22 posts tagged “mccain”

What is the point of watching this kind of kabuki dance??

The questions will "be culled from a group of 100 to 150 uncommitted likely voters in the audience and another one-third to come via the Internet."...."An audience member will not be allowed to switch questions. Under the deal, the moderator may not ask followups or make comments. The person who asks the question will not be allowed a follow-up either, and his or her microphone will be turned off after the question is read. A camera shot will only be shown of the person asking — not reacting."....McCain and Obama are not supposed to ask each other direct questions.

If nobody can ask a follow-up question, you are going to get more of the non-sequitur responses that Palin came up with last week.  A question on the economy?  How about a response on Iraq!  A question about health care?  How about a response of catch phrases and gibberish!  What a waste...  The only positive is that this kind of a format will limit McCain's ability to do something that changes the current state of the election.  However, we all lose, because we are not going to get any substative discussion of issues.

Now, only at the end, do we understand...

So we have McCain today getting his crowd riled up asking who Barack Obama is and then apparently giving a wink and a nod when one member of the crowd screams out "terrorist."

And later we have Sarah Palin with the same mob racket, getting members of the crowd to yell out "kill him", though it's not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn't seem to matter.

The polls are looking like an Obama blowout in this election.  McCain's strategists have said that they have to "change the dynamic" of the election at this point.  When the chips are down, you really get to take stock of a person's character.

(from TPM)

I just read this headline:

The McCain camp has just sent word that the senator is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to deal with the financial crisis.

McCain is also calling for a postponement of Friday night's debate and for Obama to suspend his campaign as well.

No, this is not a joke... but it sure is a stunt.  Kind of like picking a demonstrably unqualified freshman governor to salvage his campaign, calling off much of the republican convention because of a storm, etc., etc.

What a nut!  I wonder if the rest of the country will think he's off his rocker too...

Oh man, this is just too rich!  This is some sort of a press release from the sun tan booth industry representatives in response to the news that Sarah Palin had a tanning booth installed in the governor's mansion in Alaska.

While partisan bloggers and the sun scare industry will use this as an opportunity to undermine Gov. Palin and demonize the indoor tanning industry, the fact is that Governor Palin's decision to get UV light from a tanning bed positively impacts her health.

"Moderate amounts of indoor tanning allow Governor Palin to experience the many health benefits that come with exposure to UV light," said Dan Humiston, President of the Indoor Tanning Association. "Especially in dreary northern locations like Alaska, indoor tanning can help guard against wintertime depression and ward off diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency."

"Kudos to Governor Palin for standing up to dermatologists and other members of the sun scare industry who are trying to frighten Americans away from UV light."

Yeah!  Stick it to the MAN!  I ain't gonna let no "dermatologists" tell me about "dangers" to my "skin"!  What do they know?  Bunch of pointy-headed egg-heads tellin me what to do!  I'll show them.  I'll get cancer just to spite 'em!

***********

BTW, on planet reality's irony watch number two zillion with these jokers - let's just quietly note that John McCain has been treated for melanoma.  I'm just sayin...

I kind of hate to keep posting about Sarah Palin... but somehow a lot of the articles I'm reading today are about her.

This one in Slate by Rebecca Traister is really something you should read.  Here are the money 'graphs:

[Sarah Palin's] is a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible to those who have no intellectual or political use for actual women. It's like some dystopian future ... feminism without any feminists.

Palin's femininity is one that is recognizable to most women: She's the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much. The kind of woman who, as Jessica Grose at Jezebel has eloquently noted, achieves her power by doing everything modern women believed they did not have to do: presenting herself as maternal and sexual, sucking up to men, evincing an absolute lack of native ambition, instead emphasizing her luck as the recipient of strong male support and approval. It works because these stances do not upset antiquated gender norms. So when the moment comes, when tolerance for and interest in female power have been forcibly expanded by Clinton, a woman more willing to throw elbows and defy gender expectations but who falls short of the goal, Palin is there, tapped as a supposedly perfect substitute by powerful men who appreciate her charms.

But while the Republicans would have us believe that Palin can simply stand in for Hillary Clinton, there is nothing interchangeable about these politicians. We began this history-making election with one kind of woman and have ended up being asked to accept her polar opposite. Clinton's brand of femininity is the kind that remains slightly unpalatable in America. It is based on competence, political confidence and an assumption of authority that upends comfortable roles for men and women. It's a kind of power that has nothing to do with the flirtatious or the girly, nothing to do with the traditionally feminine. It is authority that is threatening because it so closely and calmly resembles the kind of power that the rest of the guys on a presidential stage never question their right to wield.

The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin's nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for, and in my mind, more than any of the intergenerational pro- or anti-Hillary crap that people wrung their hands over during the primaries, Palin's candidacy and the faux-feminism in which it has been wrapped are the first development that I fear will actually imperil feminism. Because if adopted as a narrative by this nation and its women, it could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like.

Well, at least the foreign press will actually use the word "lie" to describe the blatant and knowing telling of untruth...

Well, that's it. It's all over: the election, human existence, everything. It turns out that a preposterous new McCain campaign ad, which attacks Barack Obama for attacking Sarah Palin, also manages to tell a lie about an article published on a website that only exists in the first place to point out when the campaigns are telling lies, thereby creating a fatal wormhole in the space-time continuum that will shortly suck all physical matter into its gaping maw. The ad suggests that the non-partisan service Factcheck.org, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, has dismissed Obama's attacks on Palin as "absolutely false" and "misleading". But guess what, irony enthusiasts: that claim itself is absolutely false and misleading! Factcheck.org was talking about crazy rumours put about by so-called online internet bloggers, not criticisms levelled by Obama at all. (Perspicacious lie-spotters may also have noticed that yesterday's McCain attack ad used footage of the CBS news anchor Katie Couric apparently agreeing that criticisms of Sarah Palin had been deeply sexist; in fact, she was talking about Hillary Clinton, and the ad has since been removed from YouTube at CBS's request. You remember Hillary Clinton -- she's the one about whom a McCain supporter once asked him "How do we beat the bitch?", causing the crusading progressive feminist John McCain to chuckle and declare "that's an excellent question.")

Whereas we here in the U.S. get this double-speak from the NY Times...

Escalating its efforts to portray Senator Barack Obama as a candidate whose values fall outside the mainstream, the campaign of Senator John McCain on Tuesday unveiled a new television advertisement claiming that Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, favors “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten students.

“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the narrator asks in the 30-second advertisement, which the campaign says will be shown in battleground states and on national cable. The commercial also asserts that a sex-education bill introduced in Illinois, which Mr. Obama did not sponsor and which never became law, is his “one accomplishment” in the field of education.

Both sets of accusations, however, seriously distort the record.

The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”

But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”

Hmmm, by reading the NY Times, you'd have to be a close reader of the article to really get the idea that the McCain campaign is lying.  Did Obama propose to have sex education taught to kindergarten age kids or not?  The answer is - no he did not.  So then, if you say that he did... then you sir, are a liar.  Plain and simple.  Get it NY Times?  Is that so hard???

Lipstick on a pig?  We're in the midst of two wars, a recession, economic collapse of major financial companies, crumbling infrastructure, under-funded schools.... etc, etc.  And this is something that the national media wants to call a "major" story?  I mean, I know why McCain would like to make this an issue - the guy knows if he runs on his an his party's platform and record, he's toast...  but honestly, why is any journalist with half a brain cell going along with this??

It looks like McCain's people must be on the payroll of the Daily Show and Colbert Report.  The comedy just writes itself!

Colbert did a "green screen challenge" which asked people to fill in the background when McCain made a boring speech in front of a green backdrop a few months ago.  It looks like McCain did it again last night.  The difference was that this time the green backdrop was the lawn at the bottom of a big photo of a building. 

That building was supposed to be Walter Reed Medical Center.  We all know Walter Reed as being the center of a national disgrace at the treatment of returning Iraq veterans.  You can do your own research on that one, but suffice it to say that the Bush administration had pretty much neglected that aspect of "supporting the troops."  You might also note that without any fanfare whatsoever, Jon Stewart has been a very frequent visitor to Walter Reed despite what must be a crushing work schedule. 

Be that as it may, McCain's people wanted to put up a picture of Walter Reed Medical Center in the Washington DC area.  What they did succeed in showing was a picture Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood California.  Heckuva job A/V guy!  Is there any incompetent who won't be rewarded with a top level job in the republican party??

Crucial reporting by Glen Greenwald...

As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue -- see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway -- it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that "the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Today's Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically "aided by informants planted in protest groups." Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest -- especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march -- gets what they deserve.

Isn't it that mentality which very clearly is the cause of virtually everyone turning away as these police raids escalate against citizens -- including lawyers, journalists and activists -- who have broken no laws and whose only crime is that they intend vocally to protest what the Government is doing? Add to that the fact that many good establishment liberals are embarrassed by leftist protesters of this sort and wish that they would remain invisible, and there arises a widespread consensus that these Government attacks are perfectly tolerable if not desirable.

During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 21, The Washington Post fretted:

Six Americans detained by police this week could be held for 10 days, according to Chinese authorities, who appear to be intensifying their efforts to shut down any public demonstrations during the final days of the Olympic Games. . . .

Chinese Olympic officials announced last month that Beijing would set up zones where people could protest during the Games, as long as they had received permission. None of the 77 applications submitted was approved, however, and several other would-be protesters were stopped from even applying.

On August 2, The Post gravely warned:

Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.

Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted.

Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn't. Yet how is our own Government's behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation's establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

Just review what happened yesterday and today. Homes of college-aid protesters were raided by rifle-wielding police forces. Journalists were forcibly detained at gun point. Lawyers on the scene to represent the detainees were handcuffed. Computers, laptops, journals, diaries, and political pamphlets were seized from people's homes. And all of this occurred against U.S. citizens, without a single act of violence having taken place, and nothing more serious than traffic blockage even alleged by authorities to have been planned.

A man whose sister was one of those arrested at one of the raided houses in Minneapolis yesterday emailed me a photograph of her and her friend who was also arrested -- Monica Bicking (r.) and Eryn Trimme -- and he wrote this:

They are still in custody. I've been told that the police have 36 hours to charge her, and that 36 hours starts after the labor day holiday, so they only have to charge her sometime Wednesday. It seems unlikely that they'd do anything to expedite her or Eryn's release.

They were then planning to actually board up her house for unspecified "code violations", but apparently her neighbors were very vocal, and the police ended up agreeing not to do anything so long as the front door was fixed by 6pm (the front door they'd busted in).

Heres is the extraordinary blog item I linked to yesterday from Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video -- a NYC-based video collective which is in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week's Republican National Convention, just as they did at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York. Clancy wrote this as a plea for help, as the Police surrounded her house and (before they had a search warrant) told everyone inside that they'd be arrested if they exited the home:

This is Eileen Clancy . . . The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.

That sounds like what it was: a cry for help from a hostage. Hours later, the Police finally obtained a search warrant -- for the wrong house, one adjacent to the house where they were being detained -- and nonetheless broke in, pointing guns, forced them to lay on the floor and handcuffed everyone inside (and handcuffed a National Lawyers Guild attorney outside). They searched the house, arrested nobody, and then left. Any rational person planning to protest the GOP Convention would, in light of this Government spying and these police raids, think twice -- at least -- about whether to do so. That is the point of the raids -- to announce to citizens that they best stay in their homes and be good, quiet, meek, compliant people unless they want their homes to be invaded, their property seized, and have rifles pointed at them, too. The fact that this behavior is producing so little outcry only ensures, for obvious reasons, that it will continue in the future. We love our Surveillance State for keeping us safe and maintaining nice, quiet order.

I made sure to be home for Obama's speech last night.  Wow.  He really knocked it right out of the park.  First of all, let me say, the aerial shots they had from above the stadium... amazing.  The place looked huged and packed with people.  It WAS huge and packed with people.  Then, the actual speech.  What can I say?  He pretty much took it right to the heart of McCain.  He was on the attack the whole time.  Not nasty, but on the attack.  He explained not only why McCain is wrong and misguided, but why everything his campain is based on - modern movement conservatism - is also wrong and misguided.  In tone, cadence, appearance, and most importantly, substance... this speech was just about perfect.  McCain's folks have got to be shell-shocked right about now - especially in light of his odd-ball pick of Palin as his v.p.