Looks like we have raised about $7-9k in the past week or so, which is a solid effort. At any rate, toss in 5 bucks and have one less beer tonight at happy hour.
And, for your entertainment value, the RNC in one minute (via Rumproast):
Meanwhile, the ladies at the view just bitch-slapped McCain. Here is a snippet from Ben Smith:
Personally, I am sick and tired of hearing that lying sack of shit claim that the reason he needs to lie in so many ads is because Obama refuses to do town hall meetings with him. It is just such a ridiculous premise- “I had to lie and be nasty because he wouldn’t do what I wanted.”
And another thing- he knows the ads are running- enough with the nonsense about “the John McCain I know would never run those ads.” You apparently didn’t know John McCain very well.
liberal
Isn’t it true that Obama didn’t want to do the Town Hall because he was leading in the summer, and the TH is a format McThug is relatively strong on?
I’m a little worried about the debates, insofar as people will have low expectations for McThug (given he’s an idiot), but will have high expectations for Obama. But I don’t think debating is really O’s strength. (For him it would be speaking.)
Davis X. Machina
The Cossacks work for the Tsar. (h/t Brad DeLong.)
I think he positively enjoys the shit-slinging. He became a ‘maverick’ because the alternative was an ignominious retirement as one of the Keating five. Contrition sells. And in 2000, he was the anti-Bush, because that’s how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace. If McCain had run against himself in 2000, he’d have done everything Bush did, and more.
We’re talking Orrin Hatch 2.0, or Steve Symms XP here — a Western ultra-conservative, and although the boffins have updated the biography module, and tweaked the press interface, it’s all legacy code.
Breezeblock
Ha! Get your very own Palin Name!
http://www.personal-space.com/palin/index.php
For me: Tape Boise Palin.
Mike in MI
Credit to the The View ladies for countering McCain’s “but he wouldn’t do town hall meetings” defense by asking for a Sarah Palin appearance. After seeing clips from today’s show, I think they would skewer Palin.
jake
You mock my friend but now he’s got the stalker, abuser and pedophile votes wrapped up.
Seriously, I’m not surprised at all. Here’s a guy who thinks war is the solution when nations don’t do exactly what we want.
Brian J
I wonder if O’Reilly will include far left comedian Joy Behar in the Pinhead group of his “Pinheads and Patriots” segment. I hope he does. That woman is a menace.
Stuck in the Fun House
The ladies used the L word when it glaringly appropriate for the bucket of shit Mcclame is dumping on the American public. LIES is not a four letter word when it’s true. Mccain should have known these ladies don’t give a fuck about his “personal narrative”, they are true pitbulls, lipstick or not.
Noah
It’s clear that John McCain was always King of All Douchebags. He just hid it kinda well.
And how come Barabara Walters is suddenly a great journalist?
crayz
Best video ever. Seriously, watch to the end for the money quote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzhFDQIgGSg
The Moar You Know
John – your server, man. You’re killing me.
Montysano
Help me out here: what was it about the town hall format that made BO decline?
Also: via Tbogg, Lisa Schiffren whines “I bet they didn’t ask Bill Clinton hard questions!”
Lisa: Bill Clinton could give you 30 solid minutes on the Bush Doctrine, all while reading 3 newspapers, talking on the phone, and playing poker. Please stop. It’s embarrassing.
flavortext
See, normally I’d say that the kind of performance he gave on The View is simply embarrassing for a politician. I’m starting to think that’s his plan though – spout bullshit and lies, get called on it by the media, and then tell voters how the media are picking on poor POW John McCain. In fact I’m willing to bet that Palin and McCain will continue giving dreadful performances as a part of this strategy. It remains to be seen if “resentment” voters will lap it up (though the cynic in me says yes, they will).
Noah
My Palin name is “Mullet Troll Palin.” That sounds more like what Levi “Hockey Hair” Johnston’s name is going to be after Sarah forces him to marry Bristol.
Jeff
Best quote I heard responding to claims Charlie Gibson was tough on Palin:
malraux
I really do wonder about the judgement of those liberals who believed in the maveric mccain image. I kinda started paying attention to him in ~98 and all I ever saw was someone who would take symbolic stands to get more publicity for himself. I never saw him become the decisive vote (you know, actually make a substantive difference), just move slightly toward the center when it was one of those cases where the republican party was heading way out to right field.
Brian J
As I said at Kevin Drum’s blog, I am starting to feel like I might need to have electroshock treatment if McCain wins. But perhaps this is just the bad before the good. Perhaps next week, he’ll announce massive fund raising totals, we’ll be up in a bunch of polls, and we won’t be relying on the ladies of “The View” to do the jobs of the press corps. I can dream, can’t I?
Brian J
As I said at Kevin Drum’s blog, I am starting to feel like I might need to have electroshock treatment if McCain wins. But perhaps this is just the bad before the good. Perhaps next week, he’ll announce massive fund raising totals, we’ll be up in a bunch of polls, and we won’t be relying on the ladies of “The View” to do the jobs of the press corps. I can dream, can’t I?
HumboldtBlue
I’m leaving you John, (sniff), it’s just not working out. I can’t reach you anymore (double-sniff, deep breath-sniffle), I can’t get you to communicate with me, you don’t respond the way you used to, it’s … it’s just become too hard to maintain our relationship when it’s so one-sided like this. I leave you notes that you never receive, I call and call and you never answer (bawling catch-a-breath sniffle). I try, day in and day out to get you to respond, but … you don’t.
I guess it’s just me and the Brooklyn gang from here on out …
bvac
Isn’t it true that Obama didn’t want to do the Town Hall because he was leading in the summer, and the TH is a format McThug is relatively strong on?
As I recall, McCain first made this offer immediately after Obama sealed the nomination, and Obama said ‘thanks but no thanks.’ Then McCain went solo at a “townhall meeting” in NYC, and sure enough it was a trap; packed with Republicans, while it was being billed as “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.” And sure enough, McCain made it into a partisan event by putting an empty chair on stage to signify that, y’know, Obama is a pussy or something.
I try to watch McCain at his townhall events with an open mind, and I think he’s awful at them. Same bullshit answers, same soulless, robotic delivery. The only “tough” question I saw him get was from a teenage girl who totally schooled him, and he completely dodged her question. In my opinion Obama should have taken him up on a few appearances.
I think the general feeling at the time was that McCain had almost no media exposure with the primary still playing out, he had no money, he sure as shit wasn’t spending his time vetting VP candidates, and so he basically wanted to share the spotlight with Obama. After that didn’t work, he decided to do the only thing that would get him attention, go negative and pick a ridiculous VP.
gizzi
Where in the fuck is Warshington ?
Jeff
Please consider getting rid of wordpress…
Laura W
I actually started to cry on the way to my acupuncture appt today and then again sitting in front of him. All I had to say was: “the elections are freaking me out” and he knew, because, of course, they are getting to him too. AND HE DOES NOT FREAKING EVEN OWN A TEE VEE.
So he needled my happy place points, but I still want to cry every time I hear McLyin’s voice or see Sarah smile.
I know it will pass. I just read a few good posts on Sullivan and Al G’s sites re. ground game getting, GOTV stats, voter reg % increases… and I am (somewhat) consoled. I promise not to whine all over the comments (again) tonight, but I am making an exception and pouring my first adult beverage before I hear the sound of Tweety’s chirping.
I think his appearance on SNL tomorrow night will snap me right out of my funk because the man is nothing if not funny. Whoopi rocked with her slavery query, too.
Crank Widow Palin
(What HumboldtBlue said)
J. Michael Neal
Help! Can anyone tell me why all the embedded videos I try to play, even directly at the YouTube site, and even non-YouTube ones, have no sound and stop at the 2 second mark. They were working fine earlier this afternoon.
BFR
While getting a hummer too, no less.
Ecks
re: youbube freezing, I had the same thing for a long time. You need to flash 10. It’s still in beta, but seems to fix it.
Technical note: BEFORE you install flash 10 you have to run an uninstall program to get rid of version 9. All googlable off the adobe website.
Kevin K.
I’ve been having that problem a lot with Firefox 2.0 for PC. Seems to only happen when I’ve had it open for a while with multiple tabs/windows. The only solution I’ve found is to completely shut down all instances of FF and restart.
Svensker
Hey, I thought that was just happening to me! It happens to me sometimes in Mozilla. If I switch to IE, they play fine.
(Chance of this post getting through the intertubes and Word Press’s “system”? Less than the number of times Sarah Palin has seen any Rooskies.)
PeterJ
That’s an attack if done right. Instead of attacking him for lying or not being honorable, what Carville says is that McCain is no longer in charge of his own campaign. He’s a puppet. George Bush’s third term and we don’t have any clue about who is the puppet master this time, cause one thing is sure, it’s not the VP this time. Who did pick his VP btw?
And how would the McCain campaign answer to an attack like this?
Nicole
Augh! NY1 shows just the bit of McCain spouting off about Obama “choosing his words carefully” and not the View ladies skewering him right before that. I fraking hate the media.
Ammo Canal Palin
Charlie Miller
John —
Just discovered your website — nice work!
Also learned that you’re a convert to the Democratic Party — welcome. I too was once a Republican, but I converted when I was 16, and I’ve never looked back. You’ve probably learned this already, but one big thing: there’s not nearly as much hate on this side of the fence.
charlotte
I could use electroshock now … forget about after the election. And I’d love to know how much liquor is flying off the shelves.
McCain has always been a self-promoting ass. This Palin pick will prove disastrous for him. I can hardly wait for Part 2 of Palin’s encounter with Churly.
Sasha
Well, McCain wanted to do 10 town halls and Barack countered with 3. It fell apart from there.
Jeff
So since Obama chooses his words very carefully, does McCain not? Do we want a president who thinks before he says something or one who spouts off such classics as “Bomb, Bomb Iran” Oh wait….
Incertus
In that clip from The View, it’s clear that McCain does know what’s in those ads and approves of them. He says as much, so his defenders can just drop the bullshit on that front now–he said, straight up, that Obama was talking about Palin when there is no way on God’s grammatical earth that was the case.
And in my regular open thread fashion, I give you Ross Douthat being more stupid than normal–Amy takes apart his argument that porn is cheating pretty expertly.
Laura W
I can confidently confirm that 1.75 liters of Ketel One Citroen flies off the top shelf at the ABC store in Brevard, NC, approximately once/week.
When the acupuncturist felt my liver pulse today I asked him if I still had one. He said yes, but it was “wirey”, or “thready”. Clearly I am not drinking enough.
NonWonderDog
It wasn’t so much the town hall format (Obama holds town-hall-style campaign events too) as it was the “joint” bit. With one every week, Obama would have had to shift every weekend of his campaign to places where he and McCain could agree to hold town halls, and McCain would have absolutely wanted to hold them in red states in order to firm up his base. Obama turned down the joint town hall suggestion because he wanted to have control of where he campaigned.
That’s my understanding, at least.
Cris
My state’s very popular (and now verging on national political celebrity) governor finally went and fucked up.
For what it’s worth, I’m sure he was joking, though I’m sure you had to be there. Chalk it up to the perils of satire. But for a guy as politically savvy as Schweitzer, you’d think he’d know not to throw his opponents such a softball. This story won’t even die when Brian wins election to a second term — especially when there’s a grain of truth to be found.
SamFromUtah
“the John McCain I know would never run those ads.”
So… do the ads have the “I’m John McCain and I approved this message” on them or not?
oh really
Because misery loves company, I have the same problem with FF 3.0. Shutting down FF and restarting works.
Tsulagi
Nice to see some on teevee calling McCain on his bullshit. Now if he’d been on with Bill O’ and Hannity, they would have been throwing their panties and room keys at him.
While the premise is ridiculous, fits right in with the Bush conservative vaunted sense of personal responsibility and accountability: Not my fault! That trumps ridiculous.
Tsulagi
Oh really? At work and home I typically use FF 3.x over IE but don’t have those same video problems. And my usual habit is having 10+ browser windows or tabs open at the same time along with other programs.
Just Some Fuckhead
Yeah, and Cheney would shoot you in the goddamn face for even bringing it up.
Ecks
Yeah, I had it on both my machines using FF3. Seriously, update your flash plugin to version 10. It solved the problem instantly on both of them, and it beats the hell out of constantly opening and closing your browser, or pasting things in to IE to play (which I’d been doing for a week).
Warren Terra
1) regarding why Obama didn’t agree to the town halls: as I recall, it was about the number of events. McCain offered one a week, Obama replied by proposing a few of them, and McCain’s response was “See, folks, Obama hates America!”.
OK, that wasn’t his actual response. But his actual response was, rather than to negotiate or compromise, to declare that Obama was fundamentally opposed to holding Town Halls together. Speaks volumes about how a President McCain would govern.
And, of course, there are reasons that a constant stream of Town Halls could help McCain more than they helped Obama, even assuming no-one secured any competitive advantage within the meetings themselves. All those joint meetings could mitigate Obama’s fundraising advantage (McCain suggested they could go Dutch on the travel expenses), would constrain Obama’s schedule, and would get McCain media attention. At the time, and arguably still, McCain has a hard time attracting attention (in his own right, Palin getting attention doesn’t count) except for lying and otherwise foaming at the mouth. At the time, all the attention was on Obama, and McCain wanted to be with Obama getting attention.
2) I’ve had that same Flash-freeze problem. It happened after I switched to Google Chrome, because it’s fast and it’s fairly memory-efficient on my oldish computer, but I basically have to use Internet Explorer for Flash and for PDFs.
Cyrus
I’ll tell you, there are few things in political discussion more heartwarming and funny than seeing an ex-Republican who never liked him in the first place trash John McCain. It’s like… I can’t even quite explain why. It’s like Mr. Still-Right-Wing-To Begin-With swooping in at the last minute to save Mr. Redeemed-Right-Winger. I mean, it’s like that scene near the end of Spider-Man 3 where you can be pretty sure that Tobey McGuire is going to win just because he’s the main character, but it’s still a pleasant surprise to see him win thanks to the last-minute intervention of Harry Osborn of all people.
...now I try to be amused
If it is a strategy, it’s only a strategy of necessity because they can’t do any better than that. I’ll say this for McCain: he seems to know his limitations and play within them, unlike many politicians.