Busy getting ready for a trip, and maybe I will have something to say later.
Provided the damned site works.
by John Cole| 49 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
Busy getting ready for a trip, and maybe I will have something to say later.
Provided the damned site works.
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
While the Republicans are re-igniting the culture wars in St. Paul while begging for four more years, Jack Abramoff is in a courtroom begging for mercy:
Jack Abramoff, once a top Republican lobbyist on K Street, is asking a federal judge to show mercy when she sentences him Thursday in an epic corruption case that continues to rock Capitol Hill and the GOP establishment.
Abramoff, who is already serving a 70-month sentence stemming from his fraudulent purchase of a Florida casino-cruise ship company, will go before District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle to be sentenced in a scandal that resulted in a prison term for one former member of Congress, a dozen other guilty pleas by former Republican aides and officials, and new ethics legislation enacted at the start of the 110th Congress.
Barack Obama worked on that ethics legislation. Sarah Palin worked with an Abramoff lobbyist.
Discuss (and no, I did not watch the speeches tonight. Was reading Nixonland and watching BSG).
by Tim F| 230 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
So far Sarah Palin takes the following attacks off the table:
* Experience.
* Terrorist friends (what is Palin’s position on plastic explosives?).
* Crazy pastors who say offensive things.
* Upright family values (it’s private, fine, except that they’re marching the young couple around the convention and the McCain campaign won’t shut up about it).
Then there are the many ways that Palin enhances the perception that electing McCain essentially means a third term for George W. Bush.
* McCain’s decision itself: hasty, poorly though out, politically motivated.
* She serves the extreme Christianist fringe.
* Palin abuses power, fires employees for inappropriate reasons, replaces them with Michael Brown cronies (repeatedly as both mayor and as governor) then, in true Bush style, stonewalls the investigation and smears the investigators.
* Hates pork in words, loves it in practice.
* Cuts taxes in Wasilla and increases spending, leaving a city that had a balanced budget with more than $2,000 of debt per resident.
* Vindictive, intolerant of minor criticism, keeps a permanent enemies list.
* Lies about insultingly obvious things that practically dare the press to call her on it. So far she has falsely claimed to have won a Miss Congeniality prize at a beauty pageant, she denied any contact with the anti-American fringe Alaska Independence Party (multiple sources confirm that she attended their convention in 1994, she sent a video address this year and her husband was a longtime registered member), she claimed that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere when her gubernatorial campaign was predicated on supporting it. The McCain has repeatedly, flagrantly lied about the vetting process (the latest fallback position: Palin filled out an extensive, probing questionnaire. That must be GOP-speak for ‘due diligence’).
To sum up, Sarah Palin nullifies John McCain’s most productive lines of attack and reinforces the narrative that hurts McCain the most. In exchange her presence adds a dulling buff to his maverick image (it’s hard to overstate the mistake that she made in emphasizing the Bridge story on day one). On the whole the only imaginable reason why Palin would make a good pick is if every other possibility was worse. That may be the case, but if so, what that means for the GOP is almost too depressing for words.
by John Cole| 50 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
It looks like the election 2008, in which the Republicans are taking on the media, is underway.
So predictable, and who knows if they will succeed again.
7:51 pm- I actually have no desire to watch this. I am going to watch BSG. If someone wants to IM me when whatshername reads the speech they wrote for her, that would be great. Otherwise, I will just catch it on youtube. Move on to Tim’s thread above.
I guess I just remain flabbergasted that in the speech designed to introduce herself to the nation, the GOP is openly admitting Sarah Palin will be reading a speech someone else wrote for her before it was even known she would be the pick. I mean, I have learned to be cynical, but c’mon, folks.
by John Cole| 44 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
Before you read the rest of this post, I want you to watch this:
That is Sen. Obama, speaking extemporaneously, without a teleprompter, discussing the “quiet storms” that we all face. The speech was so good that Jay Newton-Small, who has covered Obama for 20 months, called the speech as good as any she has ever seen.
Sen. Obama is the man the Republicans like to say is just good at speechifying. You heard Joe Lieberman last night dismiss Obama as “eloquent,” but nothing more. You heard Fred Thompson last night say that “we hear a lot of talk about hope.” They like to say they are just words, and that he has no record, and that a good speech does not make a good president.
And then, after months of snide comments like that, the Republicans are going to trot out Sarah Palin, someone they would like to pretend is “authentic” and “real” and who has a real “record of reform,” but who is actually just another right-wing ideologue following a long line of pre-made hacks. And what will this “authentic” and mavericky “reformer” have to say? Whatever they tell her to say:
There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen, was too “masculine.” While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee’s speech before knowing who the nominee would be.
***So when you watch Sarah Palin tonight, expect to learn something about how well she handles a Teleprompter. Expect to learn something about the McCain campaign’s assessment of its political standing with women, or working families, or social conservatives. Whether you’re learning what Sarah Palin really thinks or feels is anybody’s guess.
How authentic. Fred Thompson won’t be the only phony just reading lines at the Republican convention in 2008.
*** Update ***
A preview of the zingers they wrote for her to recite. Should be quite the performance, and we will see she is a “fighter.” How authentic.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
Screw the foreplay:
I feel so much better. I think I need a shower.
An Afternoon Romp in the Hay with NoonerPost + Comments (81)
by John Cole| 60 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
Sarah Palin, maverick reformer and McCain’s soulmate:
It didn’t take long. We’ve already brought you news of the official investigation into Gov. Palin’s firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Steve Branchflower, the lead investigator, began trying to arrange a deposition of the governor days before her veep selection. And despite claiming executive privilege to shield requested emails, up until that point Palin had promised full cooperation with the probe.
Now, however, she is refusing to submit to questioning by Branchflower unless he and the legislative committee that appointed him agree to relinquish control of the investigation and turn it over to a state review board made up of three Palin appointees.
A far right Christian ideologue who lies, abuses her authority, stonewalls investigators, and then refuses to testify. Why does this sound so familiar?
Putting aside the absurdity of the McCain campaign, in which we need to elect Republicans to reform the government after eight years of Republican rule, I can not believe that after eight years of Bush, this is the “reform” the Republicans think the country is craving. As Chris Orr notes:
I’m skeptical that this new, aggressive posture will serve Palin well: It ramps up the heat on the story and makes Palin look more like a typical pol under investigation and less like someone with minor issues to resolve back home. But evidently those around Palin–perhaps on the McCain campaign staff?–have now concluded that there is enough there there to make stonewalling preferable to downplaying. Either that or Palin felt that resisting legislative inquiries is an area where she needed to bone up if she was going to serve in a GOP administration.
Pretty much.
*** Update ***
The Only Thing Missing Is a Degree From Regents UniversityPost + Comments (60)