Category: Politics & Elections

From America’s Finest News Source —

WASHINGTON, DC—Military and political strategists agreed Monday that President Bush’s re-election campaign has been executed with greater precision than the war in Iraq. “Judging from the initial misrepresentation of intelligence data and the ongoing crisis in Najaf, I assumed the president didn’t know his ass from his elbow,” said Col. Dale Henderson, a military advisor during the Reagan Administration. “But on the campaign trail, he’s proven himself a master of long-term planning and unflinching determination. How else can you explain his strength in the polls given this economy?”

From AP via Newsday —

Indicators measure the nation’s unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay.

“That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati on Thursday. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.”

Cheney is right. eBay is an important development as fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford garages to have old-fashioned garage sales.

Update: From Brad DeLong —

Cheney needs a staff who will tell him that the $2.0 billion or so in eBay’s domestic revenues are already included in the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis’s estimates of GDP.

Was Washington really a hero crossing the Delaware?

“Former President Clinton is wide awake and alert. I wish we could say the same for our current president.”

“For 73 minutes during the surgery, Clinton had no pulse, no heartbeat. Just like the Kerry campaign.”

— David Letterman

So Bush didn’t serve his country well in the National Guard thirty years ago. Big deal. As the song goes:

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Yeah!
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand,
Lord, don’t they help themselves, oh.
But when the taxman comes to the door,
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yes,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more! yoh,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no military son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, one.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no no no,
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son, no no no.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969

The Poor Man scoops Kitty Kelley’s Shocking Revelations:

1. Iraq didn’t have any WMD, or any significant ties to al Qaeda!
2. George W. Bush is not a West Texas rancher whose simple heartland values and quiet inner strength have guided his climb to political and financial success!
3. The economy is not strong, and it’s not getting stronger!
4. The reputation of the United States has been demolished over the last four years!
5. George W. Bush is an idiot!
6. George W. Bush is a horrible President!

Read the details.

As you may have heard, voting for John Kerry will cause us to be attacked by terrorists. Which is weird, because we keep hearing that Kerry is pro-terrorist. Vice President Cheney apparently knows better: “[I]f we make the wrong choice,” he said yesterday, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again.” Fearing that he may have been too subtle, Cheney also warned that should Bush fail to be re-elected, the waters will rise, the seas will boil, blood shall rain down upon the land, and terrorists will visit upon the house of each individual Kerry voter and there shall be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Cheney then brought his cloak across his face, laughed maniacally and disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving his support staff to cast goat entrails to determine the fate of the world should the GOP lose the Senate.

The one, the only, Wonkette.

And if you read Newsweek or Time you might want to take a look at the Current Electoral Vote Predictor for a reality check. (The Newsweek and Time polls have been pretty well discounted.)

Guess NewMexiKen was wrong about Cheney being replaced on the Republican ticket.

As an American, you have an obligation to support your presidential candidate (Bush or Kerry). So, every day until Election Day, when you drive, show who you will vote for:

If you support the policies and character of John Kerry, please drive with your headlights on during the day.

If you support George W. Bush, please drive with your headlights off at night.

Spread the word.

Kevin Drum says if people are just going to make stuff up, why not —

And I think maybe George Bush got tossed out of the National Guard because he crashed a plane while he was high on coke and then spent the next five months in Alabama in a rehab center. I mean, we just don’t know, do we?

Functional Ambivalent suggests evidence points to Cheney dropping off the ticket this week to be replaced by John McCain. NewMexiKen has suspected this might happen for sometime, but I didn’t have the courage to write it. Props to Functional Ambivalent for taking the chance.

Especially if he’s right.

Update: The more NewMexiKen thinks about this, the more I think it is likely to happen, too. What a dramatic news event. Great showmanship. Talk about a bounce.

Hope the Kerry folks are prepared.

From Ronald Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times, Second-Term Reward May Be More Headache Than Triumph

Bill Clinton was impeached in his second term. Richard Nixon would have been if he hadn’t quit first. Ronald Reagan was crippled by the Iran-Contra scandal. Lyndon Johnson sank into the swamp of Vietnam.

Dwight Eisenhower had health problems and Sputnik. The high point of Harry Truman’s second term was the day he won it in a stunning upset; after that, it was war, scandal and legislative gridlock. Woodrow Wilson suffered through World War I, the rejection of the League of Nations and a stroke. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt reached his lowest point during his second term, when Congress blocked his plan to stack the Supreme Court.

Garrison Keillor speaks his mind in We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore. An excerpt:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Louis Menand has written an excellent primer on American voters for The New Yorker. Among the fascinating insights is this:

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

If you want to understand better the phenomenon of the next 9-1/2 weeks, read this essay.

The video is here (mov file).

Like Atrios, NewMexiKen is busy fabricating a lie about one of the presidential candidates so that I can become a media star and get my 15 minutes. The media seems to make no distinction between facts (including those documented in the federal records I worked to preserve for 30 years) and every Tom, Dick and Harry’s opinion, so this should be easy.

Eric Alterman sums it up —

It’s amazing and a bit disgusting that our election seems to be turning on a war that took place thirty years ago in which the man who served honorably both in the war and in the anti-war movement is on the defensive against the man who supported the war but took a pass on any service or sacrifice it might have involved, but there it is.

It’s more than a “bit” disgusting.

has absolutely no class.

Or as Steve Gilliard puts it:

Yes, this was a campaign stunt, and yes, Cleland has his own grudges against these people, but a real man would have invited Cleland and Rassman up to the ranch house, gave them some sweet tea, taken the letter and let them go.

This wasn’t some guy off the street. It was a former United States Senator delivering a letter from other senators. It was going to generate publicity one way or the other. Why not have some savoir faire?

Julia Thorne, the first Mrs. Kerry:

When she was interviewed for the Washingtonian story [1996], Thorne said she didn’t want to get married again. However, she hadn’t totally soured on love.

“I went to a Wyoming ranch every summer and one year a man came out in the ranch truck to meet me. I saw him and I thought: ‘This man looks like a middle-aged hippie alcoholic.’ And he looked at me and thought: ‘She looks like a bitch on wheels.’ And we’ve been together ever since.”

Thorne and her husband, Richard Charlesworth, now live in Montana.

From Washingtonian Online. Link via Makes Me Ralph.

NewMexiKen would feel even worse about the presidential campaign sliding into the swamp if the country had any security, health care, education, environmental or economic problems that needed to be addressed.

The White House Guide to Understanding Terror Alert Levels.

Link via As I Please via Sideshow.

The Current Electoral Vote Predictor has changed. New polls show Wisconsin and Colorado tied, a loss of electoral votes for Kerry (10) and Bush (9) respectively.

The icon with the current prediction is on this page on the right.

For Kerry-Edwards it’s about Kerry. For Bush-Cheney it’s about Kerry.

These two screen-shots illustrate.

Run on your record Mr. President!

Link via Atrios.