I know I would never mention it here. It’s a disgrace.
Also, they must be pretty sure they could win a libel suit.
Category: Politics & Elections
Best self incriminating line of the day, so far
“The point is, I was chairman of the commerce committee. Every part of America’s economy, I oversighted. I have a long record, certainly far more extensive of being involved in our economy than Senator Obama does.”
Senator John McCain today.
Holy liquidation, Batman, does he even know what he’s saying any more?
The very best line of the day
“If the security of our financial system had been Senator McCain’s number one issue, would he have chosen a spunky mom from Jersey City because, from her window, she could see Wall Street?”
I think Love Story was about McCain, too
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”
Al Gore, call your office.
Blackberrys by the way are a product of Research in Motion, a Canadian company. They’re having an election in Canada Senator McCain. Try your luck up there. And take Governor Palin with you — you can see Canada from Alaska, so she must be an expert on Canada.
For the record, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. The whole story was bogus.
Oh Goody, a Commission — stocks will be shooting back up
“John McCain this morning called for a commission modeled on the government’s in-depth investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attack to probe what prompted the financial crisis now gripping Wall St and sending shockwaves through the market.”
Best line of the morning
“But you can only get away with parroting McCain surrogate talking points for so long before people start laughing at you and asking you to become an Amway distributor.”
The Ugly New McCain
From a change-of-heart column by Richard Cohen that you should read:
McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.
. . .
Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.
Best line of the night (from Tuesday’s newspapers)
“Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.”
The Radical McCain Plan
A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.
. . .
For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.
“It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” …
I don’t know about you
… but I prefer politicians that have the courtesy — enough respect for us citizens — to quit lying when they are found out.
The video (9 seconds) was this morning (Monday).
We’re number what?
But today, John McCain declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” — and also explained that we’re “the most innovative, the most productive, the greatest exporter, the greatest importer.”
Exactly why we’re boasting about being the biggest importer isn’t clear — not to get all mercantilist, but buying a bunch of stuff isn’t a great achievement. And last I looked, we weren’t the greatest exporter; that distinction went either to the European Union, or, if you restrict yourself to countries, Germany.
“Country first” — whatever it means it shouldn’t mean saying we’re number one when we’re not. McCain is supposed to be running for president, not head cheerleader.
He has no idea
I can understand that there are many reasons an individual might not want to vote for Barack Obama, but I fail to see why anyone would choose to vote for this doddering, mendacious old man. Just watch him — it’s only 28 seconds.
The election in 71 words
In order to disguise the fact that the core of his campaign is to continue the same Bush policies that have led 80 percent of the country to conclude we’re on the wrong track, McCain has decided to play the culture-war card. Obama may be a bit professorial, but at least he is trying to unite the country to face the real issues rather than divide us over cultural differences.
If you need a few more words:
McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?
Honor
Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the full truth is known. They do not lie.
They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented. They do not cheat.
They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property. They do not steal.
Idea from Talking Points Memo.
Best line of the day, so far
I have had a strong and a long relationship on national security, I’ve been involved in every national crisis that this nation has faced since Beirut, I understand the issues, I understand and appreciate the enormity of the challenge we face from radical Islamic extremism.
I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training.
I wasn’t a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn’t a governor for a short period of time.
— John McCain, Republican debate, October 21, 2007
Oldie but goodie
Beneath the veneer
Palin doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the Bush Doctrine is. Literally, not a clue about the guiding U.S. foreign policy principle of the last seven years. When she tried to fudge it, her ignorance on the issue was even more glaring.
Second, she really didn’t want to answer an important question about U.S. strikes in Pakistan. It’s not like this was a curveball — the issue was in yesterday’s New York Times. Eventually, after trying to wiggle out of the question, Palin eventually seemed to support unilateral strikes, which contradicts the stated McCain policy.
Third, Palin believes Russia was “unprovoked” in its military incursion against Georgia. That’s just wrong.
Fourth, instead of waving off hypothetical questions about wars with massive nuclear powers, Palin openly suggested it “perhaps” would be necessary to go to war with Russia.
Why it matters
James Fallows explains what Sarah Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine (in her interview with Charles Gibson) reveals. This is an excerpt from a longer piece worth reading in full.
Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don’t. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we’re able to talk and think about it in a “rounded” way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I’d really like to hear answered is A.
Here’s the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.
Mention a name or theme — Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong’s comeback, Venus and Serena — and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.. . .
What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.
McCain’s Health Care Tax Increase
John McCain wants to tax your employer-provided health care benefits. He wants to replace those benefits with an insufficient tax credit–$2500 for individuals and $5000 for families (the average cost per family is for health insurance is $12000).
. . .Obama campaign has let things go this far without pointing out that McCain–who opposes the energy bill because it would increase taxes on oil companies–is actually proposing a tax increase on health care benefits for American workers. But that is precisely what the Senator from Arizona is doing.
What’s your Obama Tax cut?
Calculate an estimate at ObamaTaxCut.com.
(All numbers are from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.)
The rats are beginning to jump ship
In the end, [McCain’s] final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country’s safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country’s national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain – no one else – has proved it.
Why can’t the mainstream media get this right?
The Daily Howler tells what happened in five sentences.
In the summer of 2005, Congress directed Alaska to build the bridge using federal funds. After Hurricane Katrina hit in September, this use of federal funds turned into a political firestorm. In November 2005, Congress rescinded its order—but Alaska was allowed to keep the federal money that had been earmarked for the bridge; the money could now be used for any purpose the state saw fit. One year later, in her campaign for governor, Palin said she still favored building the bridge. She finally dropped the idea in September 2007—specifically saying that Congress wouldn’t give the state any more money for the project.
BEFORE Palin became governor Congress had dropped the bridge, but not the money. During her 2006 campaign and at first in 2007 while governor, she SUPPORTED the bridge. Two years after Congress had abandoned the bridge, Governor Palin abandoned it because the state would have to pay for it.
She never told Congress “Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s a lie.
On the Trail
But I’m not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn’t-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather’s sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn’t, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it’s the same thing — but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story — putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
. . .As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I’m listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don’t care. It’s not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It’s that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.
From a longer piece.
Not the Cubs Scouts
It seems the Cub Scouts want to teach your children about sex just like John McCain accuses Obama.
Apology Not Accepted
Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists–including me–for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house. Now 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.