Wednesday, August 20, 2008

McSame McDraft McYour McAss!

If you are still somehow on the fence about John Sidney McSame and you are under say 30 years of age and male, you should probably pay attention to this transcript of today's McSame "town hall" meeting in New Mexico.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Senator McCain I truly hope you get the opportunity to chase Bin Laden right to the gates of hell and push him in as you stated on your forum. I do have a question though. Disable veterans, especially in this state have horrible conditions, their medical is substandard. They drive four hours one way to Albuquerque for a simple doctors appointment which is often canceled. Our VA hospital is dirty it is understaffed, it is running on maximum overload. The prescription medicines are ten years behind standard medical care we have seven hundred claims stacked up at the VA office in Albuquerque some of them are ten and seven years old waiting to be processed in the mean time these people are homeless. My son is an officer in the Air Force, and I am a vet and I was raised in a military family. I think it is a sad state of affairs when we have illegal aliens having a Medicaid card that can access specialist top physicians, the best of medical and our vets can’t even get to a doctor. These are the people that we tied yellow ribbons for and Bush patted on the back. If we don’t reenact the draft I don’t think we will have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.

MCCAIN: Ma’am let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said and thank you and I am grateful for your support of all of our veterans.
Right now, there's probably one of two things going through your mind:
  1. I honestly believe that was a slip and with that being the last thing the woman in the audience said, he somehow actually missed that part about reinstating the draft and that he should probably be more careful in the future discussing something like that in public, I mean really Zandar give the guy a break, he's 72 almost and a POW.
  2. Oh shit, I'm going to the sandbox if this guy is elected.

But They're Still A Sovereign Nation

The Iraqis have apparently been "convinced" to drop their timetable demands from the Status Of Force Agreement.
U.S. and Iraqi negotiators completed a draft deal on Wednesday to give U.S. troops a legal basis to stay in Iraq after 2008, without setting out a timetable for their withdrawal, Iraq's top negotiator said.

The White House denied that the long-awaited deal -- which will replace a U.N. Security Council resolution that now provides the basis for the U.S. presence -- had been finalized.

"The delegations finished the draft which now goes to the political leaders for discussions," chief Iraqi negotiator Mohammed al-Haj Hamoud told Reuters. Iraq's political leadership must approve it and submit it to parliament.

He said the draft did not spell out a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, and also leaves unresolved the thorny question of whether U.S. troops will be subject to Iraqi law.

Those issues will be resolved in further negotiations.

Iraqi officials have said for weeks that the deal is close and they hope to present it to parliament when lawmakers return from the summer recess.

But issues such as a timeline for withdrawing troops, their immunity from Iraqi law and the status of prisoners held by U.S. forces, have held up a final deal.

Asked about the draft in Washington, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said "discussions with the Iraqis on a bilateral agreement are ongoing." Asked if that meant there was still no deal, he said "Right."
The way I figure it, the odds of us leaving Iraq under President Obama are admittedly pretty slim. The odds of leaving Iraq under President McSame are precisely zero.

A Streetcar Named Cincy

Once again if you haven't checked it out, Cincy's downtown streetcar program was featured in the NY Times.
Cincinnati officials are assembling financing for a $132 million system that would connect the city’s riverfront stadiums, downtown business district and Uptown neighborhoods, which include six hospitals and the University of Cincinnati, in a six- to eight-mile loop. Depending on the final financing package, fares may be free, 50 cents or $1.

The city plans to pay for the system with existing tax revenue and $30 million in private investment. The plan requires the approval of Mayor Mark Mallory, a proponent, and the City Council.

At least 40 other cities are exploring streetcar plans to spur economic development, ease traffic congestion and draw young professionals and empty-nest baby boomers back from the suburbs, according to the Community Streetcar Coalition, which includes city officials, transit authorities and engineers who advocate streetcar construction.

Given gas is a good $3.85 a gallon here, this is a win/win/win/win for Cincy, businesses, the environment, and residents.

Make The Bad Village Man Stop

The Bad Village Man hurts Zandar's mind with stuff like:
Barack Obama might just need Hillary Clinton.
NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO WITH BILLIONS OF MINI-NOS ORBITING EACH LARGER FULLY AUTONOMOUS NO.

Barack Obama needs Hillary like MTV needs more reality shows.

The Definition Of Village Stupidity:

The AP reporting that attacking Democrats on patriotism unfairly works, then they discuss why that might be.
The political landscape is littered with Democrats whose campaigns have been hurt by questions about their patriotism. Barack Obama wants to avoid the same fate.

Critics have questioned Obama's patriotism for months, whispering about why he didn't wear a flag pin on his lapel and contending he didn't put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. Republican rival John McCain has asserted that Obama has placed his political self-interest ahead of his country's.

"Behind all of these claims and positions by Sen. Obama lies the ambition to be president," McCain said this week during a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.

The culpability of the media of course is never questioned unfairly.

Well, This Can't Be Good...

Latest Zogby Poll has McCain up by 5. No, that is not a typo. No, this is not the scary part.
In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

McCain leads Obama among likely U.S. voters by 46 percent to 41 percent, wiping out Obama's solid 7-point advantage in July and taking his first lead in the monthly Reuters/Zogby poll.

Losing 12 points in a month, STILL not the scary part.

This is the scary part.

McCain now has a 9-point edge, 49 percent to 40 percent, over Obama on the critical question of who would be the best manager of the economy -- an issue nearly half of voters said was their top concern in the November 4 presidential election.

That margin reversed Obama's 4-point edge last month on the economy over McCain, an Arizona senator and former Vietnam prisoner of war who has admitted a lack of economic expertise and shows far greater interest in foreign and military policy.

Houston, we have a problem. How the [BLOG EDIT] is Barack Obama possibly losing on the economy to McSame? This is a major, major problem and Obama needs to start hitting hard on real numbers to real people before we end up with McSame making the situation twice as bad.

Yo Joe!

Yes, looks like Joe F'ckin Lieberman is on the fast track for Biggest Douchebag In Congress again.
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate in 2000 and now an independent who is one of John McCain's strongest supporters, will speak at the Republican National Convention, an official said.

Lieberman will deliver a speech when Republicans gather in St. Paul, Minn., to nominate McCain for president, a party official told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The official requested anonymity because a formal announcement had yet to be made, and Lieberman's office declined to comment.

Yeah, and this surprised a grand total of &$@#*%$ nobody. As John Aravosis says at AmericaBlog,
Come the next Congress, when Barack Obama is president, Joe Lieberman will be kicked out of the Democratic caucus. And if he's not kicked out, there will be a civil war in the Democratic party until he is. The man is nothing more than a vindictive shell of his former self (of course, we did all make him lose his nomination, so at least Lieberman will have to live with that the rest of his life, being kicked out of his own party). He's no longer trustworthy, and he's now stabbing our party and our candidate in the back. He shouldn't just have his committee chairmanship taken away from him, he should be pushed into the minority party where he can be happy and powerless with his fellow Republicans.

Democrats need to turn on Lieberman now, because in a couple of weeks there will be never-ending stories about how moderate and mainstream Lieberman is, and how that's the reason nobody likes him in our party any more, that's the reason he's speaking at the convention. No, the man is a traitor to his own party, as he's now shown. He also seems to have a penchant for war in the Middle East. And I'm not sure the American people know that - the degree to which Lieberman is responsible for our current, and possibly our future, wars in the region. He and McCain go hand in hand.
I am so looking forward to this guy getting his just desserts. Hell, I hope he is McSame's Veep. I relish the thought.

Obama Under The Weather

The Obama/Weathermen Underground/Bill Ayers story refuses to go away, and Tom Macguire over at Just One Minute has been pitbulling it for a while now. The AP has gotten a hold of the story and is running with it.
The University of Illinois on Tuesday refused to release records relating to Barack Obama's service to a nonprofit group linked to former 1960s radical activist William Ayers.

The university's Chicago campus said the donor of the records that document the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge has not yet turned over ownership rights to the material.

The university is "aggressively pursuing" an agreement with the donor, and as soon as an agreement is finalized, the collection will be made accessible to the public, the university said in a one-paragraph statement.

There was no indication when an agreement will be worked out. The university did not identify the donor who it said was concerned that the release not invade personal privacy.

The Obama campaign said the senator does not have control over these records or the ability to release them, adding that it has made many documents related to Obama's life available to the public and that "we are pleased the university is pursuing an agreement that would make these records publicly available."

On Monday, the National Review magazine posted an online article saying that the institution had initially declared that the records were open to inspection, but that the university subsequently reversed its position.

On Tuesday, the university said that there had been a misunderstanding about the status of the collection.

Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who in his youth co-founded the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence as a necessity for political change.

In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was awarded nearly $50 million by a foundation to help reform Chicago schools.

Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Republicans have been highlighting his ties to Ayers through the group.

I don't know if there's any "there" there, but then again the GOP is damn good at perfecting teapot-based tempest technology. The worst thing Obama can do is ignore this, because this will be used to attack his patriotism. We've already seen the McCain campaign stoop to that level before, just this week. After all, the GOP has no problem with smearing Obama using email spam.

For months, anonymous e-mail chain letters, blog posts and message board items attacking Barack Obama have been flying around the country. Obama's campaign is concerned enough about the rumor mill to devote an entire Web site to fighting them. While some of the messages are blatantly false, the most dangerous ones mix lies and out-of-context facts just well enough to sound legit, playing not too subtly on racism and ignorance to make the truths they include sound sinister. (Now a book that basically collects some of the bogus accusations by Jerome Corsi is sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.)

Two such messages, circulating by e-mail and popping up in comments on blogs for months, are reproduced below -- and annotated and debunked, point by point -- to illustrate the tactics Obama's been up against for most of the campaign. The first e-mail attacks the candidate's wife, attempting to paint Michelle Obama –- and by extension, Barack Obama -- as an America-hating black separatist radical. Democratic pollsters say many voters don't know much about Michelle Obama. This e-mail, which began circulating during the Democratic primaries, seems to be a deliberate attempt to fill in a mostly blank mental canvas with negative associations before the Obama campaign can tell her story itself.

A second, more recent e-mail, received just a few days ago, shows that the spurious but very durable belief that Obama is a Muslim continues to ricochet around the Internet.

I mean let's face it, "Obama is a Muslim, his wife's a Black Panther" is the "Gore says he invented the internet" and "Kerry was a war coward" of 2008. It won't go away, and of course the more Obama tries to deny it, the stronger the lie becomes in the minds of people who are looking for any excuse to vote against the guy and not seem to be a racist.

Remember the main thrust: The GOP is trying to absolve you of your guilt for not voting for Barack Obama, because a black man in charge of the country freaks you out. It's cool to hate Muslims, terrorists, elitists, people who are married to terrorists, traitors, elitist traitors, terrorist elitists, Muslims who can't bowl, and traitors who eat arugula.

By The Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, Will This Ever Cease?


Yep, another Credible Obama Veep Selection Rumor, this time for Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Our sources work within an ad agency that is hired by the Obama campaign, and have noted that the vast majority of the discussions there are regarding material logistics in terms of Kathleen on the vice president ticket. Now until this is verified please file it as rumor, however our sources on this are not bad.. and have yet to be proven wrong.

Our source noted “It will get a women on the ticket that shares the same views as Obama” a reference to many of the Hillary supporters..

Oh boy!
Then of course we had to do some research.
Uh-huh.
We held some general opinions prior to this little research project. One of them being that they wouldn’t have multiple domain providers, it becomes a hassle.. so the chances are they used the same registrar.

The Main BARACK OBAMA site is using Godaddy as their registrar and uses DomainControl.com as their DNS… pretty generic.. as anyone can pretty much do that…

Now were it get’s interesting is the other contenders…

Domain Name: BARACKOBAMA.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Name Server: NS05.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS06.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

It appears OBAMASEBELIUS.COM is owned by the Obama Campaign, and the ‘hidden’ registration will turn into a website after the announcement. Our lead noted that a site is already being designed .. and advertising agencies are always full of leaks. Again file as rumor until verified…

Sebelius is a better choice than Kaine, that's for damn sure. I wish Obama would just tell us already so we can all be disappointed somewhat and so we can get to the important point of BEATING MCSAME.

Is Kaine Able? Able To Destroy Obama, Maybe...

I'm going to take a serious look at Gov. Tim Kaine today, going on the strength of the rumors that he's Obama's pick (at the very least he's on the short short list and deserves some scrutiny.) Bottom line is that Kaine is:
  • Pro-Life
  • Anti-Death Penalty
  • Anti Stem Cell Research
All of these are based on his strong Christian faith. Now, I can't fault the guy for that, because he's pretty much the exact political model of my parents, other than the fact they are New York Catholic as opposed to Kaine's Virginia model. There are such things as pro-life faith-based Democrats, folks. I grew up in a family full of them and was raised as one. I'm not as passionate as my parents about it, but on those issues I do agree with them. It's consistent at least, the State does not have the right to take a person's life. My parents have the same views.

The thing is, I'm also a realist.

Tim Kaine is not consistent. The State takes the lives of people all the damn time, that's how it exercises power. Tim Kaine is very much a hawk, having said he supports the Iraq War and being a Virginia politician made every Patrick Henry reference in the world to why we're there. I also know being a pro-life Democrat is politically akin to being everybody's crazy uncle at the family reunion. People tolerate you, but that's about it...but you can't be a pro-life person and happily support a war where hundreds of thousands of people die. That makes you a hypocrite AND a schmuck.

Now, here's the thing with Kaine: The pro-war thing I have to forgive because Obama has his war mad-on moments too. Stem cell isn't a gamebreaker because Obama's for it. I could actually hold my nose on it because Obama has to win. I've already said that I can't fault a person for being pro-life. But if Barack Obama picks Tim Kaine, he's going to lose in November.

Can you imagine what a pro-life male candidate for Veep is going to do to the 18 million Hillary Clinton voters? I can. It...will not be pretty. They will revolt, openly, at the choice of Kaine. And if the pro-life thing doesn't do it, the rest of the party will revolt at Kaine because he's a Bush-lite DINO on economic issues, and that's where his views and the views I grew up on strongly diverge.
Matt Stoller :: Why Virginia Progressives Turned Against Kaine
Three years into the Kaine Administration, Virginia Progressives stand aghast at what it has become. From his repeal of the estate tax to his abandoned plan for universal Pre-K, to his opposition to embryonic stem cells, from his failed transportation plans to cozy relationship to Dominion Power and his reprehensible support of the Wise Coal Plant, the Kaine administration has fulfilled our every early fear and never failed to disappoint progressive Virginia.

Not only has Kaine caved to the business right by promoting coal against the opposition of environmentalists and cutting taxes on the superwealthy, but the state is paralyzed by hyper-partisanship. This is far from Mark Warner's era, when he was able to work with Republicans to pass progressive fiscal policies.

Kathy G and Melissa McEwan also have good points on choice, the war, homophobia, etc.

Suffice it to say I am as decidedly unthrilled as I am (unfortunately) totally unsurprised that the Obama campaign is even considering putting a gay-baiting DINO war hawk whose personal "views on abortion are roughly in line with those of George W. Bush" on the ticket.

Kaine is a very bad choice for VP. He's done nothing as Governor except turn a functional state government into a partisan cesspool of giveaways to the rich and anger everyone in the process. And on national positions, the only thing he brings to the table is that he can play the Lieberman as VP role again. And sequels usually suck, especially if the original was bad.

If it IS Kaine, then both the netroots and the PUMAs are going to go berserk. If you thought the malaise about Obama selling the netroots up the river and the cries of sexism from the PUMAs was bad BEFORE, wait until Obama selects Tim Kaine. First rule of Veep work is DO NO HARM, and Kaine is a 55-gallon drum of extra strength Harm.

It's...a bad idea. It's borderline disastrous. God help me, but he might be a worse choice than Hillary...into Epic Fail territory.

StupidiNews!