be what they are, after all. So, what’s the diff now that the “boy” has gray hair? Read the rest of this entry »
There seems to be a movement afoot to send women back to the kitchen, happy, barefoot and maybe, unwillingly pregnant. Now, I could be seeing bogeymen in the bushes, so to speak, but, this “women need permission to make decisions, men don’t” developing theme bears watching. Between the Barackulator’s backtracking on selecting a woman to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, (which really doesn’t count as backtracking since he’s only responded to that trial balloon floated in the Omedia by advocates, like the Wimpy Wishy Washer he is) and “Michelle’s Got The Whole World in Her Bare Arms” articles all over the place, one can be forgiven for seeing a typical Axelrovian AstroTurf campaign in the making. Add the feminist-endorsed-by-their-silence, “FOCA is not a legislative priority, because women usually do the right thing when they talk to their Daddies” happy crappy recently uttered by the Face of Feminism, and, I think it’s past time to worry. Read the rest of this entry »
Human beings love to gossip. Let’s face it, we’re as social as we are nosy. And judgmental. And scared, and superstitious. So, speculating about our fellow beings’ foibles in the company of others satisfies our appetite for sticking our noses where they don’t belong while we condemn them for whatever transgressions they’ve been accused of, and invokes the magic of the Great Gossip Spirits to keep those troubles from our doorsteps simply by virtue of our casting aspersions aloud. All at the same time. Pretty neat trick, huh?
I’m sure the compulsion to gossip has been with us as long as there has been more than one of us. When the first human said, “ugh!” to the guy or girl standing next to him/her, some sanctimonious snit off to the side with his/her homeys probably said, “humph!” and they all rolled their eyes in a “get a load of her, who does he think he is” type manner. Human nature.
Throughout the ages people have shared stories of other people’s sordid, reckless, outlandish, or, unconventional behavior and feigned outrage, though the obvious delight they take in being titillated and entertained at others’ expense is pretty hard to miss. “Nooooo! Really? Ummm hmmm, I knew it!” are the kind of comments you make when discussing troubles befallen someone else is just plain fun. When the people and problems under discussion are disturbing to us, we are more likely to respond with, “Oh, my God! No! When? Where? Is he/she okay? Can I help?” than, “Well that’s what she gets! No better for him!”
Some people love telling gossip, some love collecting, filing and sharing it, and others just love to dig it up. We’re not just talking bored housewives here, either. First of all, I’m not sure there is any such animal any more, in fact, I’m not sure there ever was. Be that as it may, we have whole industries revolving around the collection and dissemination of gossip, rumor, and innuendo, and, we probably always have. And, notice I’m not being gender specific here. Men love to gossip just as much as women, if not more. They’re the ones who turn it into profit making businesses. Read the rest of this entry »
No, it’s not “The Barackian.” It’s worse. Much, much worse. See, a Chicago-based comic book company, Devil’s Due Publishing, is promoting 2 soon-to-be-released offerings featuring the Spokesmodel-in-Chief, Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) as a loin cloth wearing superhero, “Barack the Barbarian.” Okay…stop laughing! I mean it…this is serious, now. Nooooo, I am not kidding, and it seems this is not a belated April Fool’s Day joke. At least, not according to NBC New York, the New York Post, Breitbart, the Chicago Tribune, and, Devil’s Due’s own website:
Thursday, 02 April 2009 It’s no joke! You may have read about it on Newsarama, MTV’s Splash Page Blog , and io9. DDP is here to tell you that it’s true. DDP is readying two new titles for June 2009 featuring U.S. President Barack Obama. Check ‘em out!
DRAFTED: 100 DAYS: (1-Shot 48 Page Special) Devil’s Due’s original Sci-Fi hit returns with this double-sized one-shot featuring the President who could have been. Mark Powers offers a poignant look at a man the world never got to see achieve his true greatness when a race from beyond the stars drafted our planet into intergalactic war. See how he struggles, just as every other man, woman and child on Earth does in this truly inspiring story. As can be expected from Powers, there’s one other difference about our hero in this story in that due to an injury… he is MUTE. 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 »
Wanna hear something strange? The President I love to hate, Alfred E. Urkelbama (What, me do that?) and I actually have a lot in common. We’re both nominally “black,” (though, I didn’t grow up in Hawaii, I don’t have a white parent, and I don’t try to mute or exploit my blackness at other black people’s expense for personal gain, but other than that…) and, like him, I don’t like labels. Okay, so that doesn’t exactly qualify as “a lot” in common, but it is more than I thought, and “a lot” more than I really want to admit. I really don’t like the guy, okay?
Other than a recent declaration that President Black Obama considered himself a “New Democrat,” assumedly aligning his political ideology with a faction of the same Democratic Leadership Council he once defiantly, uncategorically, denied, Oblahblah has consistently resisted being pigeon-holed. This is understandable, given his early primary and caucus appeals to Republicans to crossover and support, vote for, and donate to him. I mean, what do you call a guy who does that? “Opportunist” if you’re kind, “traitor” if you’re not?
I’m not.
It also makes sense that he would reject the label, “liberal,” even if his philosophy leaned that way, (which, I’m not hardly sure of) since Republicans have made that term synonymous with “rabid Democratic champion of the shiftless and unworthy.” Who, besides Jesus, would want to be thought of like that, huh?
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.
The media is having a field day about the fact that the Governor Who Would Be Persecuted, Rod Blagojevich, aka Cabbage Patch Weeble, admitted during his “Screw Impeachment” media tour that he had kicked Oprah Winfrey’s name around as a replacement for President Black Obama’s vacant Senate seat. Everybody laughed and laughed at crazy ol’ Blago; even Oprah scoffed, “whatever would I do?” Scarlett O’Hara-like, when asked about the governor’s admission. But, she was a little more somber, and only slightly more reticent last month, when rumors were swirling about her moving to Washington to join Obama’s cabinet, kitchen or otherwise.
After the news broke that she was looking for an empty 50 million dollar mansion in the D.C. area, and that she was taking her show on the inaugural road, speculation ran rampant that the Big O was going to find some kind of place in the Obama administration; anything from Ambassador to vice-president to Secretary of State. Of course, most of these rumors could be dismissed as loony rantings by deranged crackpots (is there any other kind?) and gossip, but it is significant that such lunacy found traction.
Now, belly laughs abound at the Hair Bear’s expense, I mean, c’mon, the guy’s guilty as O.J., right? Why won’t he just quit, or at least show up and let them impeach him fairly at the show trial they’re conducting for just that purpose? What kind of lunatic protests about something righteous like that? Who wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to be prosecuted by a best-selling legal thriller writer? It’s not like the Obamessiah would ever let anybody convicted or accused of any kind of wrongdoing in his inner circleTonyRezkoTimGeithner. And, it’s certainly beyond the pale that any Serious Politician would ever consider giving a high-level position to a television personalitySanjayGuptaFranDrescher. Who would ever think such a thing? Isn’t that why nobody voted for Fred Thompson? AlFranken? And why Chris Matthews dropped out? Who do these people think they are, Arnold Schwartzenegger?
Not everybody can get into Big Time Politics with the depth of experience of a Black Obama or Caroline Kennedy.
First, it was black people ranting and raving to anybody who would listen that now was the time that it was absolutely, positively, super-duper imperative that we elect a black man, any old black man, over some chick, because of the nation’s shameful treatment of African Americans in the past, as opposed to the chivalrous consideration traditionally afforded women. Not only was it a “chicken and egg” kind of good thing that any old black man just happened to be running, it was serendipitous that the pent up longings of an entire ethnic group (unfortunately, not minus the half disparaged in the latter portion of the following phrase) could be so succinctly expressed: “Bro’s before ‘ho’s.” If that ain’t poetry, I’m not a one-legged, screaming tree duck.
In a stunning display of man-lovin’-man solidarity, the “bro” indeed beat the “‘ho” as well as the “cunt.” A two-fer! American has sure come a long way, baby.
Once the Brother-in-Chief had dispatched the pesky breeders, it was time for other brothers in Congress to flex their pecs and demand that their numbers not decrease with the ascension of the Big, Black Cock of the Walk to the Big White House, no matter what. “Yeah, bruh,” said they,”we feel you on the ‘Governor played your ass’ thing, but that sounds like a personal problem, so man, you got to suck it up and let his equal opportunistically appointed knife in your back stand, or we gon’ have to pull a “Rev. Wright” and come after your ass. Either that or a “Jesse Jackson,” your call.”
And, lo and behold, (I’ve always wanted to use that in something) before the Black Moses of the Joshua Generation (okay, so it’s not Biblically accurate, it rolls) could cry, “Et tu, Bay-bay?” there was a new disadvantaged, historically disenfranchised group of disgruntled males to deal with (all females had been eliminated from the equation once the “elect the sister-’ho, Cunt” non-resistance had essentially allowed itself to be effectively put down.) From Politico:
National Latino leaders vowed Sunday to press President-electBarack Obama to nominate another Hispanic to the Cabinet post vacated by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a leading light in the Latino community who caused “great disappointment” with his decision to withdraw from consideration.
Within hours of Richardson pulling his name for secretary of commerce, the head of the League of United Latin American Citizens had compiled a list of 10 Latino elected officials and corporate CEOs that would be offered to the Obama transition team. The list included Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), who turned down the U.S. trade representative post, Albuquerque Mayor Marty Chavez and Miami Mayor Manny Diaz.
I hear gay Eskimo American men and teetotaling Native American guys are starting not to feel the Obalove, either, and are thinking of forming an intra-state wheelchair ice basketball tournament and clambake in protest. Okay, they’re not; I made that up, but, with the way things are going could such a thing be far off?
Oh, and that “brother” the Guv’nuh and the Blackacrats are using as a human political football against the Obamassah’s Plantation team? They done “sent da dogs” after his ass:
Capitol Fax reports on the ongoing Springfield sideshow: ” The [House impeachment committee] has also issued a subpoena that was served Saturday on Roland Burris, the governor’s controversial choice to fill Illinois’ vacant U.S. Senate seat. The order compels Burris to testify Wednesday.”
Burris may not make it that day, as he’s expected to be in D.C., and last night gave a combative talk in which he said, among other things, “They can’t deny what the Lord has ordained.”
“I gets weary, and sick of tryin’…” Anybody know that song in Spanish? Maybe by a girl group? Wasn’t it written by a white guy?
Never mind, I’m just a girl, what the hell do I know?
In reflecting upon the historic nature of the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, I’m reminded of another moment in our recent history when the country’s color barrier was shattered. In 1984, beautiful, talented, intelligent, and yes, articulate, Vanessa Williams tore down the walls of one of the strongest bastions of white entitlement at that time, the Miss America pageant. Until that point, women of color were pretty much excluded from competition, even when token contestants were allowed entree to it’s rarefied atmosphere, there was scant expectation of them attaining victory. However, Williams, standing head and shoulders above the field, simply could not be denied. While we now take fully integrated competition in the fading glory of the event for granted, at the time, Williams’ victory seemed every bit as momentous as Obama’s.
As America’s Constitutional preclusion of blacks as citizens prevented African Americans from from holding elected office, for many years before the crowning of a black woman, the Miss America pageant was also institutionally racist. Though the envelope had been steadily pushed, women who were not examples of pure, lily-white virtue faced an often insurmountable hurdle. Even in the case of some white women, like Bess Meyerson, Miss America 1945, being Jewish almost cost her the crown. From PBS:
The pageant’s long history of excluding women of color dates from its beginnings. At some point in the 1930s, it was formalized in the notorious rule number seven of the Miss America rule book. Instituted under the directorship of Lenora Slaughter, rule number seven stated that “contestants must be of good health and of the white race.” As late as 1940, all contestants were required to list, on their formal biological data sheet, how far back they could trace their ancestry. In the pageant’s continual crusade for respectability, ancestral connections to the Revolutionary War or perhaps the Mayflower would have been seen as a plus.
It is no surprise that the nation’s first black Miss America was fair-skinned, deemed not quite black enough by some blacks and far too black by some whites. “Light, bright, and damn near white,” was the sentiment of some African Americans, displeased that the coronation of such a light skinned black woman did nothing to validate the acceptance of the natural beauty of darker complexioned women with thicker lips and wider, blunter noses.
Almost immediately, the public would become divided over this history-making event. On one hand, black people would celebrate it as a defining moment for their race, while radical whites would protest it and even go as far as to threaten Williams’ life. Still, there was another group of African-Americans who would criticize Williams because her skin was too light, her hair was too straight, her eyes were the wrong color and her upbringing was too privileged. In short, they felt that Williams was not black enough, and therefore not a true representation of their race.
“Nigger” was the expression most often used against her in the hate mail she received during her reign from those whites furious that the integrity of an American institution had been compromised. From Wikipedia:
Williams began competing in beauty pageants in the early 1980s. Williams won Miss New York in 1983, and went to the Miss America national pageant in Atlantic City. She was crowned Miss America 1984 on September 17, 1983 making her the first-ever African American Miss America. Prior to the final night of competition, Williams won both the Preliminary Talent and Swimsuit Competitions from earlier in the week. Williams’ reign as Miss America was not without its challenges and controversies. For the first time in pageant history, a reigning Miss America was the target of death threats and angry racist hate mail.
While there are some obvious similarities in the stories of Williams and Obama, the most striking being that their middle class blackness was questioned and assailed for it’s “Huxtable-esque” in-authenticity…
Vanessa grew up in a cozy community named Millwood (pop. 2,500), about 40 miles northeast of New York City. For years the Williamses were the only black family in town, but Vanessa never felt different. Her parents, Milton and Helen, taught music to high school students in neighboring exurbs and were cultivated, prosperous. “We had a real nice raised ranch house, great clothes, new bikes, good foreign cars, a pool in the yard—I missed a lot of the black urban experience.”
…there are also major differences between the two. Unlike the empty suit clad Naked Emperor, there was never any question as to Williams’ qualifications. She actually had to answer the questions, sing the song, and wear the swimsuit. She also fulfilled her duties as Miss America admirably, always honoring the blacks and women who came before her for their sacrifice. Until the “scandalously sexy” photos of her surfaced, causing those predisposed to object to her holding the crown to wax apoplectic about her “unworthiness,” giving them an excuse to hide their racism behind the fake outrage attendant to the convenient adaptation of outdated, Victorian mores, Williams served exemplarily. The hypocrisy of a culture celebratory of the judgment of scantily-clad women on superficial criteria condemning a woman for exploiting those same qualities on her own terms ws never acknowledged. Secondly, contrary to the Astroturf tools of David Axelrod in the media and blogosphere, fond of manufacturing false racial controversy on Obama’s behalf, hardly anyone objected to Obama’s candidacy simply on the basis of his race. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, his exploitation of his bi-racial background afforded him a huge advantage.
There is no question that Vanessa Williams’ shoulders are among those upon whose Barack Obama stands, she who actually faced bigotry in all of it’s ugly forms before and after society’s misogyny joined hands with its racism, forcing her to resign in shame, only to emerge victorious, provided a template Obama could do worse than follow. At the same time, struggling in a society whose standards of feminine comport are external and arbitrary, Williams also has as much, or more, kinship to other modern women as disparate as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.
With the ongoing specter of BlagObama-gate hanging over his head, the possibility of career-ending scandal derailing the Obama presidency is worthy of contemplation. If this blows up, or other skeletons in his closet were to emerge, enabling political opponents to exploit the country’s residual racism to their advantage, it is not at all clear that he possesses the character, dignity, grace and strength necessary to persevere and overcome.
It’s obvious that the curiously-funded, political science lab-created Axelsteinian entity selected by the nebulous powers-that-be to front the shadow cabal that actually seems hellbent on running the country into the ground thinks, along with his masters, that Joe and Jane Public are stupid as tree stumps. There’s evidence to support their opinion. First of all, USA Today says that America’s new Leader in the Light is the most admired man in the country. Despite the fact that he accomplished nothing of note as a state or US Senator, it seems that being elected because he wasn’t a Clinton or a Republican, as well as having the good fortune to be black in today’s Madison Avenue defined post-racial America, as designated by the Hope Pope, is enough to inspire awe and respect in 32% of those of our fellow citizens willing to be polled about such nonsense during the holidays. Hillary Clinton was dubbed “Most Admired Woman” for the umpteenth time, beating out Sarah, Oprah, Condi, Michelle and all the other American women famous enough for being famous that we know them by their first names.
However, the strongest evidence that the Obamessiah and His Disciples in and of the media are primarily committed to tending their sheeple flock is the realization that they believe that touting such fluff is sufficient to distract attention from the fact that their Teflon TelePrompTer Reader and two of his acolytes have been questioned at length in an investigation of “pay-to-play” corruption in his home state. In the federal building with lawyers present and everything. In their defense they cry, “we investigated ourselves and found ourselves innocent and the US Attorney says we’re not a target, anyway, and we told the governor all we were offering him in return for doing what we wanted was appreciation, but we didn’t know he wanted anything in the first place, and besides, that same US Attorney stopped the illegal enterprise before anybody besides the bad guy we want you to hate could be implicated, like us, but, since it’s Christmas we know you’re not really paying attention, and, oh, by the way, have you seen our guy’s pecs?
And, on top of all that, Rahm’s not even in the country right now, he’s in Africa, ‘cuz, well, he really, really wanted to go, and the Great Hype Hope is in Hawaii, spending googobs of somebody’s money while he rests up for the Greatest Inauguration Ever in a Recession, and nobody talks to Valerie Jarret besides her lawyer, so you couldn’t ask any of them any questions even if you were up on things. And don’t even worry about why the New York Times mentioned VJ staffer Michael Strautmanis in connection with the investigation and nobody else has, it’s probably not important.”
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.
Is Tony Rezko singing for his supper? Maybe. AP-Yahoo News is reporting that the convicted Chicago fundraiser and Obama “pal” (don’t tell Sarah Palin! Shhhhh) has had his sentencing delayed, usually a sign that a felon is giving somebody up.
Federal prosecutors moved Monday to delay indefinitely the sentencing of convicted fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, sending their strongest hint yet that he is ready to spill his political secrets.
The filing asks for a postponement while prosecutors and defense attorneys “engage in discussions that could affect their sentencing postures.”
Rezko has donated to Obama’s political campaigns in the past, supposedly Obama has returned all donations for his presidential run:
Obama’s campaign says it has sent to charity $159,000 traceable to Rezko’s past fundraising.
Notice the use of the word, “traceable?” While Obama has admitted his real estate dealings with Rezko were “boneheaded,” it seems Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the big fish in prosecutors’ sights. But, one can hope.
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.
Sarah Palin has been calling attention to Barack Obama’s association with ’60’s radical, Bill Ayers. For those of us who have been following the election since the primaries, this relationship is one of which we are well aware. Steve Diamond, and others, in articles like this, discussed it, and Jake Tapper even made fun of it here. The examination of it began long before The New York Times article diminishing it. Primarily, Obama’s position on the boards of The Woods Fund and The Chicago Annenberg Challenge show a working relationship with Ayers, at the very least. Yet, it seems the mainstream media is up in arms that anyone would dare bring it up.
Obama’s association with ACORN has also been pooh-poohed by the media. However, this Chicago Reader article about Obama’s community organizing roots from 1995 mentions The Woods Fund, Annenberg, and ACORN:
He sits on the boards of two foundations with long histories of backing social and political reform, including his own community work–the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation. Recently he was appointed president of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Grant, which will distribute some $50 million in grants to public-school reform efforts.
edit
Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.
Stanley Kurtz examined Obama’s lost years through the use of newspaper archives and, of course, Ayers’ name came up:
Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama’s 1995 political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama’s joint service with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on academic panels, and what the New York Times called Obama’s “rave review” (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers’s book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed “a searing and timely account” in the Chicago Tribune.
Politico discussed the issue in February, admitting a working relationship, though not a close friendship:
Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.
The article claims that the 1995 meeting was a chance to introduce Obama to the influential Hyde Park liberal crowd. The Chicago Reader, in 2000 related that those liberal associations have come back to haunt him before, in this instance, during his unsuccessful bid to unseat Congressman Bobby Rush:
There are whispers that Obama is being funded by a “Hyde Park mafia,” a cabal of University of Chicago types, and that there’s an “Obama Project” masterminded by whites who want to push him up the political ladder.
Sarah Palin’s characterization of “palling around with” seems fair to me; that statement doesn’t indicate bosom buddy-ness, it merely acknowledges that the two men are associates. That hardly seems worthy of debate. Therefore, the hair-splitting being done by media outlets like AP, is kinda silly:
But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they “pal around” is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it’s simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.
First of all, who cares how old Obama was when Ayers was setting bombs? In fact, since Obama was so young when it happened he had to be well aware of Ayers’ reputation and chose to work with him, anyway. Questioning his judgment in doing so is fair game, and to say it’s not, is again, just silly. But it’s not as silly as the charge that criticizing Obama’s associations is tantamount to racism, as another AP pooh-pooh story claims:
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.
Any criticism of Obama is going to be a criticism of a black man. Duh. But to claim that any critique is racially tinged or motivated is to diminish the reality of racism to the point of irrelevance. Obama knows and worked with William Ayers. William Ayers is a self-admitted terrorist. How well Obama knows people like that is important to ascertain, and just because some members of the mainstream media don’t like it, is not good enough reason to ignore it. My advice to the MSM: grow up and do your freaking jobs.
UPDATE: From a University of Chicago article, 1997, comes this report of a conference organized by Michelle Obama with a panel including William Ayers and Barack Obama.
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center’s monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
Ayers will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system; Randolph Stone, Director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic; Alex Correa, a reformed juvenile offender who spent seven years in Cook County Temporary Detention Center; Frank Tobin, a former priest and teacher at the Detention Center who helped Correa; and Willy Baldwin, who grew up in public housing and is currently a teacher at the Detention Center.
edit
Michelle Obama, Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University Community Service Center, hopes bringing issues like this to campus will open a dialogue between members of the University community and the broader community.
Last night, Joe Biden cried. Again. With a month to go before the election, were those the tears that were supposed to melt America?
How does a white woman attack a white man?
That was the challenge facing Sarah Palin in last night’s debate. A strong, powerful woman going up against a sensitive man has to be careful how she approaches such a delicate situation. Does she attack? Or, does she simply allow for his vulnerability? Now that the debate is over, I feel we must examine Joe Biden’s tears.
While recounting the story of the tragic loss of his wife and daughter and the serious injuries to his two sons, Biden became understandably emotional at the memories of the grief and hardship he experienced as a single father and widower.
He cried for himself.
He did not cry for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina or Gustav. He did not cry for the women disenfranchised in the primaries that lead to his being tapped as vice-presidential nominee. What of their suffering?
What of the sense of loss felt by the parents of the 125 people murdered in the streets of his running mate’s hometown, or those of the parents of more than 4,000 American casualties of the Iraq war? Did he cry for them?
No.
He shed not one tear for the thousands of women who are injured or killed at the hands of husbands and lovers, or even for the rape victim his campaign sought to exploit for a negative ad. No emotion was shown for women like Britney Spears, who face the loss of custody of their children just because they don’t like to wear panties when they take their kids for a drive.
The things written here are almost too shameful to type, and certainly don’t reflect the sympathy I feel for the victims, and the families of the victims, mentioned. If I offended anyone, I humbly apologize. However, in light of the fact that similar statements made by Obama campaign surrogate, Jesse Jackson Jr. against Hillary Clinton, a woman Joe Biden himself admitted would have been a better VP pick than him, and who, I believe, would have made a much better president than either he, or Barack Obama could ever hope to be, were allowed to stand, Biden’s tears must be examined.
And considering that Biden shed no tears over that, he, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party, come up seriously lacking.
Obviously the press has received it’s official Camp O “what we’re supposed to tell them to think” memo about last night’s debate, since article, after article, struggles to find new and clever ways to make their tediously predictable, “she was great, but…” spin seem tolerably credible. Espousing David Axelrod’s astroturf seed, these happy yappers are running off at the keyboard in gleeful abandon of reality.
Truth is, she smoked him. No matter how many stories are written about what the squiggly lines on the rigged little meters mean, or what all the drunks in the bar the writer was in, said, when it comes to perception, Palin won hands down.
As I said all along, my mind is not changed one iota about who I’m going to vote for. “None of the above” is still my personal choice, so far. But looking at the debate, it’s easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, or to be more descriptive, manure from the bull shit.
Joe Biden, and those who love him, are touting his superior foreign policy credentials as proof he “won.” But it was not a foreign policy debate. In fact, there’s no real reason to expect a vice-president to be overly-knowledgeable about…much of anything, really. Besides, every time Biden opens his mouth, one is reminded of his tendency to insert foot, or say someone else’s words, or flat-out lie. So, even if he “wins,” he loses, because the legacy of his own big, mouth-juicy foot will always follow him around, just to trip him up and make him fall flat on his Pinocchio nose. Every time.
Palin, on the other hand, came across as everything Barack Obama claims to be; a wide-eyed, innocent, Washington outsider, hell-bent on reform. More importantly, she projected small town all-America to…all America. She was mom and apple pie standing on a stage taking up for the little people, just because, gee whiz, it’s the right thing to do. The fact that stats and facts didn’t roll off her tongue worked in her favor; she was a female Jimmy Stewart, and while she may not have been around as long as her debate opponent, she sure knows moose patties when she sees ‘em, and gosh darnit, knows how to turn ‘em into fertilizer, too.
So, the Camp O team can spin themselves dizzy laying fake grassroots seed from here to Alaska with their, “she did okay, but…” stories. Hockey and soccer moms shopping in Wal-Marts for tube socks for Joe Sixpack all across the land just found themselves a shero.
And yeah, there’s an element of racism in the fact that Sarah Palin is so appealing to some voters simply because she’s an All-American White Woman, but so what? If Barack Obama hadn’t tried to win the presidency by race-baiting and girl-bashing, it wouldn’t make any difference at all. She probably wouldn’t even be in the race.
When the endless analyses and commentaries have all been written about tonight’s debate between vice-presidential candidates, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, and they will, one thing will stand out in America’s mind as it does in mine. With the benefit of a few hours of reflection, I can process that which is most memorable to me about tonight’s events into some sort of perspective.
From the moment the two combatants greeted each other, she owned him.
“Nice to meet you. Can I call you Joe?”
With that simple phrase, she took over the debate, set the terms and served notice, “I will take no shit from you, Mister.”
“Of course,” Biden replied with a smile.
Biden, clueless, had no idea he had just surrendered any advantage he might have imagined he had. However, her charmingly dismissive embrace of him was the most effective weapon she had, and she deployed it liberally.
It came late in the debate when Biden had made one of his pre-designed points, bashing the Bush administration and tying the miscreants in power to his would-be Republican successor John McCain. With the sprightliness of a quarterback calling a gimmick play designed for a certain kind of defense, she offered this: “I say it ain’t so, Joe. There you go again, pointing backwards.”
Sure, on the surface, it was a cute Shoeless Joe-Ronald Reagan call back, but in reality, it was much, much more. That was Sarah-speak for, “You’re not so tough, big guy, and I’m not scared of you. At all.”
Again, and again, Governor Palin gently chided, scolded, and nudged her “more experienced” opponent back into the place in which she wanted him to stay. Over and over, she made her point, “I don’t care what you say, I’m in charge of me.” She didn’t try to outdo him in his area of expertise, it wasn’t neccessary.
“I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter … of the mainstream media kinda telling viewers what they just heard,” she said. “I’d rather just be able to speak to the American people.”
All she had to do was exactly what she did; tell America directly, who she was. Joe Biden was incidental to Sarah Palin’s debate, and to anybody who was paying attention, she made that abundantly clear at “hello.”
*UPDATE: Believe it or not, I hadn’t seen this Peggy Noonan video when I wrote my post, in fact, most of the time, I write my impressions, then search for support data, primarily looking for direct quotes or salient facts. There are times however, when I will write commentary about something I’ve read, like in the post about the CNN/Rock The Vote debate event. In the case of Palin’s “can I call you Joe” moment, it caught my attention as soon as she said it, but I didn’t really think about it until later. Anyway, looks like Ms. Noonan saw things pretty much the way I did.
CNN, always looking for an angle, camped out for tonight’s VP debate at Atlanta’s Hard Rock Cafe, where Rock The Vote held a debate night registration drive. While young people drank themselves silly, they tried to stave off boredom by playing “Palin Bingo.”
The game was the focus of a group of four friends, all in their 20s and early 30s, as they put Xs in boxes containing keywords they anticipated Gov. Sarah Palin might say during Thursday’s vice presidential debate.
Words like: Special needs, Wasilla, maverick, Main Street, Washington outsider.
“Special needs … I won bingo!” shouted Laura Butler, 30.
Satisfied with her win, and a full hour into the debate between Republican Palin and Democrat Sen. Joe Biden, she headed for the door.
“I thought it was entertaining and so, you know, it was fun,” she said, a White Stripes song blaring in the background.
Can you say, “predictable?” The word applies to both candidates, too. Joe Biden pulled out most of the familiar stops: loose facts, manufactured tears, and unfortunately, managed to do it without committing a major faux pas. Bummer. Sarah Palin, also avoided “foot-in-mouth” disease, relying on “hockey mom” and other suburban colloquialisms that went a long way to help her connect with the little people, “you betcha.”
The young people were not only bored, they were, like me, completely unmoved. No minds were changed, in fact, they were, on the whole, way unimpressed. One of them, Daryll Cordeiro, summed things up this way:
“I’m disgusted by the whole process because I don’t see a difference between either of them: Obama, McCain, Palin or Biden,” Cordeiro said. “[Biden and Palin] are agreeing on so much. You take tax reform, for instance. What did they say that was different, really? They aren’t speaking to me. There’s all this talk about change, change, change. It’s all gimmicks.”
Ahh, there’s hope for the youth of today, after all. Laura Butler, the young lady who won the “Palin Bingo” game, claims to be an Obama supporter, but if I was Team O, I wouldn’t be popping any champagne about the “youth vote,” if she’s typical:
“If it really mattered, if it was really close between Obama and McCain, I would go with Obama,” Butler said, sipping a tall peach drink. “But that’s not because I like him or that he speaks to me. He doesn’t. They are all the same. But I don’t like McCain. It’s a matter, to me, of who you don’t want.”
Though the Rock The Vote representative claimed the event to be a success, and that young people really care what’s going on, a strong case could be made that he’s either deliriously clueless, or trying to protect his phony-baloney job:
The Rock the Vote event was intended to register new voters. But no one registered to vote during the debate, according to volunteer Demarcus Peters, and most of the tables cleared out before the debate was over.
Good to know my faith in America’s future is not misplaced.
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.
If that’s not bad enough, if elected, this “politician” would preside over a country undergoing a complete restructuring of it’s banking industry, a country that is about to bailout Wall Street with 700 billion dollars plus of taxpayer money. This comes after re-naming the “bailout” a “rescue” in an attempt to placate disgruntled voters who expressed their displeasure to lawmakers, only to seem to change their minds after the overloaded House website was shut down. Makes you wonder how Congress got the message.
Yet, nobody mentions the other bailouts, like the one in March for JP Morgan Chase, or the 630 billion the Fed pumped into the global financial market Sept. 29, or the other 630 billion dollar government spending bill, including 25 billion bucks for automakers, that Bush signed Tuesday. And, heaven forbid anyone from talking about monies paid to Congress by companies involved in the big bailout, or question donations to the “politician” benefiting most with voters from the country’s economic troubles, even when those donations come from the same banking industry whose executives advise him, like Jamie Dimon and William Daley (Chicago mayor, Richard’s brother) of JP Morgan Chase. If you’re not going to ask about those guys, you certainly won’t pay attention to donors to the “politician” like Mr. Good Will or Mr. Doodad Pro. Naaah, everything’s fine.
So, while I may seem to be a tad irrational in my daily ranting about this “politician,” I assure you, I am not. In a society gone mad, when the deck seems stacked against you, and the other side is just as bad, insanity is relative, anyway.
Oh, man, I kid you not. These two stories were featured on BuzzTracker, and anti-Obamabot that I am, I just had to pass them along. First, The Charlotte Observer reports that Fort Mill, S.C. mayor Danny Funderburk let his curiosity about Obama’s potential Antichrist status compel him to pass along a scurrilous email:
Fort Mill Mayor Danny Funderburk says he was “just curious” when he forwarded a chain e-mail suggesting Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the biblical antichrist. “I was just curious if there was any validity to it,” Funderburk said in a telephone interview. “I was trying to get documentation if there was any scripture to back it up.”
snip
When asked if he believed Obama was the antichrist, Funderburk replied, “I’ve got absolutely no way of knowing that.”
Can’t be too careful, eh, Dan-O? Moving quickly on, Politico is claiming that Camp O went out looking for a rape victim, any rape victim, to appear in an unspecified ad:
Barack Obama’s campaign earlier this month sought to find a rape victim to appear in a campaign commercial, according to an e-mail obtained by Politico.
Kiersten Steward, director of public policy at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, served as a conduit between the campaign and victims and women’s advocates.
“Obviously, this is a big ask and I haven’t seen a script but presumably it will be a brief ‘this is what happened to me, we need someone who will fight for women like me, these are the guys to do it,’” Steward wrote in a Sept. 15 e-mail. ”Again, that’s just my assumption, given how these things
usually go.”
Mikele Shelton-Knight, who declined to appear in the ad, speculated that it might have something to do with Sara Palin and rape kit charges:
And though she never was told about the nature of the commercial, Shelton-Knight said she thought that the focus of the ad may be about the practice in Wasilla, Alaska, to charge rape victims to pay for their own exams.
The law was on the books when Sarah Palin became mayor of the small city, and it’s unclear whether she supported it or opposed it during her tenure.
But Shelton-Knight said Palin should not be criticized for having governed a city with such a law as they were quite common until recent years.
Alaska didn’t pass a bill until 2000 requiring state and local law endorcement to pay for the exams. And Shelton-Knight said it wasn’t until lobbying by her and others that Virginia last year put the financial burden on localities. Many states still charge victims for the cost of the exam.
Well, I guess if you were a senator from a state that charged for rape kits and were looking for a victim to exploit in an ad claiming your opponent was guilty of the heinous crime of doing the same thing, you would qualify as the Antichrist. But since “Antichrist” literally means “not Christ,” I’d say we all fit the description. Gotta lotta problems with Obi-WanNaBePresident, but his being a demon is not one of them. His all-too human flaws are more than enough, thank you.
But, Lord, how many times and ways can you victimize a rape victim for fun and profit? Hire an actress, run a disclaimer. Take the high road for once.
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?
Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. Earlier today, in a post called “Astroturfing or Ratfucking” I put forth the theory that accusations of wrongdoing by agents aligned with the Obama campaign were being manufactured by the other side. My reasoning was simple, no one would be stupid or inept enough to bungle a simple operation so badly. I was wrong.
The Jawa Report claimed that an anti-Palin ad was produced by a firm associated with David Axelrod, Obama’s “Astroturfer in Chief.” “Astroturfing” is the art of using phony grassroots support to give the impression of real grassroots support, or, the Obama campaign in a nutshell. How could any organization ratfuck the country as well as Axelrod and friends have with the Obama presidential run, then turn around and make such a Bush League play?
Anyway, turns out the Jawa Report was right. The video producer, Ethan Winner of Winner & Associates, sent them an e-mail admitting culpability. The full text is available at the highlighted link, but here’s the gist:
The following is in response to questions I have received regarding the post on the Jawa Report website.
I produced and posted on the Internet the video entitled “Sarah Palin: A Heartbeat Away.”
The idea for the video was mine. No one paid me to produce it. The only out-of-pocket cost will be the fee for the voice-over narrator, which I will pay personally when I receive an invoice. Contrary to the allegation in the Jawa Report, the voice-over artist has never done any work for the Obama campaign. I retained her through a talent agency based solely on the quality of her voice.
Neither the Obama campaign nor any independent political action committee has had a connection with the making and/or posting of this video. Just like the thousands of Americans who have posted videos on the Internet regarding the current Presidential campaign, I produced this video as an expression of my right to free speech, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Sorry, Obama supporters, your guy’s team is even more pitiful than I gave them credit for. See what I get for trying to be objective? That’s it, from now on, no matter what, your guy sucks.
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.
While outlet after outlet of the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media tell me over and over that Sarah Palin is a doomed Republican desperation gimmick of a pick because of her “lack of experience,” her “flip-flops,” and “lies,” a similar number of similar outlets are telling me that her political evil twin, Barack Obama, whose “experience,” “flip-flops” and “lies” are just as questionable, is only doomed because he’s black.
Huh?
Let’s get one thing straight. Barack Obama is no blacker now than he was when he started this race. There has been no humongous influx of foreign born, white supremicists, naturalized as citizens just in time to thwart Obama’s presidential plans. As far as we know, there is no data that supports the theory that formerly liberal non racists have suddenly become bigots in such large numbers as to have a negative impact on the outcome of this election. No one has suggested that a surprising number of racists reproduced a bumper crop of chip-off-the-old-block offspring nearly eighteen years ago, who are now on the brink of voting age eligibility.
So, what gives? Why all the sudden interest in exploring America’s latent racism, especially in the last few days, approximately since the time Obi-Wan-NaBePresident’s poll numbers reached bottom? AP-Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University (a big Obama contributor, along with the University of California, Harvard University and University of Chicago) has a new poll showing that of the white people who don’t like black people, most of them won’t vote for Obama. The poll also showed that a lot of people think he just plain sucks.
Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.
Of course, that info doesn’t lead the story, no way. It’s tucked in the middle, surrounded by all sorts of damning statistics showing that bigoted Democrats, especially those bitter, backwoods Clinton supporters, are not falling in line behind the black guy. There’s also a nifty little interactive thingy where you can see the results in black and white, complete with illustrated stick people.
Here’s the thing, though, the poll attempts to show that Barack Obama’s troubles with Democrats are racially motivated. But that’s like taking your temperature when you stub your toe. What’s the point? More than half of the Democrats who voted in the primaries decided Barack Obama sucked, and didn’t vote for him. A lot of those people were white. A lot of those people seem to have not yet been convinced that he has suddenly stopped sucking. A lot of the people who voted for Obama were black. They seem not to care so much whether he sucks or not. A lot of people who voted for Obama in the primaries were Republicans and Independents encouraged to cast a one-time Democratic vote against Hillary Clinton. They always thought he sucked.
So, yeah, the poll data might be accurate, but it doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. When you look at the big picture, when all things are considered, maybe the real, bottom-line reason that some people, Democrats, blacks, whites, whatever, won’t vote for Obama for president is…(drumroll, please)…because he just plain sucks.
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.
Amid recent grumblings in the blogosphere that Barack Obama should dump running mate Joe (What Did I Say Now) Biden for Hillary Clinton, who many, including Biden, seem to feel should have been offered the position in the first place, it seems that Camp O has settled on a unique new strategy: run Biden/Clinton together. The AP reports that Clinton and Biden will even make campaign appearances together, like this one:
Biden and Clinton held an online video forum with women voters where they took questions on pay equity, abortion rights and other issues. The forum was to be broadcast Wednesday evening on Obama’s campaign Web site.
According to the story, the O Team is just tickled pink with Clinton’s efforts on their behalf so far:
“We couldn’t be happier,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, adding that officials would ask Clinton to step up campaign appearances after the Senate adjourns this month.
It also appears that HRC’s cancellation of a protest event appearance featuring Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin, likely came at the behest of the OBidens:
Advisers to party nominee Barack Obama and to Clinton say that she will resist pressure to speak out against Palin, believing it would diminish her own stature while creating a “cat fight” sideshow that would only distract voters from the contest at the top of the ticket. Any mention Clinton makes of Palin will only be in the context of her partnership with GOP nominee John McCain, aides said.
Hey, I guess when you’re co-running mate with the guy who thinks you’d be a better pick than him, sometimes you gotta take one for the team. Lord knows the team could use all the help it can get. Politico’s Roger Simon lays out the problems Obama is facing and ends with the sum-it-all-up quote from Donna (My Mama Taught Me Race Is The Bottom Line) Brazile:
“He has had some moments where he seems unsure of his own voice,” Brazile said, “but I still think he can pull this off.”
And if he doesn’t?
“If he doesn’t, then Obama didn’t lose,” she said. “The country just wasn’t ready.”
Okay, that’s not exactly what he said, but he did say Obama was “different” because he’s so smart he couldn’t be from your neighborhood. It was the woman who introduced Biden in Flat Rock, Michigan Monday, Barbara Theaker, who called Sarah Palin a “bucket of fluff.”
The video below, from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, shows the whole sordid mess, though interestingly, there’s nothing of note about it on their website. For the details, you gotta do a little, but not much, digging. Newsbusters gives the quote from Theaker:
Barack Obama has made an intelligent choice for the vice-presidency. How so very different this is from that bucket of fluffthat the Republican candidates have chosen for the same position.
Gateway Pundit quotes Joe (Stop Me Before I Speak Again) Biden: (their emphasis)
“All this stuff about how different Barack Obama is, they’re not just used to somebody really smart. They’re just not used to somebody who’s really well educated. They just don’t know quite how to handle it. Cause if he’s as smart as Barack is he must not be from my neighborhood.”
ABC News says that Joe responded to Theaker’s comments approvingly before telling an audience member to pipe down at a later point when the crowd got rowdy:
“You are good! My Lord!”
edit
“Shush up for a second will ya?” he said bluntly.
The ABC article also mentions another lively introduction Joe got about a week ago:
This is not the first time a Biden supporter has used the introduction to hit out at Palin.
Last Tuesday in St. Louis, Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan said of the Alaska governor, “There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick.”
That Carnahan guy sure has a unique clerical hobby. I guess he couldn’t find any pigs in need of a makeover. Either that or he didn’t get the official “Obama Lipstick/Pig/Palin And How To Sneak It In” memo. Anyway, here’s Joe and Mika on Joe and Barbara:
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.
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.
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.”
This is one of the saddest stories I’ve written about since I started this blog. Nobody is paying any attention to Joe Biden. Now, I mentioned just yesterday that nobody was paying attention to Joe Biden, but according to CNN, absolutely nobody is paying any attention to Joe Biden.
Sen. Joe Biden faces a paradox: He offers the most unfiltered contact with the media of any of the big four. But he’s the least likely to be covered.
Poor Joe. It’s all Sarah Palin’s fault.
On Wednesday, Palin’s staff told the press corps traveling with the governor her plane had become too heavy, and asked for volunteers to fly commercial.
There’s plenty of room on Biden’s plane. At one point this week, only six reporters climbed aboard. But they got one thing the press traveling with Palin didn’t: access to the candidate.
Don’t worry, Joe, I’ll keep telling people you want out. I don’t have a lot of readers, but maybe if we both say it often enough, somebody will listen to one of us. Hillary would have been a better pick.
Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson that Barack Obama will live to regret not choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Okaaaay?
“I think he’s regretting not picking her now, I do. What, what determination, and grit, and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way — she handled those well,” the Alaska governor told Charles Gibson in her third and final exclusive interview with ABC News.
Wow! Clearly, Obama has been making major mistakes, the first of which was to reject Hillary. The over-the-top “I’m the Messiah” stuff and the grandiose backdrops haven’t sold well either, except with impressionable liberal college kids.
Child, it’s getting dee-e-ee-ee-eep! Everybody in the world seems to be talking about it. Joe Biden even came out and said he even thinks HRC would have been a better pick. Ain’t that something?
Speaking at rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Mr Biden said: “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice-president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight.”
He continued: “She’s a truly close personal friend…quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me. But she’s first rate, I mean that sincerely, she’s first rate.”
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’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.
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.
Long, long ago, in the days of black and white TV, aired a classic episode of I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball, with guest star Harpo Marx. The “mirror routine” they performed was a tribute to an even more classic scene from the Marx Brothers’ movie “Duck Soup.” We are living in a real-life political replay of this comedic gem, where one character befuddles another by imitating his/her every move, this time starring Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
The premise of the skit is that the character being imitated (Obama) can’t quite figure out what’s real. Is the image replicating his movement a true reflection, or some kind of prank?
In this case, it’s both.
Sarah Palin makes an excellent Harpo. She knows she doesn’t have to say anything, she just has to be. As long as she stays in Obama’s mirror, everything he does becomes comical. She’s not him, but as his mirror image, she might as well be.
The beauty of the skit is that once the imitated character (Groucho/Harpo/Obama) buys into the farce, there’s no escape. Even when he does something unexpected, the Harpo/Palin character simply scrambles to catch up, further messing with her rival’s head. Unless the mirror image gives up the gag, or an outside force interferes, the laughs just keep on coming.
Palin and her Republican scriptwriters show no signs of letting up. They have successfully cast Obama in the hapless funnyman-in-the-mirror role, and no matter whether he catches on or not, he’s at their mercy until they let him off the hook. And since Camp O’s options to flip the script are now as limited as their imaginations, there’s not much left for us voters to do but sit back with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and let the hilarity ensue.
Was Barack Obama talking about Sarah Palin when he said “lipstick on a pig?” Maybe not, ’cause let’s face it, even if you put lipstick on a barcauda, it still hurts when she takes a chunk outta that a**.
Besides, sometimes even the most innocent comments can be taken out of context.
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.
The leaders of a women’s political organization that launched earlier this year to support Hillary Clinton are speaking out against what they say are examples of media sexism toward Sarah Palin and urging members to tell the press corps “to back off.”
A: Because they’d like to see a woman elected to high office.
The group notes, however, that they do not approve of Palin’s politics. ”We cannot pretend that Governor Palin meets any standard of progressive politics or social values,” Camposano writes.
Unlike other feminist organizations which have taken up against Palin because of her conservative views, however, WomenCount says they’ll ”work to stamp out sexism when we see it on the campaign trail.”
“To paraphrase the words of one blogger who said it best over the weekend: We will defend Sarah Palin against misogynist smears not because we like her or support her, but because that’s how feminism works.”
A: It’s a girl thing.
Q: What did Hillary Clinton say about feminism in this election?
No, that’s wrong, too, sorry.
“You know what? I don’t think that’s what this election is about,” Clinton said at a rally in Kissimmee. “This election is about the differences between us and the Republican Party,”
Ed Koch is not getting enough rest. That’s the kindest motive I can ascribe to his latest rants about the presidential race. Asked what made him endorse Barack Obama, the former Mayor of New York said:
“The designation of Palin to be vice president,” he said. “She’s scary.”
Scary? Ed, Ed, Ed. Didn’t you support Hillary Clinton? Didn’t you say Barack Obama was a loser that the super delegates would protect the Democratic party from?
I don’t think that Obama can win a general election. I believe the superde legates will exercise their discretion just as they’re supposed to in order to protect the party from a loser.”
Get back on the meds, Ed, you’re starting to make less sense than ever. Did you really mean to say Palin is scary because of a question she asked a librarian? Did you really mean to say it out loud?
“Any time someone goes to the library and says, ‘I want to ban books,’ and the librarian says ‘no,’ and she threatens to fire them — that’s scary,” he said.
I guess you did not know that she said it was a “rhetorical question”, and that no books were actually banned, huh? True, she did fire the tattletale librarian, but that’s not scary, that’s bitchy. Plus, I heard she hired her back. There are worse things in life, Ed. And, by the way, didn’t you endorse George Bush?
“I think [Bush has] been terrific. And I have never voted in the past for a Republican president…. But I am voting for George Bush this time around. And I will tell you why. He has created what is now known as the Bush Doctrine, equal to the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the Bush Doctrine? That we will go after the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. And he’s kept his commitment, unlike anybody else in the world. And certainly unlike any of the nine or so Democratic candidates for president. And the worst one is Howard Dean. I mean, that’s McGovern II.”
Okay, Ed, I promise not to make any sudden moves if you just stay calm and agree to take your nap. There are a lot of reasons to be scared of Sarah Palin, Ed. She can shoot a moose and eat it, for Goodness sakes. But she’s not running for president, Ed. Barack Obama is.
That’s scary.
(And I agree with you about Howard Dean.)
*UPDATE: I guess Ed wasn’t sleepy, after all. Click here for Ed on Ed’s reasons to support Obama.
He said Palin has an interesting biography — “Mother, governor, moose shooter. That’s cool,” he said — but the election should be about who can change people’s lives for the better.
Now, come on, Barack. If you’re going to use “mother” and “moose shooter” in the same insult, it goes, “Your mother is a moose shooter!” Or maybe, “Do your kids know their mother is a moose shooter?” And you never end a dig with “that’s cool.” That is so not cool. And that “for it before she was against it” line, you did that one wrong, too.
When it came to the bridge to nowhere, she was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it!
You remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.
“Oh, so first you were for the bridge, then you were against it? Who do you think you are, John Kerry?” That’s the line, Barack. So what if Kerry gets dissed, too? Everybody disses Kerry. Besides, when you’re trying to score in the “dozens,” you gotta be willing to go all the way, know what I mean? Like with this one:
“You don’t have to tell the people of Flint or the people of Michigan that our economy is not in good shape,” Obama said to shouts of “Yeah!” from the audience. “You do need to tell John McCain — because just a few weeks ago he said the economy was fundamentally sound.”
Too many words, B., not enough punch. Here’s the right way to do that one. “You know why John McCain thinks the economy is sound, don’t you? He’s got a job!”
Pow! Hit ‘em, get in, get out. I hope you learn your lesson quick, Obie. Otherwise, the people of Philadelphia might get the last laugh. They’re going around saying your mama was a white woman. And they’re on your side.
Joe Dougherty, business manager for Ironworkers Local 401, which hosted Biden’s morning event, also said race is an issue for many Democrats.
“I hear it in the neighborhood, and I hear it in the union,” Dougherty said. “But I remind them (Obama’s) mother was white. He sees all sides, and he could be just what we need to bring this country together.”
Give it up, you media-horny droolers looking for a Clinton/Palin mud wrestling smackdown. Hillary Clinton is not going to indulge your political wet dreams. How many times does she have to tell you? In case you missed the first memo:
“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.
“This election is about issues, and that’s what’s going to matter to people at the end of the day,” she told reporters who asked her about the Alaska governor at a rally for a Democratic congressional candidate at Wagner College.
Today in Kissimmee, Fl., Clinton said this about Palin’s VP selection:
“It is a great accomplishment,”
Did Clinton endorse Palin? Of course not, she’s a Democrat.
“Women as well as men make their decisions after they weigh the evidence,” Clinton said. “As Americans go into that voting booth, what they have to ask themselves is not so much who am I for, as who is for me? And I don’t think it’s an even close question that we have the ticket that is going to do the best job in restoring the American promise.”
Hillary went on to explain:
Clinton said: “I didn’t run because I was a woman but I was very conscious of the fact that my campaign meant a lot to so many, and I appreciate that. But this election is about the two parties, and the two presidential nominees, where they stand, what they would do, what our country needs right now.”
So for all those hoping for a little girl-on-girl violence, grow up. Go take a shower and start trying to figure out a way for your “nominee” prove he belongs in the race. As long as he and his campaign allow this “Hillary should help me beat up the new girl” song and dance to go on, the weaker he looks. I mean, if HRC’s is so darned effective, why isn’t she the nominee? And who wants a pouty, whiny, foot-stomping president? Face it, you guys are stuck with this boring race and the candidate you picked to run it. If Obama can beat up on the girls in his own party, what makes him think any of them would want to help him beat up somebody else’s sister?
Word to the new Democratic base re: Clinton/Palin:
A lot of people claim to be upset with Oprah Winfrey because she refuses to book Sarah Palin on her show. Why? By throwing her unwavering support behind Barack Obama’s presidential bid, Oprah long ago ceded any pretense of impartiality. Anyone attempting to hold her to such journalistic principles is obviously just trying to stir up trouble. And completely missing the point.
There are many valid reasons to watch/not watch the Oprah Winfrey Show. The main ones being, you either like her, or you don’t. No matter who she has on, I can’t imagine anyone tuning in just to see the guest. The whole point is to see whoever it is get “Oprah-ized.” They’re either going to be skewered or fawned over by her, and that’s what people tune in to see. Given her Obama endorsement, is it so hard to imagine which fate would likely befall Palin? Why should Sarah bother?
Oprah’s show is the foundation of her dynasty. She is the queen. She is not going to annoint Sarah Palin, so having her on the show serves no purpose. She can not endorse Palin and keep the slot open for one of her increasingly looney pet projects. The net effect is exactly the same.
Oprah’s non-invitation to Sarah Palin serves both women well. Oprah retains her all-important air of queenly superiority, and Palin gets the sympathetic press the faux-outrage from such a non-endorsement creates. It’s the classic “win-win” situation.
The only potential downside comes if Palin does appear. Oprah might get a one-time ratings boost, but it could be offset in the long-term by treatment of Palin perceived to be hostile. Palin, on the other hand, could always say something stupid.
And it ain’t gonna happen, anyway.
Anyone seeming to expect the situation to change is merely fanning the flames of a non-fire for their own selfish purposes.
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?
Barack Obama wants to prove he can out shoot Sarah Palin. On the basketball court, that is, not on the range. Gotta give it to the man, he knows his limitations. In an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Obama responded to a viewer-submitted question about a possible match-up with the Republican VP hopeful:
“You know, I would play her a game of horse,” said Obama. “She looks like she’s got some game.”
Palin was a standout high school basketball player whose skills on the court earned her the nickname Sarah Barracuda. But Obama said he doesn’t fear her.
“On the basketball court, I think I’d stand up pretty well,” he said.
Still, Obama said he wouldn’t want to go head-to-head with Palin in another sport: target shooting.
“I know she’s a sharpshooter, and I know that — I probably wouldn’t do target practice with her,” he said. “I think she’d be a better shot than me.”
Obama also said he was “puzzled” about why the Republicans would mock his community organizer creds. Maybe he should ask Michelle Malkin:
Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors’ lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Barack Obama’s brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan non-profits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.
Explaining his lack of military cred, Obama implied that since there was no war going on when he became eligible for service, there was no point.
The Democratic candidate said he briefly considered joining the military after graduating high school, but decided against it.
“I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue,” he said.
He also characterized his Saddleback Conference “above my pay grade” answer to the question about when life begins as being “too flip.”
But Obama told Stephanopoulos “what I intended to say is that, as a Christian, I have a lot of humility…all I meant to communicate was that I don’t presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”
Finally read the briefing, eh, Obie?
*I went looking for a basketball clip to accompany this post and found one of the most racially insensitive cartoons I’ve ever seen. Made in 1975, it’s still the first clip you find in a You Tube search for “Basketball Jones Cheech and Chong.” The one posted is the “Space Jam” remake featuring Barry White and Chris Rock.
That’s what some guy named Charley James, on a website called The Progressive Curmudgeon, claims that Sarah Palin said in a restaurant full of people upon hearing Barack Obama had secured the nomination. Charley says Lucille the Waitress told him, but didn’t really want him to tell anybody.
This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Here’s Charley on Charley:
If you’re born in Milwaukee, you are born a Democrat. And so I gravitated naturally to liberal politics, first as journalist and then an activist. I’ve been writing since I was eight years old and, after working in newsrooms for far too long, I have devoted much of the past decade as an independent investigtative jouralist. When not writing about politics or George Bush, I scribble out essays on the peculiarites of modern times.
The Progressive Curmudgeon on The Progressive Curmudgeon:
A progressive (read: liberal) look at US political, foreign policy, social, law and war-and-peace issues through the eyes of a politically concerned and somewhat deranged ex-pat Yank writing from the relative safety of Canada.
Hey, I just report ‘em, you gotta read ‘em.
Or not.
UPDATE: I had hoped to convey my contempt for this article and “journalist,” (I would never call myself such, I’m a chick with a blog.) but in case I didn’t, here are a couple of other takes on Charley and his story, and there’s always Michelle Malkin. This is the website credited with “breaking” Charley’s story. Sounds like a “whisper campaign” to me.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has no intention of becoming a Sarah Palin attack dog — but has no qualms about going after John McCain, people close to the former first lady say.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton marched for labor and stumped with Democrats on Saturday, but sidestepped questions about the woman who has taken her place as the nation’s most-talked-about female leader.
In three stops on the campaign trail Clinton mentioned Palin once.
“No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin,” she said.
While I’m glad Clinton is staying above the fray, it is rather cruel to leave Obie on his own like that. In Terra Haute today he sounded pretty pathetic.
“I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change,” Obama said at a town hall meeting here. “And that is great. She is a skillful politician. But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person.
“That is not change, come on,” Obama continued. “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just make stuff up. We have a choice to make and the choice is clear.”
The choice was clear Obie; you, Pelosi, Brazile and the rest of the DeaNC gang just made the wrong one. Sarah’s gonna clean your sorry clock. She dissed you good in Wisconsin this morning:
Palin said: “Just last night, Senator Obama finally broke and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for some time, and that’s thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded,” she said. “Senator Obama said, and I quote, ‘it succeed beyond our wildest dreams.’
“‘I think,’ Senator Obama said, ‘that the surge succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.’ I guess when you turn out profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it’s time to pretend that everyone else is wrong, too,” Palin said.
Oh, well, I guess you’re stuck with the old reliable race card, Obie. It’s getting pretty old though, besides, you just used it yesterday:
“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”
“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’
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.”
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
“We should all be proud of Governor Sarah Palin’s historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Senator McCain,” Clinton, the first woman to win a presidential primary, said in the statement. “While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate.”
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.
Dispatch? Does Hillary Clinton work for you, now? Last I heard, the DNC was trying to put forth the message that you were the nominee. Don’t you already have a running mate? What’s the matter, Barack, scared of girls? Given that that’s what it looks like, you might want to re-think your “sic the girls on her” strategy and let your running buddy do his job. And to think, just yesterday, you showed promise when talking about “the Palin problem“:
I think she has got a compelling story, but I assume that she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated, which means their records are under scrutiny.
That’s the right attitude, Barack. You were talking about the media, but the same goes for you. And while I’m at it, stop using the media to do your dirty work for you. I’ll bet you haven’t even talked to Hillary Clinton and personally tried to enlist her help about this. If you did, you might be surprised with the advice she’d give. It likely wouldn’t include pimping out various female surrogates, she’d probably tell you pretty much what I’m saying: man up and fight your own battles. And, a little heads up, don’t be surprised if HRC “misplaces” her cell phone for a while.
Advisers to Mrs. Clinton said that she stood ready to help the Obama-Biden ticket, but they urged the campaign not to overestimate the impact Mrs. Clinton could have, noting that she had other commitments this fall, like campaigning and raising money for Senate candidates.
See, Barack, women don’t like wimps. Since a lot of women don’t like you already, the worst thing you can do is look like you’re running from a girl and trying to get other girls to beat her up for you. It would just reenforce the image a lot of women already have of you as a sneaky, manipulative coward. Paradoxically, women got these impressions from the way you and your boyz treated Hillary Clinton, so even you should be able to see that trying to get her to fix something you created with your grubby, underhanded maneuvers against her in the primaries, might not be a good idea.
Oh, and by the way, we don’t like pimps either. So trying to ride Hillary off into the sunset, especially when there’s nothing at all in it for her, is not gonna play well in Peoria, Barack. Basically, you’re on your own. You “won,” remember? Act like it. I still won’t vote for you, but at least you might not seem like such a wuss.
What the hell do you call a post-racial black guy running for president? Everything anybody says seems to offend somebody else. Not Obama, though, he doesn’t seem to care what you call him. Which is not surprising, really. I mean, when you’re “post-racial” do racial epithets even apply?
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”
Supposedly, Obama, “took no offense” but when his people called Wetmoreland out on it, Westmoreland’s people pushed back:
“He meant the Webster’s definition of uppity, he didn’t mean anything racially tinged or anything used as a code word,” Robinson said in an interview. “He never heard the term used in a racially derogatory sense. He used the word as a synonym for elitist, which he stands by. He thinks the Democratic nominee has an inflated sense of self esteem and is snobbish. He is sorry if it was offensive to anyone who took it in any way that it was not.”
Sounds to me like Westmoreland said it and was glad. Doesn’t that mean the Obamas really are “elitist,” though? When another white Republican, Rep. Geoff Davis , R-Ky., criticized Obama in April, there was a mini-uproar then ,too:
“That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”
The article says Davis apologized but doesn’t specify if he was sorry for the “boy” part of the statement or the “he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing” part. Probably doesn’t matter, Obie didn’t seem to mind, either way. The article lists all the familiar white Democratic racial transgressions against Obama, too, Bill Clinton compared him to a black man, Jesse Jackson, (horrors!) Geraldine Ferraro called him a black man, (it was probably the “he wouldn’t be where he is” part that rankled, though) John Kerry not only agreed with Ferraro, he basically implied it was Obama’s one and only virtue, (?) and Joe Biden said he was “clean, articulate and good-looking” (the nerve!). Through it all, even though people made a big deal about it in the media, Obie chilled. Wasn’t offended at all. In fact, he made Biden his running mate. What a guy, huh?
For him to go after Obama, using ‘fairy tale’, calling him a ‘kid,’ as he did last week, it’s an insult. And I tell you, as an African- American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.”
“So, we’re up against a new young kid, who’s a nice young kid. I’m only saying: think it over, tell your friends and your neighbors and your family. There’s nothing like experience,” Knoll told the crowd.
“I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities,” Palin added later in the night. The line drew cheers and derisive laughter, but not from Obama.
Obama’s response?
“I’ve been called worse on the basketball court,” he said. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
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.
Shoulda thought about that a long time ago, Dr. Deanenstein and Frau Nancy Blucher. You’re the ones who gave the rabid Clinton Derangement Syndrome suffering “Anybody But Hillary” lunatic fringe free reign while you allowed your creation to traipse around the country like a real boy playing dress-up in the Emperor’s see-through suit. Now you want to complain because the McCain camp has given your monster a Lilith-like bride. Ha, ha, again.
Your pathetic little formula was so obvious and easy to copy. It only worked a little bit in the primaries, but you’re too power-lust crazed to realize that once Hillary and Co. realized what you were up to, she cleaned your clock nine ways to Sunday, even with both hands tied behind her back. By you. And your Republican mole, Donna Brazile, who along with her crew, kept the Rove playbook working overtime. You scrambled, thugged and mugged your way across the finish line, barely ahead, dragging your wounded, limping creation behind you and thought you had gotten away clean. What a schmoo.
Oh, yeah, Dr. Deanestein, your little theory worked. Even better than you hoped. That was your undoing. Drunk with the success of the midterm elections in ‘06, you thought you and your guy were ready for the big, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” tour, so you ramped up your plans and rushed off half-cocked, just like you did in your own presidential run. Good plan, lousy execution, Deanenstein trademark.
Your scheme is so transparent, so easy to copy, are you really surprised that an old warhorse like McCain borrowed the formula, Deanenstein? His feminized, Stepford-influenced clone is going to reduce your Emperor Pinocchio to a puddle and walk all over him without even taking off her glasses.
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.)
Today, I have come back to Springfield to tell you that I’ve found that leader – a man with a distinguished record and a fundamental decency – Joe Biden.
I wonder if they vetted him? MSNBC, among others, doesn’t think Biden’s vice-presidential rival, Sarah Palin, has been vetted at all:
The Washington Post says the news that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, “Palin’s revelation continued to reshape what Republicans had hoped would be a boisterous send-off for the McCain-Palin ticket. It also left some Republicans privately voicing concern that the campaign may have missed other potentially damaging background information about McCain’s little-known pick… McCain aides pushed back hard Monday night against any suggestion that they had mishandled the selection process. ‘Nothing that has come out did not come out in the vet — she was fully vetted,’ said a senior campaign adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.”
Ya think the Democrats are holding the Republicans to a different standard, just because the Republican vice-presidential candidate is a (gasp!) woman? Oh, no, say it ain’t so, Joe. She’s so good looking!
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.
Take Obama out of the picture and black voters flock to Hillary Clinton. At least, that’s what a Rasmussen poll about a mythical presidential match up between Clinton and GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin says. Personally, I think polling for somebody’s wet fantasy of a girl-on-girl political smackdown is, well, stupid and kinda icky, when you think about it. It’s not gonna happen for one thing, and, if I had been required to guess who would win before reading the article, choosing Clinton would have been a no-brainer. The pollees agree, 52% to 41%, though it’s impossible to know how many people responded with, “Oh, hell, who the hell cares?” before being cajoled into giving a response more likely to satisfy a hapless pollster.
There are a lot of other uninteresting stats in the article, but the one that jumps out like a mugger from a dark alley, is buried near the bottom.
White voters are evenly divided at 47% each between the two candidates, but African-Americans prefer Clinton by a whopping 83% to eight percent (8%) margin.
Didja get that? 83 freaking percent! Guess it’s a black thing, after all. Meanwhile, Philly.com’s Fatima Ali suggests that Obama better win:
If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness – and hopelessness!
I reeeeaaaallly hope she meant that race war thingy metaphorically. I think I have a prior commitment on Obama Riot Day that I’m pretty sure I can’t get out of.
It was my intention to ignore this story, because that’s what it deserves. Let me be clear, I am not a Republican, I was born a Democrat. My party affiliation was changed in early June to “none” because of the actions and deeds of the Democrats, their surrogates and the bloggers and news services in the pocket of their selected nominee. The ones who make stories out of nothing just to try to divert attention from the fact that their chosen candidate leaves a lot to be desired; collectively known here as the schmoos. So listen up, schmoos, for what it’s worth, since I’m just another ignorant, bitter chick, here’s a bit of not-so-friendly advice. Knock it off. You’re doing more harm than good. It’s none of our business, and if you guys weren’t poking your noses into people’s business looking for non-stories to pump while you ignore real stories that actually deserve scrutiny, maybe people wouldn’t feel the need to hire lawyers. Besides, if teenage girls didn’t occasionally get pregnant, you’d all be voting for Hillary Clinton this year, anyway.
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.”
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!”
On CNN’s “State of the Union” with John King yesterday, Democratic strategist, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s phone buddy, James Carville, in an appearance with his wife, Republican strategist, Mary Matalin, said that the expected outraged liberal response to the Pretendident’s Afghanistan troop surge has been surprisingly muted, and in his opinion, BahRock Whosayin’ YoMama had dodged a bullet on his way to having a pretty good week overall. I don’t have an actual quote to post here, but, I know he said it; I heard it with my own ears. However, when I search online for video or a transcript, all I find is Carville’s railin’ on Palin’s lack of qualifications while slobbering over her body, and Matalin comparing the Celebritician to the celebritician who preceded him. Along with CNN’s poll that says the most Americans see the surge Obie’s way, natch.
In Hollywood, it’s “
While there is much in the news to discuss, much of it inter-connected; and I have certainly spent the better part of the week collecting news articles, videos and links in preparation for a post addressing said issues, instead of spending time and energy fanning the “
capitulation to the Right by our 
Whether anybody takes them up on their offer or not, they proceed according to their plan. You cannot lead by consensus, or by whining about who doesn’t see things your way, thereby blaming them for your condition. Constantly complaining about other women who don’t support your vision, and how much you wish they would for everybody’s sake, is a masochistically masturbatory waste of time. If only “she” would think like “me,” “we” could do x, y, z, is a crackhead’s pipe dream. To take it a step further and fantasize that Utopian Nirvana can only be reached by aligning oneself with “her” anyway, regardless of the width of the gulf between your points of view, simply on the strength of shared anatomical features, is a crackhead’s delirium. 
Quick! Somebody get Pat and 
Hey, gang, still not quite up to the weather, (get it? “under the weather,” not “up to the weather?” never mind, any joke you have to explain is not much of a joke, and anybody who tells it anyway knew that it was more about not “wanting it,” than “getting it,” and that it sucked big, hairy weenies all along. Toldja I didn’t feel good. Waaahhhh!)
ha, ha! The Keystone Kops Meet the Marx Brothers panic that must have ensued in the halls of Obuck U.’s Chicago Loop think tank, (modeled on 
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. 
Formulating 
and the 
Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III: We’d fine you up the ass if you “opted out.”
Let’s be honest. The real reason Sarah Palin, now a private citizen not running for anything, at least, not officially, and some of her arguably 
Yesterday, I once again tried to warn my sisters and brothers of the PUMAshpere against allowing our mutual dislike of Pretendident Bah!Rock Whosayin’ Yo’Mama to lull us into a false sense of camaraderie and solidarity with political factions whose intense, visceral hatred of every principle most of us hold dear borders on the psychotic. Again, I tried to point out that political strategists seeking a political toehold in a bleak political landscape would hitch their political wagons to their female politicians and encourage them to use their feminine wiles to seduce segments of society quickly becoming un-infatuated with their blushing virgin presidential bride by bringing tasty housewarming pastries to the neighborhood meet n’ greets. Of course, bitter knitting haggish victims of prior bad marriages would be easy pickin’s, if they could be persuaded to suspend their natural skepticism of wily snake-like interlopers in favor of common disgust and disillusionment caused by their own experiences with wayward spouses (spice?). 
They say there’s a thin line between love and hate, and, that may, or may not, be true. However, whether or not there is indeed one, I believe that the line between sanity and sheer batshit crazy FrootLoopery is real, and much, much, thinner.
the line on a semi-regular basis. It’s only after hearing a given person’s argument over a period of time that one realizes that said person’s passion about something that seems to us to be rather trivial and inconsequential, leads them to become more than a little unhinged on their regular commute home to LaLa Land. 
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 
So, Sarah Palin managed to knock weeklong news reports about Michael Jackson’s death, reminiscent of Saturday Night Live’s running gag about 
On June 20, the 
I am not a bandwagoneer. It takes a lot to get me to go along with anything, or anyone, at any time. Given the way perceptions can be radically shifted by agents employing fairly subtle techniques, I have a hard time accepting things that are reported as “prevailing wisdom,” or “common knowledge,” or anything suggesting that whatever being discussed is something “everybody knows.” Everybody knows shit. Nobody knows squat. However you want to say it, unless you’re under the age of 17 and trying to cajole a parent into granting permission for something you want, but know good and well you shouldn’t have, “everybody knows” has no place in anybody’s vocabulary. Everybody knows that.
Obamboozlogandizing AstroTurf is the art of of spreading deodorized bullshit, aka, hopium laced KoolAid, to Sheeple, by preaching sanitized nonsense via the media and internet. The goal is to hoodwink said Sheeple, by any means necessary, into believing that whatever claptrap being offered is the fulfillment of an as yet unarticulated dream, satisfying a wish, or need, they may or may not have any idea they had, while doing the opposite, without getting one’s hands dirty.
After taking a couple of days off to deal with the dreaded Real Life Stuff (RLS) I’ve learned a few interesting things. One of the few things that make sense to me lately is this painting of Pretendident Black Whosayin Yomama being eaten by a Hell Burger, done by 
Where’s the outrage from the left? 
There seems to be a movement afoot to send women back to the kitchen, happy, barefoot and maybe, unwillingly pregnant. Now, I could be seeing bogeymen in the bushes, so to speak, but, this “women need permission to make decisions, men don’t” developing theme bears watching. Between the Barackulator’s backtracking on selecting a 
Human beings love to gossip. Let’s face it, we’re as social as we are nosy. And judgmental. And scared, and superstitious. So, speculating about our fellow beings’ foibles in the company of others satisfies our appetite for sticking our noses where they don’t belong while we condemn them for whatever transgressions they’ve been accused of, and invokes the magic of the Great Gossip Spirits to keep those troubles from our doorsteps simply by virtue of our casting aspersions aloud. All at the same time. Pretty neat trick, huh?
though the obvious delight they take in being titillated and entertained at others’ expense is pretty hard to miss. “Nooooo! Really? Ummm hmmm, I knew it!” are the kind of comments you make when discussing troubles befallen someone else is just plain fun. When the people and problems under discussion are disturbing to us, we are more likely to respond with, “Oh, my God! No! When? Where? Is he/she okay? Can I help?” than, “Well that’s what she gets! No better for him!”
No, it’s not “The Barackian.” It’s worse. Much, much worse. See, a Chicago-based comic book company, 
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.
Wanna hear something strange? The President I love to hate, Alfred E. Urkelbama (What, me do that?) and I actually have a lot in common. We’re both nominally “black,” (though, I didn’t grow up in Hawaii, I don’t have a white parent, and I don’t try to mute or exploit my blackness at other black people’s expense for personal gain, but other than that…) and, like him, I don’t like labels. Okay, so that doesn’t exactly qualify as “a lot” in common, but it is more than I thought, and “a lot” more than I really want to admit. I really don’t like the guy, okay?
Leadership Council
Why is Barack Obama 
The media is having a field day about the fact that the Governor Who Would Be Persecuted, Rod Blagojevich, aka 
First, it was black people ranting and raving to anybody who would listen that now was the time that it was absolutely, positively, super-duper imperative that we elect a black man, any old black man, over 
In reflecting upon the historic nature of the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, I’m reminded of another moment in our recent history when the country’s color barrier was shattered. In 1984, beautiful, talented, intelligent, and yes, articulate, 
It’s obvious that the curiously-funded, political science lab-created 
