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Friday, September 12, 2008

James Carville want McCain to win:

He knows what he's doing here.

UPDATE: On The View, McCain made it clear he's aware of the ads (pace Carville) and that "they are not lies".



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Commander-in-chief Sarah Palin:

Feel better now?



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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Have we reached critical mass?

I get the feeling that some sort of revolt is about to happen.



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I am John McCain and I approve this message:
COMMENT AT BALLOON JUICE:
The McCain campaign ... has now made it more difficult to pass future legislation to fight child molestation. It now takes just a bit more political courage to author, promote and vote for legislation that protects kids from sexual predators. Because of the McCain campaign, politicians will now think they need to more carefully measure the political costs of similar legislation, lest they get attacked in a similar way.


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Sarah Palin is The Mule:



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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

The press may be turning:

Joe Klein (Sep 3 Swampland)
There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God."
Barbara Walters (Sep 4, The View) Read out passage (above) from Klein's blog post.

Roger Simon (Sep 4) Why the media should apologize.

Elizabeth Bumiller (Sep 5, the Tavis Smiley show) McCain camp is falsely accusing the media of bias.

Jay Carney (Sep 5, the Tavis Smiley show) "It should be called it what it is, a lie."

Jeanne Cummings (Sep 5, Washington Week in Review):
... I don't have any sympathy for [the McCain camp]. I don't think there is any grievance that matters. John McCain put this woman - and she accepted - in a position to become president of the United States in the next 60 days. We don't have enough time to mess around with this. We need to know a lot more about this woman. And it's our job to find out everything we can about her, so the voters can make an educated decision about whether they want her that close to the presidency. (Applause.)
Sebastian Mallaby (Sep 8, Washington Post) McCain's Convenient Untruth

Mark Halperin (Sep 9, AC360) Says McCain camp is being dishonest.

[I have audio of Walters on The View and Carney and Bumiller on Tavis Smiley and may post MP3s at a later time.)



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Enough!

I do not want to read about lipstick on a pig, on a pit bull, on a barracuda, or on any other animal this year.



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Rank amateur:

Stupid people try to sell jets on EBAY.



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This pretty much says it all:
Hand-picked interviewer. That would be "journalist" Charlie Gibson.

Palin is pure symbolism. Just to be looked at, not to be questioned in any serious manner.



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100% propaganda:

To see a classic example, check out Bill Kristol's essay at the Weekly Standard. Bashes Obama, and even more, the press. It's laced with tons of fanciful passages. For example: (loaded words in bold)
The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media's prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.
Okay, that's just Bill Kristol being Bill Kristol in the magazine he edits. And he's a complete hack for the Republicahs. Fine. But why the hell is he an opinion columnist at the New York Times?



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Observation:

Josh Marshall is showing the kind of feistiness that I haven't seen since he went to bat to defend Social Security in early 2005.

That's probably due to two things:
  • The seriousness of the matter (Palin unqualified and right-wing, McCain in neocon land; the supine press).
  • That there is a good chance the Republicans may win.


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Monday, September 08, 2008

Jeffrey Goldberg is insane:

He writes in the New York Times:
On Nov. 4, Remember 9/11

THE next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. ...

Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today. The hard part is acquiring fissile material; an easier part is the smuggling itself ...
This is nonsense.
  • Terrorists have yet to obtain chemical or biological weapons (something that should be easier).
  • No state is going to give bombs to terrorists, or allow them to steal one.
  • And what's this about "fissile material"? Even if some was obtained, nobody outside of a government lab would be able to make a bomb (besides the difficulty of configuring the weapon, specialized detonators and other items - like neutron reflectors - would be needed).
Goldberg takes a wild number (50% chance of detonation in 10 years) and then "optimistically" lowers it to a still-high ten percent. But the general situation vis-a-vis terrorists and nuclear states has existed for three decades at least. So why hasn't there been an explosion? Because of the reasons listed above.

How about this line from Goldberg?
Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today.
Only technical complications prevent Hugo Chavez from executing a nuclear attack today. Only technical complications prevent Somali pirates from executing a nuclear attack today. Only technical complications prevent the Tamil Tigers from executing a nuclear attack today.

Goldberg is hysterical and peddling raw unthinking fear.



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Good news everybody!

The Large Hadron Collider is set to start operating Wednesday, and if we're lucky, it'll generate a small black hole that will suck the earth into oblivion.

Which means we won't have to worry about this miserable presidential campaign.



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deference:

From TPM:
McCain Campaign: No Palin Interviews Until She's Treated With "Deference"

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told Fox News this morning that Sarah Palin won't be doing any media interviews "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference," and when Palin would be "comfortable" doing it.
deference:
1. respectful submission or yielding to the judgment, opinion, will, etc., of another.
2. respectful or courteous regard
Do you think Charlie Gibson can show respectful submission to Palin?



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Mmmmm!

I love the smell of a non-government-supported stock market in the morning.



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The deciding factor in this presidential election:

According to Dick Polman, it's racism and it's not being mentioned in the press. He's right.

Oddly enough, many big-name liberal blogs (Ezra K, K-Drum, Benen, Digby, Anon Lib, Kleiman, et al) haven't discussed it much either. Why?



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Sunday, September 07, 2008

PSA:

Billmon is blogging regularly at Kos.



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Insane?

Andrew Sullivan: (emp orig)
I also think it is simply insane that a person who could be president next January and is a total unknown to the world should somehow require being shielded from a press conference.


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Joe Klein is not happy:

In a good way. Klein sees the economy as the concern of most Americans (and "liberals"). But there's always the opposite view, promoted today by George Will, that economic concerns don't matter much at all:
Unfortunately, the phrase "better off" is generally understood as a reference to your salary, your bank balance, your IRA and the like. But wait. Are you better off being four years older? That depends.

If you are young, since 2004 you might have found romance, had children, learned to fly-fish and become a Tampa Bay Rays fan. In which case you emphatically are better off ...

If you are [very old], in the past four years your expected remaining years of life have declined. But that does not mean you cannot be better off.

Suppose in those years you read "Middlemarch," rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren.   ... are you not decidedly better off?
Lesson people of all ages:
If you've lost your job, are struggling to pay for healthcare, or your home is in or near foreclosure, take up fly-fishing!


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They should ask McCain (and Palin!) about this:

2008 REPUBLICAN PLATFORM: (via The Big Picture)
"We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all..."
But they never will.



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Where's Hillary?

Anonymous Liberal writes: (emp add)
John McCain's decision to pick a running mate who is virtually unknown to most Americas and members of the media provided the Obama campaign with a rare opportunity. It's very seldom in politics that you get the chance to define your opponent at the ground floor level. Right now, the public image of Sarah Palin is still very much in flux. Opinions of her, both among voters and members of the media, are not fully formed. They're just impressions that haven't yet hardened.

But it doesn't take long for impressions to harden and once they do, they're very hard to budge.
So why has Hillary Clinton been so quiet these last 10 days?





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McCain on the housing crisis:

From Slate:
"Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting, and tax impediments to raising capital."
You can raise a lot of capital if you allow for fraud or incompetence.

Much was raised already (though it's now likely to be lost), thanks to the existing lax regulatory environment. McCain wan't more of that.



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John McCain is not a celebrity:

Proof:
While campaigning in New Mexico, which is shaping up to be another competitive state, Palin and McCain staged their own Hollywood-like entrance at a rally.

After a rousing introduction by actor Robert Duvall, McCain and Palin made their entrance by bounding off a "Straight Talk Express" bus that drove straight into the rally's convention hall, underneath a giant America flag that was raised like a curtain.

As a delighted crowd screamed its approval, the rally was clouded by either exhaust or stage smoke.


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Dunce Broder:

"The Dean" writes: (emp add)
McCain -- like the heroes of FDR's and Truman's time -- disdains partisanship and searches for the national interest, wherever he can find it.

[Obama] has yet to demonstrate, as McCain has, the backbone to challenge the prevailing interest groups in his own party. ...

[McCain and Obama] are products of the Senate, but congressional recalcitrance will test them as much as any new president. One would have to give McCain the edge on both his willingness and ability to confront the demands of a Democratic Congress.
[Taking those remarks in reverse order]

How about that? A Republican president is more likely than a Democratic president to confront a Democratic Congress. And that is supposed to "give the edge" to McCain on the change issue. Plus the notion that more change is accomplished through confrontation than skillful negotiation. Broder, old as he is, has completely forgotten how much real change (e.g. civil rights, Medicare) that Lyndon Johnson pushed through Congress when he was president, largely through compromise and deals - as opposed to pissing everybody off.

The other thing is that for Broder, challenging interest groups in a party is all that matters, regardless of the policy positions of those groups. Which makes it very clear that David Broder doesn't care about policy.

Actually, all Broder cares about is getting a Republican in the White House this election year.

Finally, it's good to see Broder claim that McCain is like FDR and Truman. Yet somehow Broder forgot to show how McCain is a modern-day Lincoln, Sergeant York, George Washington, Pope John XXIII, Shakespeare and Sir Issac Newton. That'll probably be in his next column.



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