Category: Politics & Elections

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet

From the great Andy Borowitz:

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Given that the Arizona Republican had never logged onto the Internet before, advisors acknowledged that his first visit to the World Wide Web was fraught with risk.

But with his Democratic rival Barack Obama making headlines with his tour of the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign felt that they needed to “come up with something equally bold for John to do,” according to one advisor.

Read on, it gets better.

He’s really old or just not very bright or both — your call

“We have a lot of work to do, and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.”

John McCain on Good Morning America today.  

Iraq and Pakistan do not have a border. They are separated by several hundred miles of Iran.

Neither borders Czechoslovakia either.

Most outrageous line of the day, so far

“[F]ormer chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was ‘probably the most exploited worker in American history’ since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the ‘billions’ he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.”

Phil Gramm speaking on behalf of John McCain as reported by Frank Rich.

But the rest of us are a “nation of whiners” according to Gramm, rumored to be McCain’s odds-on-favorite to be Secretary of Treasury.

“On issues of economics and … family values, there’s nobody that I know that’s stronger,” Mr. McCain has said of Gramm.

That says more about who McCain knows than it does about Phil Gramm.

FiveThirtyEight.com

FiveThirtyEight.com uses current polling data to make projections for the election — as they claim, “Electoral Projections Done Right.” This kind of analysis is different, of course, than just relying on straight-up polling, which generally asks how people would vote today.

For example, from the post linked above.

McCain has eight “penumbra” states where the model projects he will win by five-to-ten percent. Obama has seven “penumbra” states. McCain wins the electoral vote in these 15 states 81-67.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are projected to go to one candidate or the other by more than 10%. The electoral vote here goes to Obama 175-79.

Summing up, in the states where a candidate is projected to win by more than 5% of the vote, Obama leads McCain 242-160. You need 270 to win.

That leaves the battleground states, the 11 that are projected to be within five percent come November. The eleven are North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, Montana and Virginia that slightly favor McCain; and Colorado, Ohio, Michigan and New Mexico that slightly favor Obama. These are the battleground states and they have 136 electoral votes. FiveThrityEight figures Obama to win 51 of these, and thus the election 293-245.

NewMexiKen finds FiveThirtyEight’s analysis to be among the more interesting — and potentially more accurate. I recommend the site to you — I extracted as much as I did for this post to get you interested.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, whose claim to fame before was as “a writer, analyst and partner at a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries.” How the data is used is what makes FiveThirtyEight.com intriguing.

Guess who line of the day

“A guy gets up and quizzes me — it’s my fault for trying to answer — but John McCain says something about the ‘ambassador to Czechoslovakia.’ Well, I know there is no Czechoslovakia (there’s a Czech Republic and a Slovakia), but yet it didn’t make the nightly national news. I’m not going to gripe about it, but the media question is starting to pop up.”

That’s Firedoglake quoting none other than Governor George W. Bush in 2000. The subject comes up because twice in the past two days Senator McCain has referred to Czechoslovakia — a country that ceased to exist more than 15 years ago.

When even Bush knows you’re wrong — and it’s eight years later and you’re still wrong — there is something amiss.  McCain’s own memoir, Faith of My Fathers, has a chapter “Fifth from the Bottom.”  It refers to his class rank at the Naval Academy — 894th out of 899.

Do we want a president even more ignert than Bush?

Satire or ?

New Yorker

Everyone else is writing about this, NewMexiKen might as well too. That’s this week’s New Yorker cover, art by Barry Blitt. That’s Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office, she with AK-47, he in Muslim garb. The American flag is in the fireplace.

This cover work for you?

Update: New Yorker editor David Remnick —

Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention — I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics. I can’t speak for anyone else’s interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama’s supposed “lack of patriotism” or his being “soft on terrorism” or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are… We’ve run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.

The Huffington Post

There may be a reason you’re drawing a blank

Blitzer: Are there any significant economic differences between what the Bush administration has put forward over these many years as opposed to John McCain’s support?

[S.C. Governor Mark] Sanford: Yea, I mean for instance take, you know, ummm, ahhh, take for instance the issue of, ahhhh..(knocks on table) I’m drawing a blank. I hate it when I do that particularly on TV.

Transcript via Crooks and Liars.

Why do they still keep calling him Senator?

98 senators voted on the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment today that would have taken telecom immunity for past warrant-less wiretaps out of the FISA bill.

Two senators did not vote.

  1. Ted Kennedy, recuperating from brain surgery
  2. John McCain

Senators Obama and Clinton voted for the amendment, along with 30 others.  66 voted against.

Update: Actually McCain was the only senator absent all day today.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts walked triumphantly into the Senate on Wednesday for the first time since learning that he had brain cancer, hoping to provide Democrats with the crucial, single vote that they need to reverse a cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors.

The Caucus

Update 2: Here are the 28 U.S. senators who took their oath to defend the Constitution seriously and voted against the bill itself.

Akaka, Biden, Bingaman, Boxer, Brown, Byrd, Cantwell, Cardin, Clinton, Dodd, Dorgan, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Kerry, Klobuchar, Lautenburg, Leahy, Levin, Menendez, Murray, Reed, Reid, Sanders, Schumer, Stabenow, Tester, Wyden.

Thank you Senator Bingaman.

Losers

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

The Borowitz Report .com

Metaphorically phoning it in from my metaphoric break

A federal judge has ordered the invasion of your privacy. This is from washingtonpost.com:

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). [Judge] Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Speculative. It’s terabytes of data about us.

Andrew Tobias has a nice posting about Clay Felker, who died earlier this week.

Walt Mossberg provides Some General Tips For Switch to Mac From Windows. I would have found this handy during the first few weeks; not so much later.

Obama leads McCain by 5 points in — wait for it — Montana.

[Not having to blog because I’m taking a break makes it a lot easier to blog. Does that make any sense — other than as a description of insanity I mean?]

‘I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.’

While greatly respecting and admiring John McCain’s patriotism and honor, NewMexiKen has never thought being a prisoner of war was a qualification for high office, as so much of the mainstream media seems to think. General Clark seems to doubt it too.

I thought about just making this a best line of the day, but out of respect to McCain — and out of respect to Clark who was after all responding to Bob Schieffer directly — I thought the context was important.

Gen. CLARK: Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, `I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk?
What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’

SCHIEFFER: Well…

Gen. CLARK: He hasn’t made those calls, Bob. So…

SCHIEFFER: Well, General, maybe–could I just interrupt you?

Gen. CLARK: Sure.

SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…

Gen. CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

SCHIEFFER: Really?

Gen. CLARK: But Barack is not–he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements, he’s running on his other strengths. He’s running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment, and those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership.

Face the Nation [pdf]

Barack Obama Bumper Stickers!

NewMexiKen received an email this morning from a company offering Barack Obama Bumper Stickers! Normally this would be no big deal — in fact I delete email messages like that fairly often.

But I liked their idea of 50 different bumper stickers for 50 different states.

Obama New Mexico

According to the email I received: “22 percent of the proceeds from each sale benefits the Obama Campaign, and we’re offering both full-size ‘bumper-stickers’ and six-packs of mini ‘laptop stickers’.”

Take a look.

Works for Me

WENNER: “Is there a marker you would lay down at the end of your first term where you say, ‘If this has happened or not happened, I would consider it a negative mark on my governance’?”

OBAMA: “If I haven’t gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal health care and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we’ve missed the boat. Those are three big jobs, so it’s going to require a lot of attention and imagination, and it’s going to require the American people feeling inspired enough that they’re prepared to take on these big challenges.”

Daily Kos extracting from the Rolling Stone interview.

Nixon for Obama

If the children who have inhabited the White House are America’s princes and princesses, Senator Barack Obama already got a head start in collecting royal blessings with Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement earlier this year.

But soon after Ms. Kennedy made her very public endorsement at the end of January, one of her predecessors of Republican lineage made her own private one.

Yes, Julie Nixon Eisenhower is an Obama-can.

The Caucus

Her sister-in-law, President Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan, supports Obama as well. The other Nixon daughter is for McCain.

What’s He Like?

I am often asked, “What’s he like?” If you really want to know, read Dreams From My Father. It’s all in there, and it’s a wonderful piece of writing in its own right.

When we are done, his parting words are delivered with a dazzling smile: “OK, brother — take care.”

Jann Wenner

Best line of the day, so far — but it’s only June

“In the wake of last week’s Newsweek poll showing Obama with a 15-point national lead comes a new L.A. Times poll that puts Obama up by 12 points.”

Talking Points Memo

Here’s the Los Angeles Times story, which has the subhead: “A Times/Bloomberg Poll says that in a two-man contest, 49% of respondents favor Barack Obama, while 37% support John McCain. With Ralph Nader and Bob Barr added to the mix, Obama holds 15-point edge.”

FiveThirtyEight.com has it Obama 344, McCain 194.

Can a VP Nominee ‘Win’ a State?

In looking at the vice-presidential selections of the past five decades or so since television has expanded the regionality of presidential elections, it’s clear that, in reality, both major parties rarely have nominated VP candidates as a strategic electoral vote collector, and to the extent they have set about deliberately trying to add a state with a VP pick it has almost never worked.

FiveThirtyEight.com has the specifics.