...I would either find a tree, or chafe.
I'm in Colorado this week - wife and I have a house up here which I occasionally escape to, to write, to relax, to smoke a cigar or to unwind.
This is a military state. This is a conservative state. This town, back in the '80s, set up a "evangelical zone" (my term) and invited the religious right to take root here, and boy did they. It's the home of "Focus On The Family," and it's tyrannical patriarch, James Dobson.
It's also home of the Colorado Springs Gazette, which purports to be a newspaper, but is really just a third arm of the military and church. FISA arguments in congress: Page one story about how wiretapping busted some drug dealers. Barack Obama's visit to Colorado Springs?
Below the flap coverage in the Metro Section. THE SECOND SECTION OF THE PAPER.
Let repeat this in terms even someone at Focus On The Family could understand:
An historic presidential candidate who is making faith part of his campaign is coming to ground zero of the evangelical Christian movement in the same week he plans on announcing his support of faith based programs AND James Dobson decides to go after him, and they give the story all the coverage of a Cow getting caught on the street.
What was above the Obama story in Metro?
* A teen arrested in a killing. (Which, by the way, is bad.)
* A huge story about the dangers of fireworks (Which, by the way, is obvious.)
* Barry Noreen's surprisingly positioned story about how the community should welcome immigrants. (Which, by the way, is left of everything else in this paper, and more than a little surprising.)
What made the front page that pushed Obama to the second section?
* A story about how a hospital is using "Guerrilla ads" to advertise itself. (A little news about our advertisers!)
* A poll about how oil drilling is more of a priority (Good news, oil companies!)
* A story about how bad the housing market was the first half of '08 (Breaking news!)
At best, this is a turd of a paper who had already laid out the days news, and nobody bothered to realize Obama was a lead story until it was too late. At worst, it's a calculated fish wrap that buried the lead about Obama coming to the springs, all the while knowing it would move every single story on the front page to the classified section, to cover James Dobson farting.
What a waste of tree, paper, and journalistic integrity.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
A President who can admit when something is wrong.
Shocking.
Muslim Lawmaker Confronted Obama Behind Closed Doors on Head Scarf Gaffe
@ 5:40 pm by Andy Barr
When Barack Obama apologized in person last week to two women at a rally in Detroit wearing head scarves, he did it only after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of two Muslim members of Congress, confronted him about the incident. An Obama campaign volunteer removed the women from Obama's backdrop so they would not appear behind him on camera.
Sources tell Betsy Rothstein, editor of The Hill's In the Know, that Ellison confronted Obama last Thursday during a closed-door meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).
Holding the numbers of the two women, Ellison told Obama the actions of his volunteers were wrong, saying his campaign needed to maintain an air of openness, not discrimination.
The conversation got so heated that CBC Chairwoman Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) banged her gavel to try and quiet Ellison. Obama though asked Kilpatrick to let Ellison speak.
After Ellison finished, Obama told the caucus that he regretted the incident, but said that he had not ordered the women to be removed. Following the meeting, Obama called the women to apologize.
An Ellison spokesman says the meeting satisfied the Minnesota lawmaker's concerns.
Muslim Lawmaker Confronted Obama Behind Closed Doors on Head Scarf Gaffe
@ 5:40 pm by Andy Barr
When Barack Obama apologized in person last week to two women at a rally in Detroit wearing head scarves, he did it only after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of two Muslim members of Congress, confronted him about the incident. An Obama campaign volunteer removed the women from Obama's backdrop so they would not appear behind him on camera.
Sources tell Betsy Rothstein, editor of The Hill's In the Know, that Ellison confronted Obama last Thursday during a closed-door meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).
Holding the numbers of the two women, Ellison told Obama the actions of his volunteers were wrong, saying his campaign needed to maintain an air of openness, not discrimination.
The conversation got so heated that CBC Chairwoman Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) banged her gavel to try and quiet Ellison. Obama though asked Kilpatrick to let Ellison speak.
After Ellison finished, Obama told the caucus that he regretted the incident, but said that he had not ordered the women to be removed. Following the meeting, Obama called the women to apologize.
An Ellison spokesman says the meeting satisfied the Minnesota lawmaker's concerns.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
More converts, pun intended.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080622/pl_nm/usa_politics_evangelicals_dc
Young evangelicals aim to broaden agenda
By Deborah Jian Lee
Sun Jun 22, 9:58 AM ET
Matt Dunbar is not your typical evangelical Christian.
With his tousled hair, sideburns and a scruffy "soul patch" beard, the 26-year-old New Yorker belongs to a growing minority of young evangelicals who want to broaden their political agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
Evangelicals like Dunbar are eager to move on and tackle such hot topics as global warming and social justice.
As they move to the center of the political spectrum, they are deciding whether Republican presidential candidate John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama aligns best with their values and deserves their vote in the November presidential election.
A former Republican, Dunbar's political views began to change with the war in Iraq. "I couldn't keep my political affiliation with the Republican Party at that point," he said.
Research shows many young white evangelical Christians are moving away from the Republican Party.
Surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show a 15 percentage point drop in the alliance of white evangelicals aged 18 to 29 with the Republican Party over the past two years.
"This group is going to be definitely worth watching," said Dan Cox, a Pew research associate and author of the report. "If anything, they're becoming more independent in their outlook."
Most favor stricter laws to protect the environment, for example, an issue not typically associated with Republican platforms, yet remain conservative on issues like opposition to abortion and support for the death penalty.
BEYOND SOCIAL ISSUES
Several hundred young evangelicals gathered last week at Princeton University in New Jersey to meet with Christian leaders, discuss the evangelical agenda and look at the role of religion in public life. The conference was called "Envision: the Gospel, Politics and the Future."
Tattoos, scruffy facial hair and flip-flops abounded among the young attendees.
Shane Claiborne, author of "The Irresistible Revolution -- Living as an Ordinary Radical," called on young Christians to get politically and personally involved on issues of justice.
"I see an entire generation of young people who want a Christianity they can wrap their hands around," said Claiborne, who wears his hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks. "They don't want to just believe stuff. They're saying if you want to know what I believe, then watch how I live."
Claiborne and others at the conference pressed the crowd to move beyond the typical platform of the religious right.
One in four Americans consider themselves evangelical Christians, and some four-fifths of evangelical voters backed Republican President George W. Bush as he sought reelection in 2004.
McCain is regarded with suspicion in conservative evangelical circles because of his past support for stem cell research, his failure to support a federal ban on gay marriage, and his support for immigration reform, among other things.
Both McCain and Obama will be hard pressed to attract voters like Tonya Grant, a 23-year-old Bible college student from New Jersey, who said she voted for Bush in 2004.
"It seems like he (McCain) is playing the evangelical Jesus card," she said. But she's not sold on Obama either, and she doesn't favor his health-care reform proposals.
"I'm completely torn," she said.
Amy Coffin, 27, of Los Angeles said she is drawn to Obama because of his health-care plan and desire to end the war in Iraq.
She does not align herself with any political party and is critical of how so many evangelicals supported Bush. "I think a lot of that is apathy and laziness, letting people tell them how to vote," she said.
She is not looking to the election to further social change, but is pushing for change in her own life. A year ago she moved to India, where she is helping start a church in New Delhi.
"Hopefully by living with the poor, you end up doing social justice naturally," she said.
(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Chris Wilson)
Young evangelicals aim to broaden agenda
By Deborah Jian Lee
Sun Jun 22, 9:58 AM ET
Matt Dunbar is not your typical evangelical Christian.
With his tousled hair, sideburns and a scruffy "soul patch" beard, the 26-year-old New Yorker belongs to a growing minority of young evangelicals who want to broaden their political agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
Evangelicals like Dunbar are eager to move on and tackle such hot topics as global warming and social justice.
As they move to the center of the political spectrum, they are deciding whether Republican presidential candidate John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama aligns best with their values and deserves their vote in the November presidential election.
A former Republican, Dunbar's political views began to change with the war in Iraq. "I couldn't keep my political affiliation with the Republican Party at that point," he said.
Research shows many young white evangelical Christians are moving away from the Republican Party.
Surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show a 15 percentage point drop in the alliance of white evangelicals aged 18 to 29 with the Republican Party over the past two years.
"This group is going to be definitely worth watching," said Dan Cox, a Pew research associate and author of the report. "If anything, they're becoming more independent in their outlook."
Most favor stricter laws to protect the environment, for example, an issue not typically associated with Republican platforms, yet remain conservative on issues like opposition to abortion and support for the death penalty.
BEYOND SOCIAL ISSUES
Several hundred young evangelicals gathered last week at Princeton University in New Jersey to meet with Christian leaders, discuss the evangelical agenda and look at the role of religion in public life. The conference was called "Envision: the Gospel, Politics and the Future."
Tattoos, scruffy facial hair and flip-flops abounded among the young attendees.
Shane Claiborne, author of "The Irresistible Revolution -- Living as an Ordinary Radical," called on young Christians to get politically and personally involved on issues of justice.
"I see an entire generation of young people who want a Christianity they can wrap their hands around," said Claiborne, who wears his hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks. "They don't want to just believe stuff. They're saying if you want to know what I believe, then watch how I live."
Claiborne and others at the conference pressed the crowd to move beyond the typical platform of the religious right.
One in four Americans consider themselves evangelical Christians, and some four-fifths of evangelical voters backed Republican President George W. Bush as he sought reelection in 2004.
McCain is regarded with suspicion in conservative evangelical circles because of his past support for stem cell research, his failure to support a federal ban on gay marriage, and his support for immigration reform, among other things.
Both McCain and Obama will be hard pressed to attract voters like Tonya Grant, a 23-year-old Bible college student from New Jersey, who said she voted for Bush in 2004.
"It seems like he (McCain) is playing the evangelical Jesus card," she said. But she's not sold on Obama either, and she doesn't favor his health-care reform proposals.
"I'm completely torn," she said.
Amy Coffin, 27, of Los Angeles said she is drawn to Obama because of his health-care plan and desire to end the war in Iraq.
She does not align herself with any political party and is critical of how so many evangelicals supported Bush. "I think a lot of that is apathy and laziness, letting people tell them how to vote," she said.
She is not looking to the election to further social change, but is pushing for change in her own life. A year ago she moved to India, where she is helping start a church in New Delhi.
"Hopefully by living with the poor, you end up doing social justice naturally," she said.
(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Chris Wilson)
Friday, June 20, 2008
Bump a little higher, lady Obama.
Would have liked it better if she bumped Sherri and Elizabeth in their faces... but it's still nice to see her making fun of it.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Rollingstone on John McCain
Well written, well done.
Pretty awesome.
- -
Full Metal McCain
Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the one-time maverick has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Jun 26, 2008 12:04 PM
Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?
You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"
The choice of New Orleans as a launching pad for McCain's national campaign is the kind of leadenly obvious move that people who do politics for a living are pleased to call "sound strategy": For a candidate supposedly desperate to avoid carrying the Bush label into November, this disaster-stricken city is about the only place in the country that offers a striking visual image of a Bush policy that McCain has actually criticized. So the candidate dragged himself onstage here, ostensibly to perform the dreary business of "distancing himself" from Bush by once again criticizing the president's response to Katrina. The Bush-bashing money quote — "Americans have a right to expect basic competence from their government!" — was featured prominently in media accounts.
But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.
Even the briefest of surveys of the supporters gracing McCain's events underscores the kind of red-meat appeal he's making. Immediately after his speech in New Orleans, a pair of sweet-looking old ladies put down their McCain signs long enough to fill me in on why they're here. "I tell you," says one, "if Michelle Obama really doesn't like it here in America, I'd be very pleased to raise the money to send her back to Africa."
The diminutive and smiling old lady's friend leans over. "That's going a little too far, dear."
"Too far?" says the first. "Farrakhan is saying they were brought here against their will, and their bodies are still feeding the sharks at the bottom of the sea! I mean, really!"
"OK, sharks still eating bodies," I say, writing it all down. "Could I have your name, ma'am?"
"Janice Berg," says the first old lady. "And lest you think I'm Jewish, the name comes from Norway. Berg is 'mountain' in Norwegian. I'm part German, part French myself."
A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."
"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"
"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.
"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.
Some of us who have been mesmerized by the Obama-Clinton cage match during the past six months may have developed certain delusions about the state of American politics, in two areas in particular. One is the idea, much pushed by wishful-thinking media commentators like myself, that the abject failure and unpopularity of the Bush administration somehow means the Republican revolution is over, and the mean-ass hate-radio conservatism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is finally dead. The other is the even more quaint notion that the historic, groundbreakingly successful candidacies of a black man and a woman have ushered in a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness.
It's bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity. Once the victim of a classic racist smear job in backwoods South Carolina (where he was whipped in the 2000 primary after a Karl Rove whispering campaign suggested he had an illegitimate black daughter), McCain has now positioned himself on the business end of that same deal.
Like Hillary Clinton, an erstwhile vilified liberal who remade herself as a flag-waving, Sixties-bashing champion of "hardworking Americans, white Americans" once the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama forced her off her old turf, the one-time "insurgent" McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style.
The remarkable metamorphoses this year of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain would be puzzling and inexplicable were it not for a basic truism of the political-hate game. The reasons McCain and Clinton were villains of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity crowd in the first place had nothing to do with their policy positions or votes in the Senate or anything like that. Their real crimes were their arrogant insistence on exercising their intellectual independence, as well as their stubborn refusal to indulge in drooling-caveman demagoguery. The instant both of them crossed into the hater column and began feverishly jacking off the toothless racists of the Deep South with broadsides against the America-hating socialist menace Obama, all was instantly forgiven.
Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator's "liberal" record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were "God's children too." When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: "I'm much more concerned about Obama."
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.
Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.
This dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation of McCain offers the vehicle for his new platform, which is just the same old ring-around-the-collar fear-mongering horseshit used by a generation of conservatives, warmed over to fit 2008. In fact, in his stump speeches these days, McCain never veers off a strikingly Bushian binary version of reality, in which the world is divided into clear-cut camps of God-fearing American good and un-Christian, bomb-tossing foreign (and foreign-enabling) evil. McCain talks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his evil plans for world domination, Hamas and its rockets that rained on poor Israeli children in their Purim (he pronounces it pyoor-eem) costumes. Also in the "bad" column are Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the "far-left radical outfit" MoveOn.org, the wealthy liberals in Georgetown who opposed the gas-tax holiday for ordinary, decent folk because "they can probably walk to work," and the Democrats eager to impose socialism because "they have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people."
Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. His crude attempts to paint Obama with these brushes are more or less the whole of his argument for the presidency. Obama is terrorist-coddler because he is "ready to talk in person with tyrants" like Ahmadinejad, he hates soldiers because he refused to condemn MoveOn's "General Betray Us" ad, and he's a socialist because he favors health-care reform — despite the fact that the Obama plan isn't "socialized" medicine any more than the universal requirement to buy private auto insurance is socialism.
And when it comes to Obama's and his wife's America-hating, well . . . McCain really doesn't need to say anything about that. All he needs to do to remind audiences of Reverend Wright and Michelle "I'm proud of America for the first time" Obama is to offer a few bons mots in the opposite direction. "I seek the office with the humility of a man who cannot forget that my country saved me," McCain likes to say. And while he doesn't believe he was anointed by God to lead the great nation of America, he insists, "I am her servant, first, last and always."
That's it — that's the entire argument. McCain is a canny enough old goat to know that the public's insatiable appetite for traitorous enemies will do the rest. He'll wave as many flags and stand in front of as many fucking fighter jets as you like, while the other guy lectures us about why he doesn't always need to wear a flag pin in his lapel and calls a bomb-throwing Sixties terrorist "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" instead of calling for his immediate beheading.
Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama's lack of patriotism. "What was that thing about anti-American?" she asks a friend. "What were they referring to?"
"What thing?" asks the friend.
"People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing," Cindy says, frowning.
"You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?" the friend replies.
"Yeah, I guess," says Cindy. "The anti-American thing." "That bothers you?" I ask.
"Of course it does!"
"But you don't even know what it is," I say. "You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don't even know who it was that said it!"
She shrugs. What's my point? We all know what the deal is. When it comes to presidential politics, you either are or you aren't. And Barack Obama aren't. If you can't grasp the simple math of that statement, you don't know much about elections in this country. It's not about the war, or the economy, or the faltering Republican brand, or any of that: This is about hate and fear, and a dark instinct in our blood going all the way back to Salem, and whether or not a desperately ambitious ex-heretic named John McCain can whip up a big enough mob in time to drown the latest witch.
Which means that despite all the talk about "change," we're once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world. What's especially creepy about this flashback this time around is that it seems to mirror the tragic loop in McCain's own psyche. For all his frantic recanting of the many embarrassingly bipartisan episodes from his Senate past, McCain has never betrayed even a nanosecond's worth of memories from the central catastrophe of his life: his capture and torture in a Vietnamese prison. But now that he is finally pitted, in the great battle of his life, against a smooth-talking peacenik nearly half his age who wants American troops to withdraw instead of pressing on for "victory" in an unpopular war, McCain can keep reliving all those old hurts and all those old battles over and over again, in front of sympathetic crowd after sympathetic crowd.
Never mind that Iraq isn't exactly Vietnam, or that Barack Obama isn't Jane Fonda — what matters is that the Republicans nominated a wounded old soldier who now gets to spend the next five months trying to exorcise his personal demons, and this serendipitous circumstance fits nicely with the party's national strategy, despite the fact that pinning these old hurts on the likes of Obama makes no sense at all. Still, it's not hard to hear, in McCain's quasi-coherent rants, his bitterness at being abandoned to years of savage tortures while millions of little Hillarys and Bills and Obamas-in-training were getting high and balling each other during the Country Joe and the Fish set at Woodstock, instead of standing up and saluting the "winnable" war effort that got McCain sent to Vietnam in the first place.
Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn't that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn't cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate. In the present day, it is George Bush who got us into this new Vietnam-like mess and revived the specter of tortured prisoners, but McCain's anger isn't focused in that direction. He's not mad that it's happening again, not looking to blame the people who actually started the fire. Instead he seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave — and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won't hesitate. So if you thought Hillary was bad, buckle your seat belts: The really dumb stuff is just beginning.
Pretty awesome.
- -
Full Metal McCain
Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the one-time maverick has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Jun 26, 2008 12:04 PM
Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?
You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"
The choice of New Orleans as a launching pad for McCain's national campaign is the kind of leadenly obvious move that people who do politics for a living are pleased to call "sound strategy": For a candidate supposedly desperate to avoid carrying the Bush label into November, this disaster-stricken city is about the only place in the country that offers a striking visual image of a Bush policy that McCain has actually criticized. So the candidate dragged himself onstage here, ostensibly to perform the dreary business of "distancing himself" from Bush by once again criticizing the president's response to Katrina. The Bush-bashing money quote — "Americans have a right to expect basic competence from their government!" — was featured prominently in media accounts.
But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.
Even the briefest of surveys of the supporters gracing McCain's events underscores the kind of red-meat appeal he's making. Immediately after his speech in New Orleans, a pair of sweet-looking old ladies put down their McCain signs long enough to fill me in on why they're here. "I tell you," says one, "if Michelle Obama really doesn't like it here in America, I'd be very pleased to raise the money to send her back to Africa."
The diminutive and smiling old lady's friend leans over. "That's going a little too far, dear."
"Too far?" says the first. "Farrakhan is saying they were brought here against their will, and their bodies are still feeding the sharks at the bottom of the sea! I mean, really!"
"OK, sharks still eating bodies," I say, writing it all down. "Could I have your name, ma'am?"
"Janice Berg," says the first old lady. "And lest you think I'm Jewish, the name comes from Norway. Berg is 'mountain' in Norwegian. I'm part German, part French myself."
A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."
"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"
"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.
"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.
Some of us who have been mesmerized by the Obama-Clinton cage match during the past six months may have developed certain delusions about the state of American politics, in two areas in particular. One is the idea, much pushed by wishful-thinking media commentators like myself, that the abject failure and unpopularity of the Bush administration somehow means the Republican revolution is over, and the mean-ass hate-radio conservatism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is finally dead. The other is the even more quaint notion that the historic, groundbreakingly successful candidacies of a black man and a woman have ushered in a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness.
It's bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity. Once the victim of a classic racist smear job in backwoods South Carolina (where he was whipped in the 2000 primary after a Karl Rove whispering campaign suggested he had an illegitimate black daughter), McCain has now positioned himself on the business end of that same deal.
Like Hillary Clinton, an erstwhile vilified liberal who remade herself as a flag-waving, Sixties-bashing champion of "hardworking Americans, white Americans" once the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama forced her off her old turf, the one-time "insurgent" McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style.
The remarkable metamorphoses this year of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain would be puzzling and inexplicable were it not for a basic truism of the political-hate game. The reasons McCain and Clinton were villains of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity crowd in the first place had nothing to do with their policy positions or votes in the Senate or anything like that. Their real crimes were their arrogant insistence on exercising their intellectual independence, as well as their stubborn refusal to indulge in drooling-caveman demagoguery. The instant both of them crossed into the hater column and began feverishly jacking off the toothless racists of the Deep South with broadsides against the America-hating socialist menace Obama, all was instantly forgiven.
Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator's "liberal" record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were "God's children too." When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: "I'm much more concerned about Obama."
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.
Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.
This dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation of McCain offers the vehicle for his new platform, which is just the same old ring-around-the-collar fear-mongering horseshit used by a generation of conservatives, warmed over to fit 2008. In fact, in his stump speeches these days, McCain never veers off a strikingly Bushian binary version of reality, in which the world is divided into clear-cut camps of God-fearing American good and un-Christian, bomb-tossing foreign (and foreign-enabling) evil. McCain talks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his evil plans for world domination, Hamas and its rockets that rained on poor Israeli children in their Purim (he pronounces it pyoor-eem) costumes. Also in the "bad" column are Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the "far-left radical outfit" MoveOn.org, the wealthy liberals in Georgetown who opposed the gas-tax holiday for ordinary, decent folk because "they can probably walk to work," and the Democrats eager to impose socialism because "they have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people."
Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. His crude attempts to paint Obama with these brushes are more or less the whole of his argument for the presidency. Obama is terrorist-coddler because he is "ready to talk in person with tyrants" like Ahmadinejad, he hates soldiers because he refused to condemn MoveOn's "General Betray Us" ad, and he's a socialist because he favors health-care reform — despite the fact that the Obama plan isn't "socialized" medicine any more than the universal requirement to buy private auto insurance is socialism.
And when it comes to Obama's and his wife's America-hating, well . . . McCain really doesn't need to say anything about that. All he needs to do to remind audiences of Reverend Wright and Michelle "I'm proud of America for the first time" Obama is to offer a few bons mots in the opposite direction. "I seek the office with the humility of a man who cannot forget that my country saved me," McCain likes to say. And while he doesn't believe he was anointed by God to lead the great nation of America, he insists, "I am her servant, first, last and always."
That's it — that's the entire argument. McCain is a canny enough old goat to know that the public's insatiable appetite for traitorous enemies will do the rest. He'll wave as many flags and stand in front of as many fucking fighter jets as you like, while the other guy lectures us about why he doesn't always need to wear a flag pin in his lapel and calls a bomb-throwing Sixties terrorist "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" instead of calling for his immediate beheading.
Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama's lack of patriotism. "What was that thing about anti-American?" she asks a friend. "What were they referring to?"
"What thing?" asks the friend.
"People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing," Cindy says, frowning.
"You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?" the friend replies.
"Yeah, I guess," says Cindy. "The anti-American thing." "That bothers you?" I ask.
"Of course it does!"
"But you don't even know what it is," I say. "You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don't even know who it was that said it!"
She shrugs. What's my point? We all know what the deal is. When it comes to presidential politics, you either are or you aren't. And Barack Obama aren't. If you can't grasp the simple math of that statement, you don't know much about elections in this country. It's not about the war, or the economy, or the faltering Republican brand, or any of that: This is about hate and fear, and a dark instinct in our blood going all the way back to Salem, and whether or not a desperately ambitious ex-heretic named John McCain can whip up a big enough mob in time to drown the latest witch.
Which means that despite all the talk about "change," we're once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world. What's especially creepy about this flashback this time around is that it seems to mirror the tragic loop in McCain's own psyche. For all his frantic recanting of the many embarrassingly bipartisan episodes from his Senate past, McCain has never betrayed even a nanosecond's worth of memories from the central catastrophe of his life: his capture and torture in a Vietnamese prison. But now that he is finally pitted, in the great battle of his life, against a smooth-talking peacenik nearly half his age who wants American troops to withdraw instead of pressing on for "victory" in an unpopular war, McCain can keep reliving all those old hurts and all those old battles over and over again, in front of sympathetic crowd after sympathetic crowd.
Never mind that Iraq isn't exactly Vietnam, or that Barack Obama isn't Jane Fonda — what matters is that the Republicans nominated a wounded old soldier who now gets to spend the next five months trying to exorcise his personal demons, and this serendipitous circumstance fits nicely with the party's national strategy, despite the fact that pinning these old hurts on the likes of Obama makes no sense at all. Still, it's not hard to hear, in McCain's quasi-coherent rants, his bitterness at being abandoned to years of savage tortures while millions of little Hillarys and Bills and Obamas-in-training were getting high and balling each other during the Country Joe and the Fish set at Woodstock, instead of standing up and saluting the "winnable" war effort that got McCain sent to Vietnam in the first place.
Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn't that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn't cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate. In the present day, it is George Bush who got us into this new Vietnam-like mess and revived the specter of tortured prisoners, but McCain's anger isn't focused in that direction. He's not mad that it's happening again, not looking to blame the people who actually started the fire. Instead he seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave — and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won't hesitate. So if you thought Hillary was bad, buckle your seat belts: The really dumb stuff is just beginning.
Creepy and Old + Creepy and Old = More Creepy and Even Older (McCain/Lieberman? Bring it on.)
From POLITICO
I wrote a story in March noting just how ubiquitous Joe Lieberman had become in McCainworld. If anything, he's become even more prominent in the campaign since, holding conference calls to carry the campaign message and appearing at his friend's side all over the country, including last Thursday at a nationally-televised town hall meeting in New York.
It remains a longshot, but Lieberman's name has been popping up as a veep prospect. It almost has a Cheney-esque quality to it: you look around and then pick the guy who has been right in front of you all along. And people who know McCain say that if he were liberated to pick whoever he wanted, politics aside, he'd love to tap his pal Joe.
The problem, of course, is that there would be blowback.
"The political consensus is that McCain couldn't get away with either, and he knows it," wrote Bob Novak in his Saturday column about McCain's inclination to look at both Lieberman and the pro-choice Tom Ridge.
ME:
Yeah, bring it on. I think this ass clown has spent so much time parking behind John McCain's ass that nobody would consider him a Democrat with a big "D."
Dems are sick of him, Republicans won't trust him. Personally, I think it'd be the best thing that could happen to the ticket... for Obama.
- Steve
Http://www.GOPobama.com
Another Republican for Barack!
I wrote a story in March noting just how ubiquitous Joe Lieberman had become in McCainworld. If anything, he's become even more prominent in the campaign since, holding conference calls to carry the campaign message and appearing at his friend's side all over the country, including last Thursday at a nationally-televised town hall meeting in New York.
It remains a longshot, but Lieberman's name has been popping up as a veep prospect. It almost has a Cheney-esque quality to it: you look around and then pick the guy who has been right in front of you all along. And people who know McCain say that if he were liberated to pick whoever he wanted, politics aside, he'd love to tap his pal Joe.
The problem, of course, is that there would be blowback.
"The political consensus is that McCain couldn't get away with either, and he knows it," wrote Bob Novak in his Saturday column about McCain's inclination to look at both Lieberman and the pro-choice Tom Ridge.
ME:
Yeah, bring it on. I think this ass clown has spent so much time parking behind John McCain's ass that nobody would consider him a Democrat with a big "D."
Dems are sick of him, Republicans won't trust him. Personally, I think it'd be the best thing that could happen to the ticket... for Obama.
- Steve
Http://www.GOPobama.com
Another Republican for Barack!
Sunday, June 15, 2008
I am not alone.
ARTICLE POSTED IN THE OBAMA GROUP ON FACEBOOK:
WHAT do the daughter of Richard Nixon, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the son of Milton Friedman, the monetarist economist, have in common? They are all Obamacons: conservatives, Republicans and free market champions who support Barack Obama, the Democratic party nominee, for president.
The Obama campaign has a sharp-eyed political operations team tasked with seeking out prominent endorsers “on both sides of the aisle”, according to a campaign official. It came tantalisingly close to securing one of the biggest names in politics when Colin Powell, secretary of state during President George W Bush’s first term in office, said last week that he might vote for Obama.
Powell said Obama and John McCain, his Republican opponent, “have the qualifications to be president, but both of them cannot be”. He added that he would neither vote for Obama because he was African-Ameri-can nor for McCain because of his military service but for the individual who “brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America . . . regardless of party”.
“There is a good chunk of people, like myself, who believe the Republicans ought to go down in flames,” he said. “They have made a complete hash of things and they deserve to pay.”
MY REPLY:
Everybody talks about the Clinton supporters that are going for McCain... all four of them or whatever...
...but the amount of moderate conservatives who feel as though the party has shifted to the right, and moved the tent away - we're a much larger demographic.
My gut tells me that the democrats would rather have a throng of people like me voting for Obama, than a handful of spiteful Hillary supporters that will vote for McCain in 2008 so she can run in 2012, and plan to stay home on election night watching "Murder She Wrote" reruns.
Yeah, that's right. I went there. :)
- Steve
Http://www.GOPObama.com
Another Republican For Barack.
WHAT do the daughter of Richard Nixon, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the son of Milton Friedman, the monetarist economist, have in common? They are all Obamacons: conservatives, Republicans and free market champions who support Barack Obama, the Democratic party nominee, for president.
The Obama campaign has a sharp-eyed political operations team tasked with seeking out prominent endorsers “on both sides of the aisle”, according to a campaign official. It came tantalisingly close to securing one of the biggest names in politics when Colin Powell, secretary of state during President George W Bush’s first term in office, said last week that he might vote for Obama.
Powell said Obama and John McCain, his Republican opponent, “have the qualifications to be president, but both of them cannot be”. He added that he would neither vote for Obama because he was African-Ameri-can nor for McCain because of his military service but for the individual who “brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America . . . regardless of party”.
“There is a good chunk of people, like myself, who believe the Republicans ought to go down in flames,” he said. “They have made a complete hash of things and they deserve to pay.”
MY REPLY:
Everybody talks about the Clinton supporters that are going for McCain... all four of them or whatever...
...but the amount of moderate conservatives who feel as though the party has shifted to the right, and moved the tent away - we're a much larger demographic.
My gut tells me that the democrats would rather have a throng of people like me voting for Obama, than a handful of spiteful Hillary supporters that will vote for McCain in 2008 so she can run in 2012, and plan to stay home on election night watching "Murder She Wrote" reruns.
Yeah, that's right. I went there. :)
- Steve
Http://www.GOPObama.com
Another Republican For Barack.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Idiot.
If I were pulling for McCain - if I was a "vote republican regardless" republican, I would buy this woman a cupcake. But all she really gets is scorn.
If the supreme court opens up a branch of the government directly in her privates, I hope she's happy that her hard work paid off.
Look - it's easy for me to judge. My order in this thing was "Obama, McCain, Move to Canada" and I've never felt any differently. But the more McCain coddles the rightist side of the party I do not identify with, the harder that vote would have been to make.
But I'm in the middle. Always have been, always will be.
This person SEEMS to be on the left, and is willing to trade that out of spite. I find that mockable, and sad.
Delegate’s reversal stuns party
Wisconsin Democrat now publicly supports McCain
Washington - As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton's defeat.
She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.
And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.
But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.
“I’m sure people are going to be upset with me,” said Bartoshevich, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse from Waterford in Racine County, and convention delegate pledged to Clinton.
Joe Wineke, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.
“Not a delegate? To the national convention?” said Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the Wisconsin state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.
“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Wineke said “almost everybody I know who was for Hillary” is solidly behind Obama now. As for Bartoshevich, he said, “my suspicion is she doesn’t know what she’s getting into” because “the delegates to this convention will be very upset.”
Asked if publicly supporting the other party’s presidential nominee could affect a delegate’s convention status, Wineke said, “I never thought I’d ever get a question like this.”
After some preliminary checking, Wineke said he assumed Bartoshevich would remain a delegate.
But Friday night, after a story about Bartoshevich appeared on the Journal Sentinel’s Web site, he had apparently reconsidered. At the state Democratic Party convention, party members, including Clinton supporters, unanimously passed a resolution asking the national party not to seat Bartoshevich at the Denver convention. Wineke spoke in favor of the resolution.
Another pledged Clinton delegate, Paula Dorsey of Milwaukee, offered the resolution.
Dorsey said trying to expel her fellow Democrat from the party’s convention “hurts my soul and it hurts my heart,” but it is the party’s presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), whom convention delegates must support.
The McCain campaign said that, nationally, it was not aware at this point of any other delegates to the Democratic convention (it may know of an alternate, it said) who have come out for the Republican candidate.
In an interview, Bartoshevich expressed lingering unhappiness over the Democratic nominating process, said Clinton was treated unfairly by the party and said she has deep reservations about Obama’s lack of experience and his judgment.
“I’m kind of disenfranchised,” she said.
She said she planned to vote for Clinton at the convention, but in an Obama-McCain matchup in November, “I will not be voting for Obama. I will cast my vote for John McCain.
“I just feel you need to have somebody who has experience with foreign matters.”
She said a series of controversial Obama associations, including but not limited to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Chicago developer Tony Rezko, reflected poorly on his judgment. And she echoed the complaints of many of Clinton’s most ardent supporters that Clinton was treated unfairly in the nominating process and by the party.
“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her — that’s by Susan B. Anthony,” said Bartoshevich, referring to the suffragist.
Bartoshevich called herself a “devoted Democrat” who had never voted for a Republican for president.
“I’m on a lot of the (pro-Clinton) blogs, and so many people, male and female, feel the same way as I do,” said Bartoshevich, who was listed as a Racine County co-chair for the Clinton campaign and who traveled outside Wisconsin to volunteer for Clinton. “The Democrats jumped on this wagon of Barack Obama, and nobody really knows him.”
Hoping to tap into discontent among Clinton supporters, the McCain campaign is reaching out to them in a variety of ways, including a telephone “town hall” meeting today targeted to non-Republican voters.
Encouraged by her sister, who has served in Iraq, Bartoshevich signed up as a supporter with “Citizens for McCain,” an arm of the campaign targeting Democrats and independents. She said she got a call from the McCain campaign, which then provided her name to a reporter.
Polls suggest that Democrats are largely rallying around Obama after a divisive nominating fight, a phenomenon that has occurred in past intra-party fights, scholars say. But it remains to be seen whether Obama is hurt in the fall by any softness among Clinton’s core constituencies, especially white women and older and lower-income whites.
“History tells us that the vast majority of pledged (Clinton) delegates will in fact be quite enthusiastic about Obama by the time they get to Denver,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Harvard lecturer, a member of the Democratic National Committee and an expert on the nominating process.
Kamarck, who supported Clinton in the primaries, said it was too soon to tell whether discontent among Clinton supporters becomes a significant factor or “whether it’s just magnified because we have the Internet.”
Clinton has not formally released her pledged delegates, and it would not be unusual, given the modern history of the party, for most of them to cast their votes for Clinton at the convention. But that would depend on whether Clinton allows her name to be put forward for the nomination. Clinton hasn’t made that clear, but she has urged her delegates to help Obama defeat McCain.
Professor Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar who is an expert on conventions, said it’s the fact that Bartoshevich is a convention delegate, subject to the partisan tendencies and pressures common to party activists, that makes her public support for McCain so unusual.
“The competitive partisan dynamic is usually strong enough that even the people not willing to line up at the convention on record for the nominee are still unlikely to be willing to line up publicly for the other party’s nominee,” Shafer said. “It’s a pretty far-out move.”
If the supreme court opens up a branch of the government directly in her privates, I hope she's happy that her hard work paid off.
Look - it's easy for me to judge. My order in this thing was "Obama, McCain, Move to Canada" and I've never felt any differently. But the more McCain coddles the rightist side of the party I do not identify with, the harder that vote would have been to make.
But I'm in the middle. Always have been, always will be.
This person SEEMS to be on the left, and is willing to trade that out of spite. I find that mockable, and sad.
Delegate’s reversal stuns party
Wisconsin Democrat now publicly supports McCain
Washington - As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton's defeat.
She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.
And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.
But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.
“I’m sure people are going to be upset with me,” said Bartoshevich, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse from Waterford in Racine County, and convention delegate pledged to Clinton.
Joe Wineke, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.
“Not a delegate? To the national convention?” said Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the Wisconsin state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.
“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Wineke said “almost everybody I know who was for Hillary” is solidly behind Obama now. As for Bartoshevich, he said, “my suspicion is she doesn’t know what she’s getting into” because “the delegates to this convention will be very upset.”
Asked if publicly supporting the other party’s presidential nominee could affect a delegate’s convention status, Wineke said, “I never thought I’d ever get a question like this.”
After some preliminary checking, Wineke said he assumed Bartoshevich would remain a delegate.
But Friday night, after a story about Bartoshevich appeared on the Journal Sentinel’s Web site, he had apparently reconsidered. At the state Democratic Party convention, party members, including Clinton supporters, unanimously passed a resolution asking the national party not to seat Bartoshevich at the Denver convention. Wineke spoke in favor of the resolution.
Another pledged Clinton delegate, Paula Dorsey of Milwaukee, offered the resolution.
Dorsey said trying to expel her fellow Democrat from the party’s convention “hurts my soul and it hurts my heart,” but it is the party’s presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), whom convention delegates must support.
The McCain campaign said that, nationally, it was not aware at this point of any other delegates to the Democratic convention (it may know of an alternate, it said) who have come out for the Republican candidate.
In an interview, Bartoshevich expressed lingering unhappiness over the Democratic nominating process, said Clinton was treated unfairly by the party and said she has deep reservations about Obama’s lack of experience and his judgment.
“I’m kind of disenfranchised,” she said.
She said she planned to vote for Clinton at the convention, but in an Obama-McCain matchup in November, “I will not be voting for Obama. I will cast my vote for John McCain.
“I just feel you need to have somebody who has experience with foreign matters.”
She said a series of controversial Obama associations, including but not limited to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Chicago developer Tony Rezko, reflected poorly on his judgment. And she echoed the complaints of many of Clinton’s most ardent supporters that Clinton was treated unfairly in the nominating process and by the party.
“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her — that’s by Susan B. Anthony,” said Bartoshevich, referring to the suffragist.
Bartoshevich called herself a “devoted Democrat” who had never voted for a Republican for president.
“I’m on a lot of the (pro-Clinton) blogs, and so many people, male and female, feel the same way as I do,” said Bartoshevich, who was listed as a Racine County co-chair for the Clinton campaign and who traveled outside Wisconsin to volunteer for Clinton. “The Democrats jumped on this wagon of Barack Obama, and nobody really knows him.”
Hoping to tap into discontent among Clinton supporters, the McCain campaign is reaching out to them in a variety of ways, including a telephone “town hall” meeting today targeted to non-Republican voters.
Encouraged by her sister, who has served in Iraq, Bartoshevich signed up as a supporter with “Citizens for McCain,” an arm of the campaign targeting Democrats and independents. She said she got a call from the McCain campaign, which then provided her name to a reporter.
Polls suggest that Democrats are largely rallying around Obama after a divisive nominating fight, a phenomenon that has occurred in past intra-party fights, scholars say. But it remains to be seen whether Obama is hurt in the fall by any softness among Clinton’s core constituencies, especially white women and older and lower-income whites.
“History tells us that the vast majority of pledged (Clinton) delegates will in fact be quite enthusiastic about Obama by the time they get to Denver,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Harvard lecturer, a member of the Democratic National Committee and an expert on the nominating process.
Kamarck, who supported Clinton in the primaries, said it was too soon to tell whether discontent among Clinton supporters becomes a significant factor or “whether it’s just magnified because we have the Internet.”
Clinton has not formally released her pledged delegates, and it would not be unusual, given the modern history of the party, for most of them to cast their votes for Clinton at the convention. But that would depend on whether Clinton allows her name to be put forward for the nomination. Clinton hasn’t made that clear, but she has urged her delegates to help Obama defeat McCain.
Professor Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar who is an expert on conventions, said it’s the fact that Bartoshevich is a convention delegate, subject to the partisan tendencies and pressures common to party activists, that makes her public support for McCain so unusual.
“The competitive partisan dynamic is usually strong enough that even the people not willing to line up at the convention on record for the nominee are still unlikely to be willing to line up publicly for the other party’s nominee,” Shafer said. “It’s a pretty far-out move.”
Friday, June 13, 2008
The Gas Hike is a Tax Hike, kids
I tire of hearing about how we need to preserve the Bush Tax Cuts.
Look, I appreciate it. I do. The fact is, it's been really nice for me the last few years. And I know that by pulling for Obama, I'm painting a big red target on my ass and wallet. That's fine.
I'd rather have a government I believe in and pay a little extra, than this nonsense.
But enough with the "Democrats are going to raise your taxes" crap, and this gas holiday stupidity.
Gas has gone up two dollars a gallon. 30 bucks a tank, really. And it's gone up because of the policies of this administration - whether it's a hike in the barrel price because of policy, or a hike in the barrel price to offset the weak dollar.
Any hike in prices caused by the government can be construed as a tax. The only difference is that your 30 bucks per tank isn't going to roads, or schools, or health care, or social security. It's going to an oil conglomerate.
Considering the fact that Bush and Chaney were two formal oil men, that this is going on is ignorance at best, criminal at worst.
Look, I appreciate it. I do. The fact is, it's been really nice for me the last few years. And I know that by pulling for Obama, I'm painting a big red target on my ass and wallet. That's fine.
I'd rather have a government I believe in and pay a little extra, than this nonsense.
But enough with the "Democrats are going to raise your taxes" crap, and this gas holiday stupidity.
Gas has gone up two dollars a gallon. 30 bucks a tank, really. And it's gone up because of the policies of this administration - whether it's a hike in the barrel price because of policy, or a hike in the barrel price to offset the weak dollar.
Any hike in prices caused by the government can be construed as a tax. The only difference is that your 30 bucks per tank isn't going to roads, or schools, or health care, or social security. It's going to an oil conglomerate.
Considering the fact that Bush and Chaney were two formal oil men, that this is going on is ignorance at best, criminal at worst.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Countdown on MSNBC
Big discussion as to whether or not Keith Olbermann is going too far.
He's what - the ONE guy on a news channel that does what everyone on Fox News, plus that dolt Glenn Beck does... but to the left, and he's the douche?
He's counter point. He's needed.
Yeah, he can be grating but so what? I'm glad he exists.
He's what - the ONE guy on a news channel that does what everyone on Fox News, plus that dolt Glenn Beck does... but to the left, and he's the douche?
He's counter point. He's needed.
Yeah, he can be grating but so what? I'm glad he exists.
A firing? A layoff? A terrorist job jab?
Goodbye, ED Hill.
When next we meet, I am sure you will be handing me a plate of Nacho Fried Pooter Balls at Bennigan's.
When next we meet, I am sure you will be handing me a plate of Nacho Fried Pooter Balls at Bennigan's.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Scarlet Johansson needs to shut it.
This, from Politico.
Actress has a crush on Obama
By: Jeffrey Ressner
June 10, 2008 07:45 PM EST
Every presidential candidate can use a sexy blond movie star to liven up his or her campaign, appear at big money events and rally the entertainment community. Sen. Barack Obama’s go-to Hollywood hottie is Scarlett Johansson, a starlet who trades frequent e-mails with the presumptive Democratic nominee, campaigns tirelessly on his behalf, hosts lucrative fundraisers and even appeared in that “Yes We Can” viral video that got 10 million views in its first week online.
Of course, there’s always the possibility of a backlash. “Even I’m wary of celebrity endorsements,” Johansson told Politico on Friday. “I don’t want to seem like I’m holier than thou. We all have the same right to vote and, especially in this technical age where we all can broadcast our opinions, we all have the opportunity to entice others to vote.” But, she adds, “if the spotlight is on me, I might as well try to direct it on things and causes that I believe in.”
The 23-year-old actress, known for cool, quirky films such as “Ghost World,” “Match Point” and the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation,” has been an Obama supporter for years, even before the first Democratic caucus in Iowa, and she’s made no secret of her deep devotion to the candidate. “I am engaged to Barack Obama,” she said back in January, joking with reporters after returning from a USO tour to the Persian Gulf. “My heart belongs to Barack.”
Ugh.
HEY, SCARLET? YOU ARE NOT HELPING.
You're probably not used to being told things you don't want to hear, because you are incredibly, incredibly beautiful. This. Isn't. Interesting.
What would be awesome if you didn't splash triviality on the candidate in the process of trying to make yourself feel smarter to the public.
You wanna help? Help. You wanna be a part of it? Swell. And I believe you - you have liked Barack Obama for years. But guess what? It's a whole new game now. And it is the height of ego to try to place yourself above the story. So knock it the hell off.
Take your school girl "crush," and your desire to blather on about it in the same way somebody 13 would be excited about a new pair of shoes... and try to remember the media will love shining a light on this, the same way they will a crazy preacher, a bad night of bowling, or anything else.
You want to be Marilyn Monroe, go track down Joe DiMaggio and leave JFK alone. Okay?
Actress has a crush on Obama
By: Jeffrey Ressner
June 10, 2008 07:45 PM EST
Every presidential candidate can use a sexy blond movie star to liven up his or her campaign, appear at big money events and rally the entertainment community. Sen. Barack Obama’s go-to Hollywood hottie is Scarlett Johansson, a starlet who trades frequent e-mails with the presumptive Democratic nominee, campaigns tirelessly on his behalf, hosts lucrative fundraisers and even appeared in that “Yes We Can” viral video that got 10 million views in its first week online.
Of course, there’s always the possibility of a backlash. “Even I’m wary of celebrity endorsements,” Johansson told Politico on Friday. “I don’t want to seem like I’m holier than thou. We all have the same right to vote and, especially in this technical age where we all can broadcast our opinions, we all have the opportunity to entice others to vote.” But, she adds, “if the spotlight is on me, I might as well try to direct it on things and causes that I believe in.”
The 23-year-old actress, known for cool, quirky films such as “Ghost World,” “Match Point” and the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation,” has been an Obama supporter for years, even before the first Democratic caucus in Iowa, and she’s made no secret of her deep devotion to the candidate. “I am engaged to Barack Obama,” she said back in January, joking with reporters after returning from a USO tour to the Persian Gulf. “My heart belongs to Barack.”
Ugh.
HEY, SCARLET? YOU ARE NOT HELPING.
You're probably not used to being told things you don't want to hear, because you are incredibly, incredibly beautiful. This. Isn't. Interesting.
What would be awesome if you didn't splash triviality on the candidate in the process of trying to make yourself feel smarter to the public.
You wanna help? Help. You wanna be a part of it? Swell. And I believe you - you have liked Barack Obama for years. But guess what? It's a whole new game now. And it is the height of ego to try to place yourself above the story. So knock it the hell off.
Take your school girl "crush," and your desire to blather on about it in the same way somebody 13 would be excited about a new pair of shoes... and try to remember the media will love shining a light on this, the same way they will a crazy preacher, a bad night of bowling, or anything else.
You want to be Marilyn Monroe, go track down Joe DiMaggio and leave JFK alone. Okay?
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Just because evil doesn't believe it's evil doesn't mean it's not evil.
I read a lot of comic books. The thing to know about comics is this - the heroes are only as good as their villains.
And the good villains don't see themselves as evil, they see themselves as right.
Lex Luthor - feels that the idea of a superman is making humanity weak.
Galactus - Is a force of nature, like a Hurricane. Eats entire planets because that's the way of the universe.
I could go on. Honestly, I really could. I read a lot of comic books.
But to me - the best stories involve two sides that see themselves as completely and utterly on the correct side of an issue. It's then up to the reader to root for the right side.
I don't think our current administration is a comic book super villain. I don't think they wake up in the morning and scream "And now, I will destroy the world. SO SWEARS DOOM!"
But evil is, and has been done, by people I trusted and done in my name.
38 years of reading comic books - I would much rather root for the good guys.
And the good villains don't see themselves as evil, they see themselves as right.
Lex Luthor - feels that the idea of a superman is making humanity weak.
Galactus - Is a force of nature, like a Hurricane. Eats entire planets because that's the way of the universe.
I could go on. Honestly, I really could. I read a lot of comic books.
But to me - the best stories involve two sides that see themselves as completely and utterly on the correct side of an issue. It's then up to the reader to root for the right side.
I don't think our current administration is a comic book super villain. I don't think they wake up in the morning and scream "And now, I will destroy the world. SO SWEARS DOOM!"
But evil is, and has been done, by people I trusted and done in my name.
38 years of reading comic books - I would much rather root for the good guys.
Monday, June 9, 2008
WTC Conservatives
So... I consider myself a WTC Conservative.
A World Trade Center conservative.
Backstory:
Back in 2001, I was the host and executive producer of a show called "Pop Across America," for "The New TNN." It was a talk show that went from town to town on a big flatbed truck.
I played guitar with Bo Diddly. Poorly, by the way, because I don't play guitar. But still - that was pretty cool.
We went from city to city with a big red, white and blue truck and parked it in iconic locations around the country, folded the truck open like Optimus Prime and did an hour long talk show from wherever we parked.
Two things put a daggar into that show.
One, it aired after wrestling. Nobody wants to see some lanky comedian blather on about the wonders of Pittsburgh after watching guys beat the crap out of each other with chairs.
Two, nobody wanted to be a part of a show that parked a big red, white and blue anything in front of "hard targets" (ie, landmarks) right after 9/11.
We were in Witchita, Kansas - the entire crew - when the first tower was hit. We all thought it was an accident until the second one, and then... we stopped trying to be funny.
That explosion blew me right. And I stayed there for quite a few years.
That being said, it's not complacency that moved me over to the left again... I feel like I'm pretty close to where I was on 9/12... but the right moved more rightward, the government moved in a direction I didn't believe in, and the country shifted in a way I didn't like.
Time hasn't given me distance to forget... it's given me a perch for perspective. I no longer like the big picture I'm seeing.
A World Trade Center conservative.
Backstory:
Back in 2001, I was the host and executive producer of a show called "Pop Across America," for "The New TNN." It was a talk show that went from town to town on a big flatbed truck.
I played guitar with Bo Diddly. Poorly, by the way, because I don't play guitar. But still - that was pretty cool.
We went from city to city with a big red, white and blue truck and parked it in iconic locations around the country, folded the truck open like Optimus Prime and did an hour long talk show from wherever we parked.
Two things put a daggar into that show.
One, it aired after wrestling. Nobody wants to see some lanky comedian blather on about the wonders of Pittsburgh after watching guys beat the crap out of each other with chairs.
Two, nobody wanted to be a part of a show that parked a big red, white and blue anything in front of "hard targets" (ie, landmarks) right after 9/11.
We were in Witchita, Kansas - the entire crew - when the first tower was hit. We all thought it was an accident until the second one, and then... we stopped trying to be funny.
That explosion blew me right. And I stayed there for quite a few years.
That being said, it's not complacency that moved me over to the left again... I feel like I'm pretty close to where I was on 9/12... but the right moved more rightward, the government moved in a direction I didn't believe in, and the country shifted in a way I didn't like.
Time hasn't given me distance to forget... it's given me a perch for perspective. I no longer like the big picture I'm seeing.
Who I am, and why I'm here
I'm a registered republican.
When the towers fell, I rallied around the flag and I rallied around my President.
When the war started, I believed.
I'm a member of the Hollywood Republicans, and I will remain there, even if I get knocked off their "Good" list.
But I'm a centrist, who more often than not leaned to the right and registered my affiliation accordingly.
I've always known there were Evangelicals in my party who I had big disagreements with, but I'm also the part of an interfaith marriage. I don't have to be surrounded by people that are Xeroxes of me to enjoy being in a group.
And yet here I am - changing groups.
Not just because of the war, or the economy, or Katrina, or the dozens of other things that depress me about this administration. At some point, every President and his administration disappoints. And then they have to be held accountable.
And when they disappoint on such a massive level, they need to be held massively accountable. And in a democracy, the only way to do that, is with your vote.
This site won't be fancy: I don't know how to code.
There will be days it's completely inactive, because I'm not an activist, and I have stuff to do.
But if you're like me... welcome. And if you share the Point of View, and you want to post, or author, or whatever... Shoot me an Email.
And at least for me, in 2008, while I will keep my party affiliation, I am voting to send a message: If your base is close to the center, and you shift your tent way to the right, your base is no longer in the tent.
But I didn't leave the tent. The tent left me.
When the towers fell, I rallied around the flag and I rallied around my President.
When the war started, I believed.
I'm a member of the Hollywood Republicans, and I will remain there, even if I get knocked off their "Good" list.
But I'm a centrist, who more often than not leaned to the right and registered my affiliation accordingly.
I've always known there were Evangelicals in my party who I had big disagreements with, but I'm also the part of an interfaith marriage. I don't have to be surrounded by people that are Xeroxes of me to enjoy being in a group.
And yet here I am - changing groups.
Not just because of the war, or the economy, or Katrina, or the dozens of other things that depress me about this administration. At some point, every President and his administration disappoints. And then they have to be held accountable.
And when they disappoint on such a massive level, they need to be held massively accountable. And in a democracy, the only way to do that, is with your vote.
This site won't be fancy: I don't know how to code.
There will be days it's completely inactive, because I'm not an activist, and I have stuff to do.
But if you're like me... welcome. And if you share the Point of View, and you want to post, or author, or whatever... Shoot me an Email.
And at least for me, in 2008, while I will keep my party affiliation, I am voting to send a message: If your base is close to the center, and you shift your tent way to the right, your base is no longer in the tent.
But I didn't leave the tent. The tent left me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)