Politics
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- threadpost0
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.c…
Exactly right, if McCain so urgently needs to be in washington (but not before milling around cbs) that he must cancel his scheduled interview with Letterman, he should be willing to put in his backup QB, Palin. This is exactly what would happen in the real world were he to be unavailable for whatever reason. But instead they continue to shield her from any press scrutiny. Because she is unable to stand on her own, without the safety net of her phonetically written cue cards and cadre of "advisers" (see Bush II and his inability to think on his feet, w/o a team of advisers).
This thing stinks, McCain the "straight talker" is nothing more than a speaking teleprompter. And this delicate little lap dog Palin, totally incapable of fielding any nonscripted questions is just utterly frightening. Frightening because most of these american sheep don't see right through their games.
- monkeyshine0
I would also vote for Fareed Zakaria for president:
- ukit0
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
- ukit0
- what's scary is how close to the real interview experience that actually was! Funny stuff.monkeyshine
- TheBlueOne0
"Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”
. . McCain is expected to have a front-row seat at Bristol’s wedding and to benefit from the outpouring of goodwill that it could bring. “What’s the downside?” a source inside the McCain campaign said. “It would be wonderful. I don’t know that there has ever been a pre-election wedding before.”
Seriously WTF. He can suspend his campaign long enough to grandstand in DC because it's you know, vitally important and shit for America, but he's got time to go to the sluts wedding? And they hope this distracts America?
http://needlenose.com/wp/2008/09…
Bread and fucking circuses. That's ALL they have. Yeah let's watch the little teenage whore get married and get all misty-eyed and shit. The American Idolization of politics just continues meanwhile Rome burns. I wish the Almighty would just deliver Mighty Neck Punches of Justice to all involved.
- hallelujah0
"McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 27, 2008
WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.
By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.
The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.
To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)
Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain. As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll. The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new polls from Fox News, Marist and CNN/Time, each with numbers closer to Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose strongholds of Alaska and Montana.
That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin. The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.
But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.
What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.
The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.) By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.
By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)
It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.
Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains, Bono, and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.
There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on the down-low.
Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”
In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience. Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”
Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”
That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David Blaine: Dive of Death.”
It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office."
- hallelujah0
"Why was Friday a game changer? Because we're tired of personal and public drama. We're tired of Clinton family dramas, we're tired of breathless, paralyzing fear the robs of us our ability to assess. We're tired of lurching from one crisis to another. McCain is a Walking Crisis. McCain is more dangerous than Bush. McCain doesn't think, doesn't care about the people, our status in the world, and only has military solutions to every foreign policy problem. He personalizes every policy position. Everything is an out-an-out fight as if it's an assault on his very being. These are the reasoning skills of a self-absorbed eight year old. The world is not a playground, Sen. McCain. It is you who does not "understand" the realities of the world.
We're sick of it. Those of us less engaged are sick of it, too, maybe even more so. They just didn't know what the alternative was; if they could trust that uppity, dangerous black guy, for whom the narrative was begun and hammered by Hillary and taken up by McCain.
This past week, culminating in Friday's debate, was a breath of fresh, steady, intelligent air. That we can think as a nation, that our President can lead without personal puffery. That the welfare of the American people can be served instead of exploited.
I've been calling it comfort level since Friday. But there's more to it than that: we can finally relax, we can trust. We'd forgotten what grown up leadership looks like. Even though we liked the exuberance of the Clinton administration, we haven't been guided by steady hands in decades. Even on the left when some of my favorite left wing radio hosts sneer at Obama for having the likes of Robert Rubin as an advisor, they ignore the fact that Obama also has his left wing advisors as well. He will include all voices to find the best answer to any problem. The best answer, not just his answer. Obama is comfortable enough in his own being to embrace the fact that solutions are bigger than he is. It's true leadership.
Anyone 35 or under doesn't even know what that kind of leadership looks like. Anyone older has forgotten.
The events of the past week culminating in Friday's debate brought that back.
So the McCain campaign can have at it with distractions, lies, ugliness, fear, stunts. That's how we got in every mess we're in now. That's all that the Obama campaign needs to say from here on out.
Change is no longer just a slogan. We know what it looks like. It's calm, thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent leadership and policies with our welfare at its core. It's leadership we can trust.
We knew we were yearning for something different. We just didn't know what it was. Now we do. "
- lowimpakt0
just post the link...just post the link...just post the link...just post the link...just post the link...just post the link..just post the link...just post the link
- i imagine he's pasting articles from paid subscriptions_salisae_
- ah. that's totally cool so..... excuse my ranting...lowimpakt
- i just checked. the last one is from the NYTlowimpakt
- I don't want to paste the link, I want the info RIGHT HEREhallelujah
- zaq0
- _salisae_0
excellent reading, thank you hallelujah
- locustsloth0
The bracelet comeback by Obama may not have been so clever
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politic…
It may be that the mother (because of negative attention via the internet to previous mentionings of her son) asked him nt to wear it anymore on the trail, much less mention it. The truth of the matter still remains to be seen,
- don't you find this extremely trite?_salisae_
- i think the whole "a mom of a dead soldier likes me" thing is a dangerous move, easy to backfire on either partylocustsloth
- the whole thing is overblown...and the comments on that site are pretty scary.monkeyshine
- The mother was 'ecstatic'... http://ap.google.com…joeth
- TheBlueOne0
I miss the good old days....like two or three weeks ago, when $87 billion seemed like alot of money...
- drgss0
When is the election already
- dbloc0
the spew had to be cleaned up after the debate.
- Mirpour0
re-post but I will post this fucker as many times as needed..
- ukit0
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2…
Here's the long and short of it for John McCain: Barack Obama has as large a lead in the election as he's held all year. But there is much less time left on the clock than there was during other Obama periods of strength, such as in February, mid-June or immediately following the Democratic convention. This is a very difficult combination of circumstances for him.
On the strength of a set of national tracking polls that each show Obama at or near his high-water mark all year, our model projects that he would win an election hold today by 4.2 points. It discounts this lead slightly to a projected margin of 3.3 points on November 4, as most races tend to tighten as we approach election day.
This lead might not sound like that much, but it's fairly significant: we've been through two conventions and one debate, voters have dug their heels in, and Obama's position in the Electoral College is extremely robust. Trimming away a 4-5 point lead isn't that difficult over the summer months -- in fact, McCain accomplished exactly that in July and August -- but it's a steeper hill to climb after Labor Day. And if anything, our projection may be lowballing Obama slightly, as the aforementioned national tracking data (which incorporates one day of post-debate interviewing) has Obama's lead in the range of 5-8 points; the model will need Obama to hold those numbers for another day or two before it catches up to them.
Democrats have no reason to be complacent. Although the situation looks dramatically better for them than it did two weeks ago, so too have the stakes of the election increased. The next president will face perhaps the most challenging set of circumstances of any since Franklin Roosevelt, and could potentially have nearly as much impact on the future direction of the country. Obama could very easily lose, and even if he wins, odds are that there will be at least one more swing back toward McCain in the intervening 37 days. Nevertheless, as Isaac Chotiner suggests, I believe that the national punditry is understanding the difficulty of the position that McCain finds himself in.
- hallelujah0
I don't want to paste the link, I want the info RIGHT HERE
