Negative Campaigns

For the record:

I thought mudslinging had to be lies. My brother thought mudslinging was throwing everything--both truth and lies out there--and getting anything to stick.

What do you think?

A Times Editorial
Campaign of lies disgraces McCain

This nation is facing real challenges on the economy, health care, jobs and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are significant differences between how Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain would address them. But McCain's recent campaign ads suggest the most vital issues are whether Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergarten children and whether he derided the Republican's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, by talking about lipstick on a pig.

McCain's straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity, and it is a short-term strategy that eventually will backfire with the very types of independent-thinking voters that were so attracted to him.

The sex education ad says that Obama supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten children. Graphics then appear with a voice-over saying: "Learning about sex before learning to read?"

The facts: Obama, while a state lawmaker in Illinois, supported a measure to provide older students with age and developmentally appropriate sex education. Younger children, such as those kindergarten-age, would be taught "age-appropriate" things such as how to protect themselves from sexual predators. The legislation was widely backed by the state PTA and the Illinois Public Health Association. Parents could choose to opt out of any instruction for their children.

St. Petersburg Times (This paper is usually considered Republican. Though in actuality, most papers over the last few years are now Republican. There use to be a labor version and a business version. Now the labor version usually is just like the business one.)

That program Obama supported was to protect kids from pedophiles and from sex abuse from their own peers. I think it's disgusting that McCain has sunk so low to take a measure that protected kids and turned it into an attack.

Child sex abuse--child rape:

Approximately 20% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children.[11][12][13][14][15] Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often fathers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbors; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases. Most child sexual abuse is committed by men; women commit approximately 14% of offenses reported against boys and 6% of offenses reported against girls.[11] Most offenders who abuse pre-pubescent children are pedophiles,[16][17] however a small percentage do not meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia.[18]

Obama and separately John Kerry (and I think the DNC now) have started sites to fight the smears and the lies. But McCain's commercial deals with peoples' emotions, not their logic. And given those high percentages of CHILD RAPE, it makes it that much deplorable to pretend that Obama was advocating to teach about consential sex to 5 year olds.

Obama needs to create an add that will deal with these facts but put them into the emotional level that it deserves!

The littlest ones need our protection as best as possible. And when McCain purposely promotes lies against little ones, it shows just how evil he is.

Stopping At Nothing To Win

Sparrow/Christy:

Thanks for the concern -- I just got off the phone with my wife and all is better than could be expected. One of our neighbors streets actually still has electricity! So the mobile phones can be charged. Water is coming back on. My wife and daughter stayed with a friend a few blocks away but today they made it through knee-high water to our place and it's basically intact and our street isn't even that flooded. Our windows and roof held together and the goldfish is still OK! This is the area just south of Rice and just west of Medical Center. Apparently, everything is just a big old mess though, with downed branches and trees and wires, etc.

Again, thanks for the concern!

Chuck, Houston Resident, High and Dry, on a Business Trip, in Bangkok

PS: Glad V made it OK!

This is REAL HOPE and REAL REFORM.

Obama is the real deal. It's not about the trumped up lies the McCain camp is spreading. It's about the way Obama wants to enrich our lives and the way his inner soul is purer than McCain's (who wants the power for more $$$) or better than Sarah Palin who has already abused her power and positions to be vindictive against others.

Obama is a real hero and a real Christian. There's nothing made up about him.

Also, to be on-topic, I think the key to understanding negative campaigning is the degree to which US elections, the public aspect of them anyway, are driven by personalities, rather than parties or philosophies or concepts of governance. So all campaigns are negative in the sense that "I am good and the opponent is bad." This is deep in our history too. George Washington didn't like the idea of parties, if memory serves. I suspect to the enlightenment mind, a person of virtue would seek the best policies, so that is what you select, rather than having loyalty to an impersonal organization like a party, which, unlike a virtuous individual, is subject to corruption (again, according to that world view). As this arrangmement evolved over time and though the cynicism of the modern age and into our current information overload age, our elections resemble nothing so much as the production of a Hollywood blockbuster with the Stars being the politicians and the Producers being the powers behind the scenes (I guess the speechwriters are the equivalent of the Hollywood Writers Guidl). In this respect, negative campaigning is just the flip-side of glorifying a hero-candidate -- you can't have one without the other (and you can't have a good action-adventure plot without both -- you can't have Bond without Dr. No). As issues themselves defy this simple anthropomorphizing (sp?), they are pushed out of the public discussion by the sound and the fury. That's how I see it anyway.

Chuck in Bangkok

Why McCain is going so negative
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=59999227-18FE-70B2-A843A61B46DCD096

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely perch for John McCain to be shamed for his increasingly hard-edged and truth-stretching campaign than the middle seat on “The View.” Yet on Friday morning, there sat the Republican nominee — a politician who has built an all but saintly reputation for “straight talk” over the years — caught in a vise between Joy Behar and Barbara Walters and getting a lecture from each on honesty.

“They’re lies,” Behar said of two recent lines of attack from the McCain campaign. “By the way, you yourself said the same thing about putting lipstick on a pig,” Walters interjected as a defensive McCain struggled to respond. The two daytime talk show hosts are hardly alone.

McCain’s tactics are drawing the scorn of many in the media and organizations tasked with fact-checking the truthfulness of campaigns. In recent weeks, Team McCain has been described as dishonorable, disingenuous and downright cynical.

A series of ads — including accusations that Barack Obama backed teaching sex education to Illinois kindergartners and charges that Obama called Sarah Palin a lipstick-wearing pig — have provoked a cascade of criticism of McCain’s tactics.

The furor presents a breathtaking contrast to McCain’s image as a kind of anti-politician who plays fair, disdains politics as usual and has never forgotten how his 2000 presidential campaign was incinerated by a series of loathsome dirty tricks in the South Carolina primary.

The defense from the candidate himself — heard only on “The View” because he hasn’t held a news conference in more than a month — is to essentially assert that he’s savaging Obama because the Illinois senator wouldn’t agree to the series of town hall meetings McCain proposed at the end of the Democratic primary season.

“If we had done what I asked Sen. Obama to do, because I’ve been in a lot of other campaigns where I have appeared with the opposition with the people and listened to their hopes and dreams and aspirations, I don't think you’d see the tenor of this campaign,” he said. That’s the candidate’s public answer — and one that a former adviser suggested that McCain may have convinced himself to believe is true.

Current campaign aides and other Republicans who’ve closely watched the race, however, have a very different response to the media elites and good-government scolds: We don’t care what you think. McCain seems to have made a choice that many politicians succumb to but that he had always promised to avoid — he appears ready to do whatever it takes to win, even it if soils his reputation.

“We recognize it’s not going to be 2000 again,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media’s swooning coverage of McCain’s ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. “But he lost then. We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

Rogers, who hung tough with McCain through the dark days of the primary and has lived through every high and low of this turbulent and unpredictable race, argues that they tried to run a high-ground campaign and sought to keep the candidate in front of the media in the fashion he enjoys. His point: No one paid any attention.

“We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything,” he said. Rogers concedes that they were understandably overshadowed by the historic Democratic primary through June, but contends that even after the general election began they could get attention only when McCain committed a gaffe.

“When he’s sitting in back of a bus and getting questions about Viagra, I think we understand at that point you’ve got to make some tactical adjustments,” he said, recalling a particularly awkward gotcha-of-the-day moment on McCain’s bus in early July.

A senior adviser to the campaign echoed Rogers’ point: “Some of the traditional tactics we did for a long time weren’t working, so we adjusted.” So instead of doing things the traditional McCain way, they tried out the Steve Schmidt way.

Turning to the playbook of a campaign manager who has been running take-no-prisoners campaigns for years brought immediate changes. It meant ending McCain’s anything-goes sessions with reporters on his bus that had become politically untenable in the Internet- and cable news-dominated, 24/7 modern media age. And it meant embracing, rather than fighting, the notion that Obama was the star of the race.

When the August “celebrity” ads cut through the clutter and, for the first time in the campaign, put Obama on defense, McCain aides felt they’d gotten their answer about whether tougher was smarter.

Similar affirmation came when Obama first suggested McCain would bring race into the campaign — and the Republican side smothered the tactic by countering that it was Obama who was playing the race card.

McCain strategists now have became even more sure of themselves after the picture-perfect reaction — in the GOP’s view — to the decision to put Palin on the ticket. The choice provoked derision from elites, jubilation among conservative voters long skeptical of McCain and uncertainty from Obama about how to respond. If you are a McCain staffer, it doesn’t get better than that — so who cares that the candidate had met her only once and her chief foreign policy credential seems to be that she lives closer to Russia than other Americans.

With polls moving in their direction and a unanimous view in the political world that the fundamentals of the race have changed dramatically in the past few weeks, McCain aides aren’t about to drop a flood-the-zone approach that they believe has worked. “Most people would have been afraid to have called him out on race,” boasted an adviser. “And we’re not going to let sexism or denigration of her go unchecked now.”

On all three counts — their portrayal of Obama as a celebrity, outrage at his purported use of race and his flat-footedness and confusion on how to respond to Palin — McCain aides saw weakness and indecision.

It adds up to a campaign that is now unapologetically aggressive and aimed almost entirely at keeping Obama off-message, even if it means hitting him below the belt in the process.

“Clearly we intend to stay on offense,” Rogers said. “That’s what we need to do because the campaign is fundamentally about him. We feel comfortable about the ads we’re running and arguments we’re making.”

And, given their surge in the polls and Obama’s uncertainty about how to respond to the Palin phenomenon, they’re going to keep it up.

“Every day not talking about the economy, the war and how to fix a broken system is a victory for McCain,” said John Weaver, a former top strategist to the nominee who left the campaign last year. “They’re going to ride it as long as they can and as long as the mainstream media puts up every ridiculous charge.”

The negative and often exaggerated or misleading claims being made about Obama and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, especially those playing on Palin’s gender, are just too irresistible for the process-consumed online and cable news media that now drives the campaign conversation, Weaver said.

“Unless there is a hurricane, they’re going to cover it,” he observed.

Added Terry Nelson, McCain’s former campaign manager: “It works in part because Obama responds to it.”

The question now, though, is just how long McCain can keep riding the wave of process and Palin.

“If they don’t attack her, she’s going to go back to being the vice presidential nominee,” Nelson said of the Democrats. “And in the natural scheme of things, the focus will go back to McCain and Obama.”

At that point, “the biggest burden for the McCain campaign will be to convey a compelling, positive vision for the country’s future.”

A top McCain adviser said they’re hoping to keep the still-flowing momentum from their convention going as long as they can.

“But we’ve always been planning to get back on the economy, jobs and energy,” said this strategist.

And even if they weren’t, the campaign calendar would demand it.

McCain and Obama face off in three debates, beginning Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi — events that will force a focus, at least temporarily, on issues rather than pigs and lipstick.

Chuck,

Sorry I missed your comment earlier. My multi-tasking skills are sort of dead right now!

Anyways, I'm glad your family is ok. I know that must be hard to be out of the country when something like this is going on!

And thank you for responding to my thread header.

Yes, I agree with you that the founding fathers recognized that parties would 'negative campaign'. But it's also why they created those very articles of impeachment which were suppose to protect us from party corruption/politics. It somewhat saved us from Clinton's illegal impeachment. However, the last 8-15 years have shown us that the party politics is strong. And after having read Brock's book, 'Blinded by the Right', I'm utterly convinced that the Republicans smasher mentality is why they win and our gentlemanly side loses.

Oh. I'm sick and tired of people picking on Obama, Gore, and Kerry as being left. Frankly the LEFT IS RIGHT. We've been proven to be that way for the last 15 years. And the Republican right and moderates are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, unless you're a big CEO. Time after time again, we've seen that average Americans and the mom and pop owners do better under Democratic policies.

Yes. That's the left! And that's right.

This warms my heart. I'm so happy to have read this diary about the protest against Palin in Alaska that the wrongies tried to end the protest but failed.

Read the whole diary--but here's a few of the pictures I swiped.

Obama raised 55 million in August - I know I will continue to fight for change and hope and unity no matter what happens in November so I am going to send more money, make more calls, etc.

Sparrow
Love those! Click on my name and after "Mother of all Garage Sales" comes a video of backlash to the rally - that is bound to happen.

Here the media give Obama advice

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/09/14/how-obama-can-win-the-campaign-ask-the-media/

I agree with - he should ignore the R VP and focus on McC - let Dems attack R VP record - so I am doing that all I want because there isn't much there yet alot of voters are ignorant of that

I just saw your video over there. (I watched a few.)

Here's a few more pics I found around the web. (Then I'm going to have to force myself to work on work stuff!)

(I definitely agree with this one! She lies just like Bush. She abuses her office just like Bush. She claims to be a Christian and claims to have a relationship with God while she creates policies that are harmful and deadly to the living. And she is trying to appeal to his 2000 and 2004 supporters!)

Then there is Joe Trippi, who says Mc/P are trying to steal Obama's "outsider" status (trying to be "mavericks" etc.) and he needs to reclaim it
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/09/14/politics/horserace/entry4447858.shtml

Yes they have alot of goddamn nerve - "change" & also after having claimed anyone was a "celebrity" - mind boggling insulting to people's intelligence (or maybe alot of people have already forgotten info from 3-4 weeks ago or so - no wonder more dots aren't connected)

McC ran that "wolf" ad and I didn't see anyone remember that Bush ran same against Kerry and the code for "wolf" is terrorism, as when Reagan ran a "bear" one, it stood for communism.

It's manipulation, propaganda and brainwashing - is it any wonder I don't watch tv? It shocked the hell out of me when I REALIZED during the Gulf War that the American government was showing me PROPAGANDA! I had grown up being told that Russia indoctrinated its people with propaganda so I learned about that & was able to recognize it.

It's insidious and avoiding it means, to some extent, avoiding facets of one's own culture but I don't know any other way to even minimize it and continue with some semblance of free thought. I am not one who can really "study" it - I try to be objective but it's especially designed to suck all kinds of people in.

I had to do it (on our blog)

McCain used a Wolf ad to depict Obama as a terrorist subliminally. He did it right before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush used a Wolf ad to depict Kerry as weak on terror. A woman's voice is used, to appeal to "security moms."

Thanks to Pandagon for remembering also.

Reagan used Bear imagery as code for Communism (the old Terrorism.)

Palin Had Direct Role In Charging Rape Victims For Exams

Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence.

Palin's role is now confirmed by Wasilla City budget documents available online.

Under Sarah Palin's administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee "does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test...To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice," Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin's knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city's victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.

~~~~~

Keep in mind that she also charged the tax payers to sleep in her own home most of the year too. So she's making sure that there's money for her to profit off her job.

That's an abuse of power.

I'm fairly certain that McCain picked her because he thinks as a Christian and a women, people will forgive her for her sins.

I'm not one of them.

As far as I'm concerned McCain wears his POW status like she wears her "saved" status. They use it as a "get out of jail free" card.

I agree with Trippi in one sense. They are trying to use Palin as the outsider and a reformer and maverick. The funny thing is that many are seeing how little outsider Sarah has already abused power and is obstructing investigations into her abuse of power.

I say...she's already in Bush's mold. She's already a DC gamer.

Regarding the first Gulf War...I agree. I didn't realize it was propaganda at the time. But later, I saw how they not only used the media to manipulate Iraq, they used it on us. Most of us were fixated on CNN at that time. We truly felt invested!!!

Even Mitt Romney admits McCain is a liar

http://digg.com/politics/Mitt_Romney_McCain_WRONG_REPREHENSIBLE_video

calls his tactics "reprehensible"

I realize Romney ran against McC but R's generally stick together, esp. at this stage of the game so close to the election.

Per Rev. Chuck Currie:

My feelings about John McCain were enhanced by the 2000 election. I didn't agree with his policies but I kept think "if only he were the GOP nominee it wouldn't be so bad if Gore lost. At least someone with some integrity would be in the White House." It turns out McCain's integrity was only skin deep. The NYT has three stories worth noting on the 2008 race on their website.

On the negative tone of the McCain campaign:

Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions.

Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).

Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and health care.

snip

If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.

What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.

The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.

There was a time when a lot of us thought McCain was something different - a better man than most in politics - but now we know he's as dirty and low down as the man he hopes to replace.

At least we have a solid alternative in Barack Obama.

~~~

And in my view, having voted for McCain in the 2000 primary, he's found a perfect soul mate in Sarah Palin. Though she may be inexperienced, she has proven herself to be as dirty and lowdown as McCain.

I concur with his opinion:

At least we have a solid alternative in Barack Obama.

The propaganda of which I speak was the use of animated diagrams to show aerial bombing and make it look clean and precise and the introduction of the term "collaterol damage" to indicate the accidental killing of civilians via missing targets. We were led to believe they were using "precision bombing" so accurate it could go down a chimney and it was a lie. Clean, sterile air war but a convoy of 55,000 on the ground trying to retreat from Kuwait to Baghdad was simply burned to death from the air. After we left, those in the south were encouraged to rise up against Saddam and we would back them. We didn't and over 100,000 died.

"McCain admits being 'divorced' from everyday challenges"

Good ad, but I hope to see more ads about the reality for those who have no healthcare. How many adults and children will die in this world because John McCain thinks it's ok for HIM to have government sponsored health care and pension, but not for us.

slugbug,

Yeh. Those precision videos were a classic definition of propaganda. I remember...I fell for it.

slugbug, you'll like this Framshop diary

From BlueMassGroup

I'm moved by your message of hope. With the Republican party so dominated by corporatism and foreign influence the only hope for the country lies within the Democratic party.

George Washington once spoke of the rise of political parties with concern. He felt that loyalty to the party would become greater than that to the country. It is so with many people. Certainly the Republicans I speak to. Though the feeling I have with Democrats, is that there is still a love in many hearts for the people of this nation and the ideas of liberty and law. We must stop what we have become.

We have become an ugly people in the last eight years. We have a stain on our nation. The people of the world see it. Many of our own people see it. Do we want to live like this?

What country launched unprovoked wars of aggression and despoiled whole nations? Who snatched people from the street and held them without charges in secret prisons, tortured them with brute force and with exquisitely calibrated techniques approved by the highest authorities? Who spied without qualm or restraint on their own people, no warrants needed, no evidence required, just a nod from some faceless official in the security organs? Who believed that the national leader is beyond the law, that any order he gives is rightful and just and cannot be punished, simply because he has given it. Who treated protests against the established order as security threats and acts of terror, and repressed them with mass arrests and police violence? Soviet Union? Nazi Germany? Who? Is there anyone that wishes to live in a country that can be compared to the past evils?

Time to rid ourselves of those that corrupt our country. To join again the free world.

Sparrow
I enjoyed the Frameshop diary. Thanks!

I purposely did a slew of anti-Palin stuff all yesterday to post it all today & yesterday - catharsis like puking - & stuff the campaign might not do - anyone who wanted to could pass it on.

I feel like I have it out of my system & have just looked at the money figures for Obama & the DNC & McCain & the RNC. Obama has alot of people on the ground. I just got sent pdfs for a rally in Manitou Springs Colorado where my brother lives. (Manitou is to Obama as Colorado Springs is to McCain)

McCain may have been running alot of ads because he had to spend up his primary money and now it's the general - the conventions are over - he has to use public funding. There were doubts whether Obama could raise enough to compete and the media haven't helped - with Chicken Little stories & Loser Frame stories.

Who has been the "Celebrity" lately?! (But also polarizing .. may have lost McCain votes from more moderate Republicans, like my uncle or those who liked Romney vs Huckabee & don't like Coulter & Limbaugh etc.) Not all are social conservatives. If they are fiscal conservatives are faking it and some may spot this (hopefully enough.)

Anyway, I am going to donate more to Obama as soon as I figure out how much I can afford. If I am not actively out canvassing and phoning and stuff for awhile & mostly blogging, then in the interim I need to donate. It's time or money, or both but not always both at one time. I am still paying off Denver.

slugbug,

Yeh, you did your catharsis yesterday. I'm still working on mine.

I guess that's why I have an onslaught of posts about her. Particularly, since I believe she is being picked by a Rovian type person who will use her as the 'star' just like they used Bush as their 'star' but then behind the scenes they were creating policies that have destroyed this country and the world.

I still have no idea how smart Bush is. But I KNOW Palin is capable of being equally as complicit or equally as dumb (it's a toss up) as Bush is.

Personally, I've decided the Bush thing is an act to give him plausible deny-ability.

In the meantime, here's a great letter at kos:

(excerpted)

This election is not about issues.

It's not about the fact that it costs me three times as much to fill my tank today than it did eight years ago. It's not about the fact that my family's increase in income hasn't even begun to match the inflation in the price of goods and groceries. It's not about the fact that my plans to retire are in jeopardy and that in order not to fall into abject poverty and be warehoused in the worst sort of end of life institution, I must until work until the day I die. It's not about the fact that a job as a professional and more years of higher education than anyone should need to succeed have left me with 38 years of full time teaching experience, but no financial security at all. It is not about the fact that my colleague who is ten years younger than I has done the math and concluded that even with what should be a substantial retirement fund, she cannot live past 80 because her savings will run out.

It's not about the fact that some of my friends have lost their house or face losing their home because of predatory lending and the mortgage crisis. It is not about the fact that McCain's former campaign co-chair, Senator Phil Graham not only championed financial deregulation in the Senate, he called his fellow suffering Americans a nation of whiners when discussing our economic problems as recently as July 9th.

It's not about the fact that for the first time since the Vietnam war, our returning warriors' suicide rates are surpassing the nation's suicide average, or that veterans of our current wars are sleeping homeless on the streets.

It's not about the fact that leading politicians are already rattling sabers at Iran and Russia while our military struggles to keep enough bodies on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, has said, "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

It is not about the lies the McCain campaign has resorted to or the choice of a stunningly unqualified running mate, one whose record is filled with the exact opposite of the claims made by McCain's loyalists who are all, to a man and woman, the very lobbyists he claims to abhor. It is not about the fact that Palin left her tiny town of Wasilla in debt and fired everyone in town who didn't swear allegiance to her (including the librarian who was only reinstated because the community came out to support her). It isn't about the fact that she charged the state of Alaska $17,000 dollars in per diem to live in her own home while refusing to spend time in the capital even though legislators were begging her to show up. It isn't about the fact that she not only advocated and campaigned on the Bridge to Nowhere project, she accepted the federal funding for that project be diverted to other pork barrel projects in Alaska. It isn't about the fact that her executive experience is a thin as tissue paper or the insult she represents to not only Hillary and all women who have worked hard for recognition or even about the incredible absurdity of claiming that a Senator of the United States of America does not have a staff he administers or, in Obama's case, an enormous campaign that he has been directing for nineteen months.

It isn't about the fact that Obama has authored 820 laws in the Illinois State Senate, has co-sponsored 427 bills and has authored 152 bills in the U.S. Senate. And what was John McCain during in this same period in the U.S. Senate as a Washington insider for 26 years? He sponsored 38! He has the highest level of no shows for votes in the current Congress of any Senator. Don't believe me? I challenge you to check this out at the Library of Congress here: http://thomas.loc.gov/

So after a lifetime of trying to educate America's youth, I have to throw up my hands and admit that facts and evidence just don't matter. The irrational matters. So it goes. Democracy is an experiment. It always has been. Our democracy is failing. Without an educated and informed citizenry, we are doomed.

So most offline people don't know Rove, but here's why online people should know and make sure they don't let McCain win again.

Ken Mehlman, who ran Bush’s 2004 campaign, is now serving as an unpaid, outside adviser to the Arizona Republican. Karl Rove, the president’s top political hand since his Texas days, recently gave money to McCain and soon after had a private conversation with the senator. A top McCain adviser said both Mehlman and Rove are now informally advising the campaign. Rove refused to detail his conversation with McCain.

And Rove said, while pretending to be nonpartisan:

"Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads -- similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test."

~~TPM

Your eyes don't lie--even if McCain/Palin consistently and systematically lie.

From the Obama campaign:

In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove -- the man who held the previous record -- said McCain's ads have gone too far.

It only took two days for the organizers of the "Values Voters" Summit to notice the giant banners showing racist images of Barack Obama hanging in their exhibit hall. "They didn't know it was racist?"...ummmmmm, come on. Do we have "Gullible" written across our forehead?

Sooo...why is it ok for them to hate, Jews, Islamic people, immigrants, blacks, French, Europeans, and working women like THK and E.E. but they're called "V.A.L.U.E.S. V.O.T.E.R.S."? In my area, it's called what it is: racism and hate speech--and some even call it bullying.

It wasn't ok in Nazi Germany or South African Apartheid and it's not ok now (racism, antisemitism & so on). It should not be considered normal. People have pulled Nazi stuff and Aunt Jemima stuff off places like eBay yet all of this crap is tolerated.

I really should be working today, but it's rainy and I have no focus!

So I created a top ten reasons to vote for McBush and PalCheney

10. I don't like living in a house anyways. I much prefer the comfort of my tent with my inflatable bed and my handy dandy home on wheels (shopping cart). It really cuts down on the overhead costs!

9. It's a GREAT thing that the US dollar has no value and that the Euro is now more valuable. Why...even South America has decided to follow the European's trend.

8. Charter schools deserve more funding and tax breaks for rich people than public schools do. After all, the rich folk will trickle down their money and their good paying jobs to us.

7. Private Security? Huh? Who needs that?

6. Palin is my kind of women: she proves it ain't just guys who are corrupt and can abuse their power. Why can't women have it all?

5. Veterans don't need all that healthcare, housing, or schooling anyways. After all, they're going to be in Iraq for 100 years protecting the oil for the oil barrons.

4. Universal Health Care is just a way of tending to those free-loader poor folk. UHC? Scary thought! Who cares if an ounce of prevention can save a life. The only one that matters is the one in someone else's womb.

3. Rich people deserve a break. While we have to go to McD's with our tax refund, they deserve to use theirs on new yachts and country clubs dinners.

2. I enjoy making corporations richer and giving corporations welfare. But those social programs for the rest of America have got to go!

1. I've always wanted to live in China or India and work for pennies a day.

Chuck, glad to know that you're safe in Bangkok (where politics has really bee f'd up lately) and your family in Houston.

Please keep up the healthy discussion!

Sarah Palin ought to be renamed "Dickless Cheney" or "Vagina Cheney." By the time I return to the States to vote, I hope the whole Palin glow will have faded by then, as she has no substance beyond her evangelical orthodoxy.

And with this post, I am officially gone. Will check in when I arrive in Seoul.

Obama raised 55 million in August

Obama Raises $66 Million In August
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/14/obama-raises-66-million-i_n_126259.html

Our car is covered with bumper stickers and at the grocery store some old man with a WW2 hat on said, "I wonder who YOU're going to vote for? Think you can believe him?" "Don't you know Palin and McCain are ahead 51-48?"

I said, "Do you think someone is qualified in foreign policy because they can see Russia with binoculars? & you're talking about the popular vote. It's the electoral vote than is going to count."

Earlier I had taken my son to work and I had slowed down for bicyclists and those who were participating in a Walk-a-thon for Breast Cancer. Someone behind me who could see all my bumper stickers came up way too close to me and leaned on the horn. I was waiting til the coast was clear so as not to hit pedestrians and bicyclists with my vehicle.

As soon as I moved enough at the intersection, this person and their friend (also in an SUV) behind them crossed behind me on the left (into oncoming traffic) and then ran the red light at the intersection (I was turning right) and sped off really fast, almost hitting pedestrians. I had a feeling they were from the Opposition Party.

Yep. I know that feeling. For the most part, people have been afraid to be associated with Bush, but now that McCain has chosen Palin, they feel as if they're suddenly safe to come out of hiding. We now have about 4-5 McCain signs in town and a lot more Obama's.

I picked up two McCain signs for free today. Why not?

I plan on taping/painting "McCain=10% Bush=90%" and I plan on seeing if one or two of the Obama supporters would be willing to put the sign in front of their house. Then I might go back for more!

From a friend:

Thought I would share this email I sent to the Washington Post in response to an article listed. I do not want to bring anyones hope down, but we are nationally ahead still and we need to get past this Palin anxiety, myself too. I hope that this will fuel the drive of ENOUGH! NO! America, despite if you are a Republican, Democrat, Independent, Liberal or Conservative, it is time to let the Democrats take a crack at repairing this great nation. If you keep using the
same old tool and it still doesnt work, you use a different tool that will work! Lets ROLL!

Hello, I just read your article which I too share recently some
sentiments. I have a question in regard to the conclusion of your article in this section; "Obama losing," one wrote, "would be hurtful, but it still spells substantial progress. . . . Change WILL come -- the wheels have been set in motion." Declared the second: "Sometimes you have to believe in the change before it comes (and in the face of its apparent defeat) for the change to be possible."

Do you feel that he will lose? Because when I read your article I sensed an anxiety of a type of coming to grips with defeat. In regards to the recent campaign developments and they very disturbing embracement of Gov. Sarah Palin, who within from my interpretive measure, represents the apparatus of further continuation of imperialist Bush conservatism, and a lynchpin to the unhinging of a nation that has dangerously allowed religious ethos to dictate and undermine its democracy, i.e. it is the beginning of the fall of Rome.

I have been feeling sad and have felt that the current 'dead-even' race
represents evidence of the reactions from a certain type of political
correctness that have given answers to polls to deny admiting to vote for or against a black man. The picture of McCain and Palin represents the imperialism of conservative American evangelic power structure, this is what keeps people in fear and subservient, it divides a nation unfortunately amongst influential and non-educated white Americans, allowing them to feel comfort to vote for another white presidental ticket, that real change is out of their comfort zones and the blurred version of change of distraction is what your tradition and God calls for.

I also feel sad because I am utterly confident that we are witnessing a great turn of the page from American historic narrative, this time seems to fit perfectly in the American historical discourse that after two-terms of the most imperialistic conservative presidency, that America will shift back from the depths of strict unforgiving conservatism up back to the surface of greatness and fairness by voting in a landmark and future icon president, a new post-postmodern JFK and Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama. Whose presidency I believe will be the transcendency and re-illumination of the American beacon of hope, a brighter America back on its feet. It will show the world an America that is so full of greatness and the possibility of redemption that even a person of any colored skin could become the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. Obama's win would be a very positive and good thing for American history, even that of greatness, a McCainwin will be a utter complete non sequitur in our American narrative.

Sorry for the rant, as you can see I am one of the Obama supporters whose anxiety is apparent.

~Armando Olivas

I haven't seen enough yard signs to make a judgment (Albuquerque is about 51/49 dem but . . .) but I have seen more Obama bumper stickers than McBush. I wore my homemdade Obama t-shirt to the grocery store yesterday and I had some folks smile at me: there is no writing on the shirt: just the logo. So if you know, you know.
I also found it odd that even Karl (traitor) Rove found McBush's ads out of line. Hmmm . ..

WEll tomorrow I'll be delivering Chris Gregoire yard signs - she won Governor by a hair and my job probably depends on her winning again - the GOP (won't all himself Republican) candidate does not support children's health services, of course.

& even if Dino Rossi is GOP and puts on lipstick he is still a Republican pig.

St. Petersburg Times (Editorial) “Campaign of lies disgraces McCain” McCain's straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity, and it is a short-term strategy that eventually will backfire with the very types of independent-thinking voters that were so attracted to him.

Atlanta Journal Constitution (Jay Bookman) The volume and audacity of lies pouring from the McCain campaign is startling and even historic…That’s really something, lying straight out about a FactCheck group, knowing that you’re going to get caught but not giving a damn about it. With stuff like this, the McCain camp has cut any remaining tethers to reality and integrity and is now floating wherever the winds of illusion and whimsy may take them. It’s quite remarkable, and quite insulting to the intelligence of the American people.

Pittsburg Post Gazette (Tony Norman) Where have you gone, John McCain? You once said you'd rather lose an election than lose a war. Is it worth winning an election if it means forfeiting your soul on the altar of political expediency?...Where is the honor in reciting lies for something as transient as political advantage? What are we as voters supposed to make of political ads that accuse Barack Obama of advocating sex education for kindergartners?... Despite the intellectually dishonest maneuvering of your campaign, many Americans admire you, John McCain. Before you embraced the darkness, I was among those who disagreed with your politics, but considered you honorable. Now it's hard to look at you without seeing the scoundrels who made you what you are today.

Kansas City Star (Barb Shelly) McCain stoops to deception, distortion: Maybe you’ve seen it. The campaign ad cites the authoritative journal Education Week to claim that Democrat Barack Obama has been missing in action on education reform…Shamelessly misleading the public?...These are old tricks we’ve been seeing in local elections for years. Distort. Twist. Deceive. Damage. And the winning candidate drags a load of public contempt into office. I had hoped for better from McCain…John McCain may win the presidency this way, but he will lose the respect he has acquired over the years.

Boston Globe (Scot Lehigh) Pretzel logic from the McCain campaign: Here’s the question voters should be asking themselves this week: Just how stupid does the McCain-Palin campaign think I am? The answer: Dumb enough to hoodwink with charges so contrived and cynical they make your teeth ache…As the nonpartisan campaign watchdog FactCheck.org has made clear, this is a thoroughly dishonest ad [Kindergarten]. No matter. The McCain campaign has shown it's ready and willing to say preposterous things to win.

Washington Post (David Ignatius) Stopping at nothing to win: Thinking about the Palin choice, you begin to ponder other moves McCain has made on the road to winning the Republican nomination. McCain was right a few years ago to warn that Bush's tax cuts would have potentially ruinous fiscal consequences; now he favors extending the cuts that have produced a crisis of debt and deficit. Why did he switch his position, other than political opportunism?...In May 2006, after McCain had courted the Rev. Jerry Falwell in an effort to win conservative support, I asked him if he was bending his principles for the sake of winning. "I don't want it that badly," McCain answered. "I will continue to do what is right…If that means I can't get the Republican nomination, fine. I've had a happy life. The worst thing I can do is sell my soul to the devil." He was right.

Washington Post (Eugene Robinson) The Scream Machine: There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year -- lacking ideas, programs or values -- John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood…Creating the false impression that Democrats and journalists are unfairly attacking Palin serves another purpose as well: It helps create the impression that legitimate and necessary questions about her record -- such as her one-time support for the Bridge to Nowhere or her history of seeking the congressional earmarks she now claims to reject -- are somehow out of bounds.

Chicago Tribune (Steve Chapman) To McCain the truth is expandable: McCain has concluded that a fact-based case about Obama isn't enough to prevail in November. So he has chosen to smear his opponent with ridiculous claims that he thinks the American people are gullible enough to believe. He has charged repeatedly that his opponent is willing to lose a war to win an election. What's McCain willing to lose to become president? Nothing so consequential as a war. Just his soul.

Chicago Tribune (Frank James) “McCain plays dirty on Obama & sex-ed” So the McCain ad, in the way it contorts the truth, is pretty shocking from a candidate who has promised to bring change and reform to Washington, a man who's urging Americans to live for a cause larger than themselves. This is an old-fashioned, unreconstructed politics whose goal, first and foremost, is to get the candidate elected, the truth be damned. McCain has said he'd rather lose a campaign than lose a war. But it appears from this ad he'd rather lose any purchase he has on straight-talk than lose this presidential election.

Chicago Tribune (Eric Zorn) `Sex ed' ad educates us on the character of John McCain: The surprise came at the end: I'm John McCain and I approved this message. With that infamous admission, McCain surrendered his integrity and signaled a willingness to say or do anything to get elected… We used to expect better from John McCain. No longer.

TIME (Joe Klein): A new rule here: Rather than do the McCain campaign's bidding by wasting space on Senator Honor's daily lies and bilge--his constant attempts to divert attention from substantive issues--I'm going to assume that others will spend more than enough time on the sewage that Steve Schmidt is shoveling and, from now on, try to stick to the issues.

TIME (Joe Klein) Apology Not Accepted: he is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won't abet its spread by linking to it, but here's the McClatchy fact check.. I just can't wait for the moment when John McCain--contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat--talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

TIME (Joe Klein) Another McCain Flip Flop: Army Times, which is not--last time I checked--a radical left wing publication, takes John McCain to task for changing his position on the Future Combat Systems program. This is yet another example of how running for President has driven McCain off the deep end. In the past, he was one of the more consistent voices against foolish Pentagon weapon systems. Here's a program that McCain previously wanted to end. Then Obama says he wants to slow-walk it...and McCain--reflexively, it appears, and unable to recall that he previously opposed it--decides to support it.

New York Times (Paul Krugman) Blizzard of Lies: I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come…And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country? What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

New York Times (Editorial): The most disheartening aspect of a scurrilous Republican ad falsely accusing Barack Obama of promoting sex education for kindergarten children is its closing line: “I’m John McCain, and I approved this message.” This from that straight-talker of yore, who fervidly denounced the 2004 Bush campaign’s Swift Boat character attacks on John Kerry’s military record. What a difference four years makes, especially after Mr. McCain secured the nomination by hiring some of the same low-blow artists from the Bush campaign.

New York Times (Larry Rohter): The advertisement [“Disrespectful”] is the latest in a number that resort to a dubious disregard for the facts. The nonpartisan political analysis group Factcheck.org has already criticized “Disrespectful” as “particularly egregious,” saying that it “goes down new paths of deception,” and is “peddling false quotes.”

New York Times (Michael Cooper and Jim Rutenberg) McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions: Mr. McCain came into the race promoting himself as a truth teller and has long publicly deplored the kinds of negative tactics that helped sink his candidacy in the Republican primaries in 2000. But his strategy now reflects a calculation advisers made this summer — over the strenuous objections of some longtime hands who helped him build his “Straight Talk” image — to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the eyes of voters.

ABC News-Political Punch (Jake Tapper): One can only imagine what the John McCain of 2004 – who called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads “dishonest and dishonorable” – would say about this ad… I suppose one could twist this stuff any way you want if your only point is to make an inflammatory charge. And win an election… The New York Times’ “Checkpoint” (“Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy “), Factcheck.org (“Obama, contrary to the ad's insinuation, does not support explicit sex education for kindergarteners”) and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker ("McCain's 'Education' Spot Is Dishonest, Deceptive") say the ad is a gross distortion. I agree -- in both senses of the word "gross."

AP (Charles Babington): The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak. Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He said Friday that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers' pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

http://www.americablog.com/2008/09/lies.html

An astonishing list of newspapers challenges McCain and his Lies

http://www.americablog.com/2008/09/lies.html

Christy

WOW

McCain-Palin: White man speaks with forked tongue.

OMG...two more big banks and retirement places going under!

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/09/lehman_rescue_stalls_bofa_seen.php

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/09/fed_moves_to_deal_with_financi.php

This is a crisis! How many people will lose their homes or their retirement money? This is a direct result of deregulation and is another reason why we can't afford 4 more years of McBush. The scary thing is that we may not make it 52 more days!

And I have to confess, I'm not even sure what happens to a home owner if their bank goes under? What happens to their loan?

And how is it that we bail out the businesses who begged for deregulation but we've tightened the purse strings on borrowers through the bankruptcy laws? Remember those? the ones where they blamed us for not being reliable?

CNN's Lou Dobbs with his Obama Waffles

PHOTO!

Exclaiming as he walked up to the booth "My wife will love these!"

http://roschellenelson.blogspot.com/2008/09/cnns-lou-dobbs-with-his-obama-waffles.html

Oh, ma lawd! That white man sho do looks proud of him some Obama waffles!

Wanker.

sparrow, the Framshop diary is EXCELLENT!!

Oppppps !!!!!!!

The candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America,
whose experience in small town politics, mothers´day dos and the local
hockey club is her claim to fame, threatened to open the gates of Hell
by attacking Russia in the event of another invasion of Georgia in a
televised interview on ABC (shown today). One question for this self-
opinionated upstart: Do you know what a nuclear holocaust is?

Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the
joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas before
letting rip in front of incredulous audiences while McCain coos in the
background, cuts a ridiculous figure as she strives to be taken
seriously.

How can anyone whose husband is a member of the Alaska Independence
Party and who is running for the Vice Presidency of the Union be taken
seriously? How indeed can the Republican Party be taken seriously for
not vetting this female, or have they not yet discovered the skeletons
in her closet? We have.

So Sarah Palin, Mrs. Hockey Mom housewife-cum-small-town gossip
merchant and cheap little guttersnipe, suppose you shut up and allowed
real politicians and diplomats to do their work? Threatening Russia
with a war is perhaps the most irresponsible thing anyone could do at
this moment in time. Have you any idea what a nuclear holocaust is?
Have you any notion of the power of Russia’s armed forces? Did you
know that Russia has enough missiles to destroy any target anywhere on
Earth in seconds?

And have you not forgotten, you pith-headed little bimbo from the back
of beyond, that small detail about the slaughter of Russian citizens
by Georgians, which started the whole debacle? So next time suppose
you keep your mouth shut and while you’re at it, make sure the members
of your family keep their legs shut too. Your country has enough
failed mothers as it is.

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/106354-palindevil-0

Media defend Palin on Bush doctrine

Via ThinkProgress, here's a video of various media types telling their viewers that it's totally okay that Sarah Palin doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is. Why is it okay? Because most Americans don't know what it is either! And they're right! In order for most Americans to know what is going on in the world, there would have to be some sort of public institution by which important facts would be systematically communicated to the general public, perhaps through an interconnected network of cathode ray tubes or something!

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/12/media-palin-bush-doctrine/

Is everybody ready for the opening bell? Hold on to your retirements, if you can!

I would pop some popcorn but I better save it for when we are starving.

Jiminy Christmas, even I KNOW what the Bush Doctrine is!

Strike first, ask questions later (if ever).

Geez, this is a stupid friggin country.

“If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama - with all his conspicuous gifts - could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most.

http://silencedmajority.blogs.com/silenced_majority_portal/2008/09/jonathan-freedl.html

McCain Loses Fox News: Megyn Kelly Rips McCain Flack For Claiming Obama Would Raise Middle Class Taxes

http://thinkprogress.org/

Holy Shittokki Batman! Watch it!

Well the stock market dropped 5% in Europe and our market won't close for awhile and it's our banks!

I was just over at DailyKos and the recommended all the recommended diaries because they were all amazing.

McCain's running mate personally protested abortions in Alaska and women wanting choice or even checkups had to come all the way down to Seattle. She installed a tanning bed in the Governor's mansion.

Hugo Chavez severed diplomatic ties with the US, which I knew, but they show the video of him surrounded by excited people and point out that most of South America is doing the same. There goes 10-15% of oil that goes to US.

Jerome a Paris says he predicted the banking meltdown and no one in US would publish his stuff (except DailyKos, of course.)

Another diarist reports yet another FEMA messup around the latest hurricanes (evacuation problems & lies.)

It's revealed that Gallup only releases polls favorable to McCain (manipulated likely voter numbers, estimates them, times poll release, does it intermittently at favorable times, uses USA Today etc.)

Obama in New Hampshire got a big excited crowd and that is somewhere McCain reports big excited crowds and badly wants.

Obama finally releases an ad calling McCain a liar (so we put it in our pro-Obama blog which was always positive but now we have pulled out all the stops.)

Hurricane Ike destroys oil platforms in Gulf of Mexico

Ok. So how does THIS effect the Republican's blaming Democrats for that off-shore drilling?

Gas is already up 20 cents from a week ago.

This election truly is a test of what America is made of.

After 8 years of GOP control, the financial sector is in ruins. And John McCain's financial guru, Phil Gramm, has nothing to offer the nation but the same old snake oil.

If the Red States pull the lever for the status quo that McCain represents, as I fear they will, you have to wonder if this crowd doesn't have an authentic death wish. Maybe that's why they're so bloody infatuated with the Apocalypse.

At worst, I expect divided government in 2009, with the Democrats in complete control of both Houses of Congress. And hence, I don't fear a McCain presidency in the way that I feared the Bush presidency. McCain has demonstrated that he's a politican, pure and simple, in this campaign - and a politican willing to float one lie after another if it helps him win the Presidency. Talk about selling one's soul to the Devil. But he's likely managable. Palin is another story entirely.

But my real issue is with that segment of the American people that appear to possess a death wish - and virtually no ability to separate spin and lies from anything approaching an authentic fact or an enduring principle.

It's sad, incredibly sad. America once represented the brightest minds on the planet. Now having a mind, and being able to actually use it, gets you painted as "elitist".

Gee, I haven't heard anyone in the media condemning the people of Texas who stayed behind after being warned to leave prior to Ike's landfall for being so stupid for having done so, or for being so dumb as to live in an area that is susceptible to hurricanes, nor have I heard Barbara Bush utter how well this is working out for them.

Shrill, baby, shrill.

September 14, 2008
Wind-Power Politics
By MARK SVENVOLD
“The moment I read that paper,” the wind entrepreneur Peter Mandelstam recalled, “I knew in my gut where my next wind project would be.”

I was having lunch with Mandelstam last fall to discuss offshore wind in general and how he and his tiny company, Bluewater Wind, came to focus on Delaware as a likely place for a nascent and beleaguered offshore wind industry to establish itself. Mandelstam had been running late all morning. I knew this because I received a half-dozen messages on my cellphone from members of his staff, who relayed his oncoming approach like air-traffic controllers guiding a wayward trans-Atlantic flight into Kennedy. This was the Bluewater touch — crisp, informative, ever-helpful, a supercharged, Eagle Scout attentiveness that was part corporate style, part calculated public-relations approach. It would pay off tremendously in his company’s barnstorming campaign of Delaware town meetings and radio appearances to capture what he had reason to believe would be the first offshore-wind project in the country’s history.

These features were, unsurprisingly, manifestations of Mandelstam himself, who arrived in a suit and tie, a wry smile, his wiry hair parted in the middle and tamped down like someone who had made a smooth transition from a Don Martin cartoon. Mandelstam, a 47-year-old native New Yorker who is capable of quoting Central European poets and oddball meteorological factoids with ease, had long committed himself — and the tiny company he formed in 1999 — to building utility-scale wind-power plants offshore, a decision that, to many wind-industry observers, seemed to fly in the face of common sense. Offshore marine construction was wildly, painfully expensive — like standing in a cold shower and ripping up stacks of thousand-dollar bills. The very laws for permitting and siting such projects had yet to be enacted. Indeed, the recent past was littered with failed offshore wind projects. Never mind that there were so many more opportunities in the continental United States to build land-based wind farms, which cost half as much as offshore projects. While wind-energy companies in Europe were moving offshore at great speed, neither Mandelstam nor anyone else had ever successfully built an offshore wind farm in the United States. Failed, stalled or delayed projects sounded like a catalog of coastal shipwrecks: Long Island, Padre Island, Cape Wind. Entrepreneurs, of course, need to anticipate the next market, but when it came to offshore wind, Mandelstam seemed too far ahead of the curve to ever succeed.

Then in 2005 Willett Kempton, a University of Delaware professor in the school’s College of Marine Studies, began teaching a course on offshore wind power. “In our department,” Kempton recalls, “most of my colleagues were working on some aspect of the global-warming problem.” Coal-fired power plants, a major contributor of carbon in the atmosphere, had recently been linked in Delaware to clusters of cancer outbreaks and to high levels of mercury in the state’s fishery. One of the first things Kempton and his class did was go down the list of clean-energy options for Delaware — “It was a pretty short list,” he said. Solar power was still far too expensive to be economically sustainable. And the state had no land-based wind resource to speak of. But a team of students, led by Amardeep Dhanju, became curious about measuring the winds off the coast to determine whether they might serve as a source of power. What he found was that Delaware’s coastal winds were capable of producing a year-round average output of over 5,200 megawatts, or four times the average electrical consumption of the entire state. “On the wholesale electricity markets,” Dhanju wrote, “this would produce just over $2 billion” in annual revenue.

- more -

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14wind-t.html

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies."

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

http://mailcenter.comcast.net/wmc/v/wm/48CE8FC40006773E000039B522069997359D0A9C0A079D090B?cmd=Next&no=391&sid=c0

better link
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/governor-palins-reading-l_b_126478.html

This is like all the years Bush said that everything in Iraq was swell. And Heckofajob...

Now, McBush thinks the 'economy is fundamentally sound.'

Even millionaires losing money might disagree with that assessment even though they are doing MUCH BETTER than average Jane or John Doe.

However, as I've heard said by people before, "When it hurts enough, people will say stop."

Or a less kind of way to say it is, "If you vote for McCain/Palin, knowing that they want pre-emptive war; they want to build BIG CORPORATIONS UP and promote a "Global Economy"; and they want NO HEALTHCARE UNLESS YOU"RE IN THEIR CLASS...well, you get what you vote for and don't be surprised when your job walks out the door to China and you're penniless and living in the streets."

(Yes. I've heard people saying that, and I am to the point where I may have to agree with them. Except we all will be peniless, jobless, homeless, health-careless, but McCain and Palin will be living in their mansions.)

Matthew, the red states do not have a 'death wish'. They literally do not know any better.

Louisiana, for example. they have my kids praying twice a day in public school, the police and politicians are totally corrupt and we have not had a fair election ever. Control of information is tightest here and these people are literally in the dark when it comes to current events that affect their lives. Most have never seen a protest sign in their ENTIRE LIVES!!? Is it just me or is that not freaking insane?

Add to that the worst public schools, the highest poverty and illiteracy rates and the worst medical system ever and you have people that are literally out there wondering around in the darkness without a chance in hell to learn what 'should be'.

They did not abandon America, America abandoned them. They are still here, and still completely disenfranchised on every level.

These people are not in control of any part of their own destiny, that is why there are so many churches here because churches always flourish when people are desperate. The religious offering of salvation is the only comfort they have.

They literally CAN'T tell the spin from the facts because all they have ever known are lies and propaganda. No one has ever been able to stop it.

I might blame them too if I did not live here, I would blame them because it is more comfortable than wondering how in the hell such a place came to be right in the very heart of our nation.

But I am here, and I can tell you, it is not a death wish. It is all they know, it is all they were ever offered. They literally know not what they do. All they were ever taught to do was shut up and pray for the best.

They did not give up on America, America gave up on them. That is the real tragedy of it all.

To me, that is why God sent Katrina. To tear open the heart of a nation and show you all how rotten it was to the core. He ripped away the facade and showed you what We really are as a nation.

BTW, I have not heard anyone dogging on the stay behinds in Texas either, nor any speculation as to why God hit Texas this time.

I think I know why though. george w bush and his greedy war for oil cabal.

It is pretty obvious that God just drank their milkshake.

Christy

It's ironic that one of the favorite conservative book series is called "Left Behind." In that case, they are talking about those who are "raptured up" after Armageddon.

The truth is that the South has been "left behind" as you describe (economically, educationally & so forth) and now alot of America is following in the same footsteps - the barren empty "breadbasket" areas where young people leave in droves like I did, & the rusty outlived factory towns as shown in "Roger & Me" and a couple of other Michael Moore movies (he's native.)

McCain chose his running mate to trick such people once again.

I hate to be a cheerleader around here, but the young heading to the cities aren't finding life any better. For the most part, there are many homeless and jobless. And the bars and restaurants abound with minimum wage jobs that you have to compete for!

I have to say, I believe it's hopeless for them and us right now. And I, personally, am to the point of blaming every single Bush voter for this mess. I'm blaming every McCain/Palin for the mess that will continue.

Shooting yourself in the foot is one thing. But these people are shooting each and every one of us, including our freinds and family, and they look down at us with no compassion for what they're doing.

"It's tough out here," they think. "Deal. with. it."

Take a look at the bloody deer that Palin shot with her kid. When she shot that deer was her freezer already full? When she shot that deer and watched it bleed to death, did she need that deer or was it just extra? Just like money. Those greedy people don't need more money. They just like the sport of getting more money. So if Palin didn't need that deer for feeding her and her family then she callously did it for sport.

To McCain and Palin, our suffering is their sport. And that's why McCain can lie through his false teeth like he does. And that's why Palin can lie through hers.

They enjoy the sport and don't care about the common well-being out here.

I heard Ed Schultz on the way home today and he put it just right, "The Democratic Party cares about your life post birth."

And I heard Randi Rhodes on business and bailouts. (Paraphrased) "They're pro-business deregulation and pro-profit and they keep the profits for their CEO's. But after the de-regulation they insisted upon kills them, that's when they're pro-socialism (meaning BAIL US OUT) and their CEO's still get the money (profits)."

You know who you are. You are LYING to US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You dirty, corrupt SOBs!

Posted by wowimthere

How can Obama raise 66 million dollars in August, gain another 500,000 donors and have over 80 thousand people show up at his Denver speech and be tied with a corrupt politician who can't even get 5000 people to hear him speak, who can't raise money on his own and has to lie about the crowd sizes to create perception that he's doing well enough to be considered a presidential hopeful?

80 percent of this country believes that this country is going in the wrong direction and I'm supposed to believe that McCain who votes with Bush 90 percent of the times is tied with Obama?

COME ON!

All indications are that Dems will gain more seats in the House and the Senate giving the Dems an overwhelming majority to push their agenda but Obama who is a popular Democrat who can get disaffected Republicans and Independents to vote for the Democratic ticket may not get to the white house because he's tied with a Republican who was responsible for enabling Bush?

COME ON!

The Democrats have registered 11,000,000 more Democrats than the Republicans and I'm supposed to believe that Obama and McCain are tied?

COME ON!

McCain picks a woman to be his running mate (for political reasons) who has absolutely no foreign policy experience (a credential he ripped Obama for), who is as corrupt as he is and is just a heartbeat away from the presidency and he and Obama are tied?

COME ON!

All together!

Chuck Todd is LYING!
MSNBC is LYING!
CNN is LYING!
ABC is LYING!
CBS is LYING!
Wallstreet Journal is LYING!
USA Today is LYING!

And the polls...?

GALLUP IS LYING!
RASMUSSEN IS LYING!

THERE IS NO TIE! This is a fabrication. This is an illusion. This is a fairytale.

The Media and the Polls they road in on are FULL of SHIT! They want you to believe the illogical. It's a LIE. How can they get away with THIS LIE?

Obama and McCain are NOT TIED! Good commonsense defies the logic of the polls. The media who sponsors these polls is holding these polls up as a way of pushing their own agenda. People should do one thing consistently. Write or call the media outlets to tell them that you aren't gullible, that you know that they are trying to sway opinion and possibly the election.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/wowimthere/6

More McCain signs popping up around here. But still way more Obama.

It will boil down to who actually votes.

My daughter registered and requested an absentee ballot today. So we've got another vote. (Yay!) She's fought participating in 'politics' for a long time. But I think she knows that McCain is Bush and is scared for the country now.

Keep in mind that she knows, listens (unwillingly), and so she's not online or listening to the media. Call it force feeding on my part to her...

According to NPR, several slave camps are alleged to be running in Florida. These "Slave Farms" were reported on Morning Edition.

"It's shocking -- it broke my heart, you know? Their conditions are like the ones you would see on a documentary from 300 years ago."
Outreach worker Julia Castro

According to NPR's investigation, most of the workers are U.S. citizens, many homeless African-American men recruited from shelters and soup kitchens. Lured by promises of work, they find themselves in fenced farm camps sometimes paid with drugs instead of money. Raids are rare, and many of the camps are remote. Charities take food and clothes to workers in the field. more information

As for the "push polling" of the Florida Jewish vote - it seems Florida Republicans have hired a firm to locate those who voted for Kerry and try to swing them to McCain. Here is what they do.

(info from JewsVote.org )

Joelna Marcus received a phone call to her Key West residence that went like this:

She was asked if she is Jewish, and she replied in the affirmative.
She was asked if she was religious.
She was then asked if her opinion of Barack Obama would change if she knew that Obama had given lots and lots of money to the PLO.

Joelna said the caller admited that the calls were meant for Jews only. The firm sending the calls, Research Strategies, has a history of working for Republican candidates.

DONATE VOTE CALL CANVASS READ BLOG WRITE LTE's DOCUMENT BE THE CHANGE http://silencedmajority.blogs.com/silenced_majority_portal/2008/09/florida---land.html

When will We the People ever learn...

Dow Crashes 504.48 points on corporate greed and hubris...

Its not like the Founders did not warn us...as President Thomas Jefferson said:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

Got Greed?

Shareholders sue Merrill Lynch in New York Supreme Court over proposed buyout of Merrill by Bank of America; says terms are "wrong, unfair and harmful" to Merrill stockholders 5:21pm EDT

Indeed. Such obscene concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few and merciless are just as harmful as the threats to our freedom from abroad or within our government.

Fascism...its not just for dictatorships anymore.

Gator Bait,

Excellent post! And the point is right on.

I think that's what scares most of us here at the DCP and other progressive blogs. The average person doesn't get it until it personally affect them. THEN they still 'get it' mentally but they vote for something that their gut also knows is the antithesis of what the brain is saying!

Greetings from the Land of the Morning Calm!

I have just arrived a few hours ago.

A few quick observations:
- Asiana Airlines pampered me well overnight, though its complimentary newspaper selection included the Chosun Ilbo, a mouthpiece of the pro-W Lee Myung-bak regime with glowing praises of Sarah Palin, as well as the Segye Ilbo, owned by Reverend Moon (and sister paper of the Washington Times).
- Upon arriving in Yeouido, a densely built-up island near downtown Seoul that's called "Seoul's Manhattan" (also home to the national legislature and the largest Christian church in the world by congregation), I saw squatters protesting Lee Myung-bak regime's crackdown on temp workers and their rights.
- Also nearby: newish looking middle class apartments that were recently condemned by Seoul and Samsung in order to build luxury apartments on site and make money for Samsung - I found that out due to residents' banners hanging on the apartment buildings.

I will do my part during my next month-plus in Seoul, to stop the Lee Myung-bak and Samsung machine from installing John McCain as your next President, and from banning teen abortion and gay marriage in California.

NMP...that slavery thing is terrible. Of course I believe it because I have heard of similar type things from those former shows like 20 20. They would basically sign these people up for indentured slave wages. Charge them enormously for room and board, and then they'd work forever trying to earn money to pay off that debt which was non-ending! (Is indentured slave the right word?)

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