Here we are with about a month to go and Barack Obama clearly cannot seal the deal.
Despite the best efforts of the wholly corrupt leftist media to portray Governor Sarah Palin as a naive rube -- you know, the kind of person who "clings" to Christianity because she's stupid, bigoted and bitter -- Governor Palin has reemerged as the real American hero that she is.
Today's polls show McCain/Palin closing the gap with The Anointed One's lead cut by a full quarter in today's Rasmussen Poll, nearly in half in the Battleground poll and down to a single point in Hotline while Reuters records the precipitous drop from a high of about eight points for the team of academics-turned-lawyers and now career politicians of the left just a few days ago, to a mere two today.
This trend allowed John McCain to not have to go for the jugular in the face-to-facce debate last night as the leftist media so powerfully suggested. Instead, with the trend line in favor of the can-do war hero and hockey-mom turned Governor, McCain could further chip away at The Anointed One's lead by exposing his naivite and arrogance one question at a time.
Meanwhile, the Governor of the largest state in the union, Palin is out on the road picking up endorsements -- like the virtually unreported support from the president of the National Organization for Women's largest chapter (Los Angeles) -- and taking the truth about Obama's long-standing and deep relationship with terrorists like William Ayers, hate mongers like Jeremiah Wright and convicted mobsters like Tony Rezko over the heads of the former daytime chat show hosts like Chuck Gibson and Katie Couric and directly to the real people of America. It's working big time!
With just under a month to go, The Anointed One -- despite the all out propaganda efforts of the media -- has failed to close the deal, his lead is shrinking and we go into the homestretch with the good guys on the ascendancy.
Shana Tova, y'all.
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Er... how is Palin a hero? She's obviously done the job the Alaskans elected her for, running the state the way they want it run, and was certainly better at that than she was as the mayor of Wasilla, but... being good at your job isn't heroic.
McCain v Obama: New polls says it's becoming a blowout. Obama up by 11 percent now
Barack Obama has expanded his lead over John McCain, among registered voters, from yesterday's record nine points to 11 points today, according to the latest Gallup daily tracking poll.
The poll, which has a margin of error of +/- 2, shows Obama is now attacting 52 percent of voter support, while McCain is attracting 41 percent.
These poll results would not reflect opinions on the second debate. Those would be expected to come out in a couple days. they would seem to reflect the growing unease of Americans with the state of the economy, and the current credit crisis.
Now, as always, polls are polls, and should be taken as no more, no less, than snapshots in time. But they offer a glimpse at what those being polled are thinking, at the very least. And by these numbers, which continue a trend of Obama becoming more popular the longer the financial crisis stays in the news, and the days financial news from the IMF that the crisis is resulting in a economic slowdown worldwide that will continue at least into 2009, these would be discouraging numbers for the McCain camp.
On the other hand, they're national, not state by state, so they don't necessarily reflect any change in the electoral makeup of the country. The electoral map, however, is not looking very good for McCain at the moment, with a number of poll based projections noting that if opinions stay the same and people vote the way they're now thinking, Obama is within a single state of the 270 it would take to become the next president, while McCain needs as many as 11 more states to get to the 270 threshold.
In any case, this is the biggest gap yet seen in the poll we try to keep up with most often. So, what do we think it means?
John McCain is heading to near-certain defeat in the presidential election because American voters no longer trust Republicans on the economy, a strategist for the party warned yesterday.
Steve Lombardo, who has worked on Republican campaigns since 1992 and advised McCain's opponent, Mitt Romney, in the primaries, said it would take a major external event, such as a terrorist attack or a crippling error by Barack Obama, for McCain to make a comeback.
"Basically unless there is some external event the dynamics of this race are being driven almost entirely by the financial situation here in the United States and globally, and that works for Barack Obama," Lombardo told the Guardian.
"If there isn't some sort of event or, God forbid, a terrorist attack that moves the election on to foreign affairs or national security, it is unlikely that McCain can regain the lead, just because voters have decided that the base of the problems they face are the Republican party, George Bush, and, by extension, John McCain."
McCain last night tried to get past Obama's advantage on the economy by making a personal connection with voters, in the second of three presidential debates in Nashville, Tennessee.
Taking advantage of a town hall format, McCain walked up to the studio audience to make his pitch. "I know how to get American working again," he said.
But the outlook for Republicans did not look good. Yesterday saw Bush brought to a new low. The 25% approval rating was recorded just after Congress approved a $700bn (£400bn) economic bailout, suggesting the public gave no credit to the White House for its rescue plan.
The rating, a new nadir for a historically unpopular president, puts Bush one point ahead of Richard Nixon on the eve of his departure in 1974. It is three points higher than the poll's all-time low for any president, Harry Truman's 22% in 1952.
Lombardo laid out his misgivings in a memo obtained by the Guardian, in which he wrote that McCain's attempts to make the election about Obama's character were unlikely to work. The memo argues such attacks at this point seem "desperate"; the time to define the Democrats' character had been in August - before the presidential debates. "The economic situation has virtually ended John McCain's presidential aspirations and no amount of tactical manoeuvring in the final 29 days is likely to change that equation," the memo said. "There are more turns to come in this election and it is not over yet but it sure seems like it is."
The memo said McCain lost the election on September 15 - two days after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy - when he told a rally in Florida: "The fundamentals of the economy are strong."
McCain saw fresh signs yesterday of the damage to his prospects in polls showing him trailing in four battleground states and fighting to keep Indiana and North Carolina. He suffered another blow when the wife of a retiring Republican senator seen as one of the Republicans' experts on national security officially endorsed Obama. "We're in two wars, two of the longest we've ever been in. We've run up a third of our nation's debt in just the past eight years. We're in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression," said Lilibet Hagel, whose husband, Chuck, is a senator from Nebraska.
With less than four weeks until election day, the slide in the polls brought an even more personal edge to McCain's attacks on Obama. The Democrats hit back with an ad released on cable networks yesterday, accusing McCain of being "out of ideas" and seeking to distract voters from America's economic problems. "With no plan to lift our economy up, John McCain wants to tear Barack Obama down," it said.
In the latest bad news for McCain, a Time magazine-CNN poll showed the Republican struggling to hold states Bush carried easily in 2004. In Indiana, Republican since 1964, McCain and Obama were tied among registered voters on 48%.
Palin, meanwhile, emerged as the attack dog. The vice-presidential candidate redirected her attack from Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers to Obama himself. "You mean he didn't know that he launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist?" she asked a rally in Jacksonville.
Time running out for McCain to turn election tide: pundits
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — After a lackluster debate, John McCain now has less than four weeks to turn the race for the White House around, as observers on Wednesday began to wonder aloud whether the Republican who once dubbed himself the comeback kid can win.
One day after McCain faced off in the second of three debates against Barack Obama, political observers said the exchange failed to up-end the front-runner status of his Democratic rival Barack Obama, as the contest ticks down to the November 4 vote.
"Despite John McCain's best efforts, the Arizona senator didn't knock Mr Obama from his cool evasion or even do much to rebut the Democrat's talking points," the conservative Wall Street Journal wrote the morning after the debate.
"This isn't enough to change the dynamics of the race."
Snap polls by US television networks awarded the debate -- the second of a trio of presidential clashes -- to Obama.
Democrats now are optimistic that -- with two of three rhetorical contests over and both won by Obama according to opinion polls -- the Illinois senator is an increasingly good bet to clinch the November 4 election.
"The race is over" crowed Howard Wolfson, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, one of several Democratic rivals vanquished by Obama en route to the sealing the nomination.
Longtime Washington pundit Roger Simon pronounced neither McCain nor Obama the winner, saying that from his vantage point, neither candidate succeeded in "delivering a knockout punch."
"The trouble for John McCain, however, is that he needed one," wrote Simon, a writer for the Politico daily newspaper.
The day after Tuesday's outing, Obama continued to sound an upbeat note on the stump in the midwestern state of Indiana, Wednesday promising Americans "better days ahead" despite plummeting global stock markets, rising job losses and dark clouds of economic gloom.
McCain appeared at a campaign rally planned along with running mate Sarah Palin in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Trailing in most national polls, the Republican White House hopeful went to Tuesday's debate armed with an ambitious 300-billion dollar surprise plan to buy up the bad American mortgages that helped tip the global economy into crisis.
The gambit however failed to convince voters and the US political class that Obama is not be trusted at the helm of state and that McCain is in fact, the best choice to lead the country.
Political observers noted that support for the Democratic contender had been growing leading into Tuesday's face-off, and said they saw nothing in the debate that was likely to change that, including in a handful of all-important in battleground states as time runs out before the election.
Meanwhile, observers continued, despite the generally civil exchanges of Tuesday's encounter, to remark upon the markedly nasty tone between the two candidates.
The New York Times excoriated McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of Alaska for the tone of the Arizona senator's campaign.
"Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday," it lamented.
"We certainly expected better from Mr McCain who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics," it said.
McCain, widely criticized for rarely looking at Obama during their first debate two weeks ago, let his dislike of his opponent show again, when he referred to him as "that one" in a tense exchange over energy.
A CNN national poll after the debate found that 54 percent of those asked thought Obama won and 30 percent said McCain was victorious.
A CBS survey also gave the debate to Obama -- 40 percent to 26 percent.
Gallup's daily tracking poll Tuesday reflected the high stakes for McCain, giving Obama a nine point lead nationally, while the Democratic nominee is also widening his edge in key battleground states.
wtf, evan. what planet are you beaming this latest evidence of idiocy from?
Mccain is through. Any chance of victory has slipped through his fingers. The efforts of the "Christian" Palin to stir up hatred in the crowds she addresses won't help. With the election of Obama in less than a month and 10 Democrats added to the Senate, we will have one-party government.
WASHINGTON — It was a moment that stood out in a presidential debate void of many pithy sound bites: "That one," Republican John McCain said contemptuously of Barack Obama, pointing in the general direction of his Democratic rival while discussing energy policies.
Those two small words didn't just leave many pundits cringing, but more significantly, they caused some in the African-American community to accuse McCain of racism in his dismissive treatment of the man aiming to be the first black president in U.S. history.
"It speaks to the fundamental belief of racism: despite all evidence to the contrary, you are inherently beneath me simply by virtue of the melanin content of your skin," Ciji McBride, a 33-year-old sales professional in Los Angeles, said Wednesday.
Don Hammonds of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also took offence.
"Regardless of intent, it showed Senator McCain to be culturally ignorant, and completely unaware of the implications of what his off-the-cuff statement meant to people of colour," he wrote.
"Whether Senator McCain meant it that way or not, if you are a person of colour, and someone trots out the 'that one' remark, you instantly take it as racist. I know that I did."
Some say race is an issue that's been simmering beneath the surface since Obama won the Democratic nomination in August and began his run for the White House.
The Obama campaign has been careful to steer discussion away from race, knowing its potential to be a powder keg in a nation still deeply divided along colour lines in some key battleground states.
The Illinois senator is reportedly mindful about reaching out too visibly to black voters, assuming it would alienate the white voters he needs to win the Nov. 4 election.
But in recent days, with McCain as many as 10 points behind Obama in some polls and embarking upon a campaign to discredit his character, stories from across the country have begun to emerge:
-Yet another Republican official referring to Obama publicly as "Barack Hussein Obama," apparently in an attempt to falsely suggest he's Muslim. A sheriff in Florida did the same thing at a Sarah Palin event in Florida last week, and although McCain's running mate distanced herself from it, the sheriff was unrepentant.
-The 10-day suspension of a Grade 7 teacher in Florida for using the N-word in class to describe Obama. Parents were demanding that he be fired.
-Reports from Obama supporters in Virginia - a longtime Republican stronghold that is now polling in favour of the Democrats - of an anonymous message stuffed into their mail boxes accusing them of voting for Obama due simply to their white liberal guilt.
-A report from an Obama canvasser in a predominately white, low-income area of Philadelphia of voters using blatantly racist terms to refer to Obama, but then declaring themselves undecided.
-A man allegedly shouting out "kill him" at a Palin rally in which she criticized Obama's association with a onetime domestic terrorist. The Secret Service was investigating.
Ange-Marie Hancock, a race relations professor at the University of Southern California, says it's not surprising McCain is now running a negative campaign of the type that could incite some of the baser elements of society.
"Any time that a candidate is losing, they are going to go negative," she said.
"Americans say they hate it but it often works because it gets them riled up. I am not surprised that it's gone this way but it wouldn't have gone this way if McCain was winning. It's a sad commentary."
Alvin Poussaint, a well-known figure in the black community, says McCain's "that one" remark was an attempt to suggest Obama is a risky choice.
"This is America and race is an issue," said Poussaint, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who co-wrote a book with comic Bill Cosby entitled "Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors."
"And part of the McCain campaign strategy is to paint Obama as a risk because he's different than many other Americans," he said.
"So when he says something like 'that one,' it's highlighting that. He's outside the norm. And what does 'that one' mean? Is it because he's an outsider, he's black, he's young, he's a liberal or is it all of that?"
Racism is an issue that is weighing heavily on the minds of African-Americans as the election looms, Poussaint added.
"I have many African American associates who don't believe the polls at all, who don't believe Obama is as far ahead as the polls suggest because they truly believe people simply won't vote for a black man when they are actually in the election booth," he said.
"They're fearful he is going to lose, and I've already heard that if he does lose, it will solidify in their minds that the souls of many Americans are deeply racist."
The McCain campaign appeared oblivious to how the black community received the Arizona senator's remark - and his response to a black audience member during the debate that he "may not have heard of" two failed and high-profile mortgage companies, Fannie May and Freddie Mac.
His campaign even sent out an email shortly after the debate, saying McCain's "that one" remark was the line of the night and then proceeding to refer to Obama throughout the dispatch simply as "That One."
McBride says that serves to illustrate McCain's people are out of touch. But she's optimistic that they don't represent the population in general.
"As a black person, I'm am consistently amazed by the volumes of non-black folks who are working their butts off for free to help get Obama elected," she said.
"This isn't just about Obama's race, it's about him transcending his race. Yes, there will be some people who just can't get over it. But the numbers show there are far more people who are ready to move on."
By Gloria Borger
CNN Senior Political Analyst
(CNN) -- Here we are, at a time of national crisis, a moment when Americans feel truly besieged, wondering when and whether they will be able to retire or send their kids to college.
Political analysts say Sen. John McCain needs to lay out a comprehensive economic plan in order to win.
Coincidentally, it's also time to elect a president.
So in this race, the questions about leadership in a crisis are, for once, not theoretical. Candidates aren't just opining about leadership; they're supposed to show that they can lead. In real time.
Yet if viewers tuned in to the second presidential debate to see some evidence of that, what they mostly saw was two caged contenders.
Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain were restrained by silly rules designed to crush any legitimate exchanges between the two men (no doubt lawyered to death by their own campaigns and approved by the archaic Presidential Debate Commission). No direct exchanges. No real conversation. Oh, unless, of course, you consider "one-minute" discussion periods anything but an oxymoron.
Hey, this is a really important election. Why not actually allow interaction between the two men who want to lead the free world? Watch voters rate the debate »
But if you're judging what we did see, it was a truly aggressive Obama. He never missed an opportunity to take on his opponent (in a substantive way) or to respond to a charge (about, say, whether he will raise your taxes).
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As for McCain, he was full of moments missed. When asked about "sacrifice," for instance, he could have hit it out of the park with his usual (and very affecting) answers about national service, about "a cause greater than yourself," et al. Instead, what did we get? Earmarks! Get rid of earmarks!
It's beginning to sound a lot like the chant to get rid of "waste, fraud and abuse" from the Reagan years. Here's the problem: Good idea, but not enough. Not in this economy. This crisis calls for bigger ideas, not tiny ones. And earmarks -- worth about $18 billion -- are small, given the $700 billion financial bailout. It's Tuesday's punch line.
To give McCain some credit, he did try, at least, to come up with a new idea: a plan authorizing the Treasury to buy up the mortgages of bankruptcy-bound homeowners and replace them with loans they can afford. Watch memorable moments from the debate »
The Obama camp immediately pointed out that, in fact, the plan signed by the president last week gives the Treasury permission to do that. They were right, to a point: McCain's plan is more specific.
It's also really expensive, with a price tag of about $300 billion. So it kinda makes McCain's arguments against Obama that he's a big-spending liberal ("He's proposed $860 billion in new spending") look a tad hollow. And GOP fiscal conservatives were probably lining up to lambaste McCain's idea the minute he proposed it.
Then there are the larger points: Going into this debate, there was a sense that McCain needed ye olde game-changer. His campaign (largely through his obliging running mate) has been all about downgrading Obama's character, with lines about him "palling around with terrorists" (aka William Ayers) or Gov. Sarah Palin's winks (real or imagined) about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's strong ties to Obama's world view. Watch more on whether the debate was a game changer »
And although we figured McCain would leave that nasty work to Palin, we thought he might have something else up his sleeve. He came sleeveless.
Sure, his dislike for Obama -- now known as "that one" thanks to McCain's inept attempt at humor(?) -- came though loud and clear. And he was strong on foreign policy. But as for changing the game as he continues to lag in the polls, it didn't happen.
Obama has made substantial gains since the first debate, and much of that is largely because of the financial crisis. Voters clearly want a change. But this debate only cemented his presidential persona. He's in the process of closing the deal with the American voters.
McCain has to figure out a new deal, and fast.
Wow, denial is a sad, scary thing.
I would stop there, but I should clarify that I'm referring to our self-important blogger ("America's top conservative comedian") as being the one in denial, before he twists my words into an attack on myself (or whomever he feels like hating today).
But denial isn't enough to describe flat out lies and "half-truths" that this nutjob has made his primary modus operandi -- like aggrandizing Alaska as the "largest state in the union" (sure, it's huge if you're measuring square footage, but the reality is that population-wise Alaska is currently ranked 47th in the United States), or basing his "analysis" on cherry-picked polls whereas overall it is pretty evident that Obama was much stronger in the debate last night (without resorting to being condescending or unnecessarily belligerent as John McCain was).
Now I personally find polls to be nothing more than damaging to a fair election process. They practically help generate public opinion, since -- let's face it -- most Americans don't know what we're voting for, but only WHO we're voting for. And what's easier than determining your presidential pick by having your favorite political pundit TELL you who to vote for, or of course by following the latest poll results (which are all over the place anyway)? Of course, this behavior usually leads to a cycle where people go to the person/network/blog/newspaper that's going to support the decision they've already made in their minds, which in turn only strengthens their "decision".
The sad truth is that people want decisions made for them, and doing actual research is just too much damn work. This applies to most conservatives and liberals. And hate-spewing people like Evan prey on the malleable minds of the choir they are preaching to...mostly to make themselves feel like they actually have a viable purpose in life.
Here's something conservative pundit/journalist Michael Barone had to say about the discrepancy that exists between polls today:
Tracking Polls Show Different Pictures of Obama vs. McCain
(I purposedly picked a conservative point of view because anything else would've been immediately shot down by the blogger as being "liberal media bias", possibly followed by a forced segue into Chris Matthews feeling "tingles rushing up his legs".)
Now that I've criticized the voting habits of the majority of Americans...go ahead, Evan, tell me I'm just an elitist liberal who looks down upon "gun-loving", "clinging to religion" Americans. I expect nothing more from you.
Brooks: Obama will win by nineAll comments (1)
David Brooks was interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg today at an Atlantic magainze luncheon in New York. He predicted, according to HuffPo, that Obama is going to win by nine points.
I want to say that I emphatically think it's too early for such talk. I would make no such projections. I do think it's interesting though that one of the country's most important conservative journalist/intellectuals is doing it. And I thought you should know! It may start a drip, drip, drip.
Oh yes, Brooks also said this:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Yowza.
The Obama Surge Gets Stronger! Breaking: Latest Gallup Poll, Released on October 8th, Has Obama Ahead by 11 Points! "The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report shows Barack Obama with a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain."
In Historic Move, Court Orders Release of 17 Innocent Gitmo Prisoners Into U.S.
By , Center for Constitutional Rights
Posted on October 7, 2008, Printed on October 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/101983/
July 21, 2008, New York -- Today, for the first time, a federal court ordered the release into the United States of 17 innocent Uighur men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for nearly seven years. The men are refugees who would face persecution and imprisonment, if not death, if returned to their native China.
"In the history of our Republic, the military never imprisoned any man so harshly, and for so long, let alone men who are not the enemy. We have broken faith with the rule of law, and been untrue to the generosity of spirit that is our national character," said Sabin Willett, Partner at Bingham McCutchen who argued the case for the detainees today.
"This is a historic day for the U.S. Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them," said CCR Attorney Emi MacLean. "For years, the United States has begged other countries to clean up the mess we made in Guantánamo, but the hypocrisy of this appeal was evident abroad. Perhaps now other countries will be less reluctant to come to our aid." MacLean continued, "Allowing these wrongfully detained men a fresh start would also provide the U.S. a fresh start -- an opportunity to turn a page and finally take a position of leadership in closing Guantánamo."
Religious and community leaders from both Tallahassee, Florida and the Washington D.C. area offered to the court detailed plans for the support of the men, from housing and counseling to employment and car insurance. In this stunning show of goodwill and solidarity, 20 leaders from faith-based communities in Tallahassee, Florida, and a network of refugee resettlement agencies and other religious groups, have pledged to help settle the men in local communities. Many members of the Uighur community came to court today to lend support.
Said Mr. Willett: "The volunteers who come to court today from church and community, from synagogue and mosque to offer sanctuary to these men bear true faith to that character, and give us hope that the better angel of our nature can yet return."
On the day of the hearing, Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) also reiterated their June call for the U.S. to grant protection to the imprisoned Uighurs.
The 17 men currently imprisoned at Guantánamo left China amid increasing political oppression and found their way to Afghanistan, where they lived in small Uighur communities. In late 2001, they were forced to flee the aerial bombardment of the surrounding areas. Eventually, they made their way to Pakistan in the belief that they would be safer there. After crossing into Pakistan, the Uighurs were welcomed and fed by Pakistani villagers who then turned them over for generous bounties offered by the United States.
Last week, after years of litigation, the U.S. government finally conceded that none of these men would be treated as "enemy combatants." All were cleared for release long ago. However, because of the stigma of their detention at Guantánamo and for fear of offending China, no other country had agreed to offer these men safe haven. Despite this failure to find a third country to take them, the government argued that the court could not release them into the U.S. and, therefore, that the men would have to stay at Guantánamo indefinitely.
For more information on the Uighurs' story, click here.
CCR has led the legal battle over Guantánamo for the last six years -- sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA "ghost detainee." CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at Guantánamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. CCR represented the detainees with co-counsel in the most recent argument before the Supreme Court in 2007.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. www.ccrjustice.org.
© 2008 Center for Constitutional Rights All rights reserved.
The destruction of the Republican Party appears imminent. This is all to the good - after all, it offers nothing of value to the American people. The term "Republican Party" can be defined thus: "a political party that throws up a smokescreen of patriotic and religious formulae so as to conceal the tawdry machinations of corporate criminals and the crooked politicians who do their bidding." Fortunately, within a short time this totally discredited organization will be reduced to almost complete impotence, indeed will no longer play any sigificant role in our national life. With Obama in the White House, a fillibuster-proof Senate and (eventually) a predominantly liberal Court, the Democratic Party will poised be achieve ascendancy for at least a generation.
Gee, it appears DAvid Brooks disagrees with Kreeps...and especially and specifically about the people he surrounds himself with...he is scared of Palin, though:
David Brooks: Sarah Palin "Represents A Fatal Cancer To The Republican Party"
David Brooks spoke frankly about the presidential and vice presidential candidates Monday afternoon, calling Sarah Palin a "fatal cancer to the Republican party" but describing John McCain and Barack Obama as "the two best candidates we've had in a long time."
In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg at New York's Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine's redesign, Brooks decried Palin's anti-intellectualism and compared her to President Bush in that regard:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Brooks praised Palin's natural political talent, but said she is "absolutely not" ready to be president or vice president. He explained, "The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there's no time to think or make decisions."
The New York Times columnist also said that the "great virtue" of Palin's counterpart, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, is that he is anything but a "yes man."
"[Biden] can't not say what he thinks," Brooks remarked. "There's no internal monitor, and for Barack Obama, that's tremendously important to have a vice president who will be that way. Our current president doesn't have anybody like that."
Brooks also spent time praising Obama's intellect and skills in social perception, telling two stories of his interactions with Obama that left him "dazzled":
Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.
And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.
The Bush-hating Left has been slamming the "Bush Economy" since the last recession, the recovery, a record-setting expansion, and now the crunch with equal calumny throughout.
Now they have a real (and very conveniently timed) crunch they can celebrate.
But it was never as bad as slandered when it was doing well.
Despite the subprime larva which broke out of its cocoon and is now wreaking havoc like Mothra, the problems we have now have nothing to do with the tax-cuts, deficits, or the general de-regulation that they railed about for the last eight years (when specific regulation was attempted for Fannie Mae, as needed, and as called for by Bush, McCain, & other Republicans, Democrats sabotaged the effort), but they finally have a real "economic debacle" they needed that would roll out the red carpet for "change."
But, as before, are things here really THAT bad to warrant Marx's I-Told-You-So obituary for Capitalism and a Cinderella shoe for socialism?
Knowing that there were ideological forces behind the sub-prime lending catastrophe that may have intentionally pushed the System to the brink (see the Cloward-Pivens strategy designed to ultimately discredit capitalism--with thanks to fj for the heads-up), those forces and their sniveling tools here are spreading rumors of Capitalism's demise prematurely, methinks:
"Not Doomsday For Capitalism
We're Not Headed for a Depression
No, this isn't the crisis that kills global capitalism.
By GARY S. BECKER
In order to promote a much smoother functioning of the financial system, it is paramount to distinguish between the immediate steps needed to cope with the present crisis and the long-run reforms needed to reduce the likelihood of future crises. Let's start with the short-run fixes.
David GothardFirst of all, the magnitude of this financial disturbance should be placed in perspective. Although it is the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it is a far smaller crisis, especially in terms of the effects on output and employment. The United States had about 25% unemployment during most of the decade from 1931 until 1941, and sharp falls in GDP. Other countries experienced economic difficulties of a similar magnitude. So far, American GDP has not yet fallen, and unemployment has reached only a little over 6%. Both figures are likely to get quite a bit worse, but they will nowhere approach those of the 1930s.
The Treasury's announced insurance of all money-market funds, and the full insurance of bank deposits, carry considerable moral hazard risks, but they have not aroused much controversy. The main thrust of the new banking law allows the Treasury secretary to purchase bank assets up to $700 billion in order to increase the liquidity of the banking system. These assets are of uncertain worth since there is essentially no market for many of them, and hence they have no market price. The government hopes to create this market partly through using auctions, where banks would offer their assets at particular prices, and the government would decide whether to buy them. I would have preferred starting with a smaller dollar value of purchases, and up the amount if the situation deteriorates further.
Partly because many consumers are repelled by the intention to bail out companies and their executives who made decisions that got the companies into trouble, the new law includes income and severance pay limits for executives whose firms seek government help. Even though one cannot think much of executives who led their banks into such a mess, that is a bad precedent since it involves too much micromanagement of bank operations. Moreover, such salary controls can be evaded by very generous fringe benefits.
The moral-hazard consequences for banks receiving a bailout now is worrisome since they may expect to get rescued again by the government if their future investments turn sour. Yet while I find helping these banks highly distasteful, moral-hazard concerns should be temporarily relaxed when the whole short-term credit system is close to collapse. Still, the bank bill with its huge bailout does suggest that the $29 billion bailout of the bondholders of Bear Stearns in March was a mistake. It seemed to have a moral-hazard effect by encouraging Lehman Brothers and other investment banks to delay in raising more capital because they too might have expected the government to come to their rescue if times got much worse. Although the government was apparently concerned that foreign central banks were major holders of the bonds, it was unwise to give them and other bondholders such full protection.
One troubling provision is that the government can take an equity stake in banks it helps. Some economists have proposed a similar role for government equity in these banks. I believe it is unwise to give governments equity in private companies, even if the government does not have voting rights in company policies. Many examples in recent history, such as the current Alitalia fiasco, show that political interests outweigh economic ones when governments have some ownership of private companies. This is likely to happen in this bailout if some banks that are helped decide to sharply cut employment in the districts of some congressmen, or to transfer many jobs overseas.
Taxpayers may be stuck with hundreds of billions of dollars of losses from the various government insurance provisions and government purchases of assets. Although the media has made much of this possibility through headlines like "$700 Billion Bailout," such large losses are highly unlikely except in the low probability event that the economy falls into a sustained major depression. Indeed, with efficient auctions, the government may well make money on its actions, just as the Resolution Trust Corporation that took over many savings-and-loan banks during the 1980s crisis did not lose much, if any, money. By buying assets when they are depressed and waiting out the crisis, the government may have a profit on these assets when they are finally sold back to the private sector. Making money does not mean the government involvement is wise, but the likely losses to taxpayers are being greatly exaggerated.
The temporary banning of short sales is an example of a perennial approach to difficulties in financial markets and elsewhere; namely, "shoot the messenger." Short sales did not cause the crisis, but reflect beliefs about how long the slide will continue. Trying to prevent these beliefs from being expressed suppresses useful information, and also creates serious problems for many hedge funds that use short sales to hedge other risks. Their ban can also cause greater panic in other markets.
The main problem with the modern financial system based on widespread use of derivatives and securitization is that while financial specialists understand how individual assets function, even they have limited understanding of the aggregate risks created by the system. That is, insufficient appreciation of how the whole incredibly complex financial system operates when exposed to various types of stress. In light of such limitations, it is difficult to propose long-term reforms. Still, a few reforms seem reasonably likely to reduce the probability of future financial crises.
- Increase capital requirements. The capital requirements of banks relative to assets should be increased after the crisis is over in order to prevent the highly leveraged ratios of assets to capital in financial institutions during the past several years. Possibly a minimum ratio of capital to assets should be imposed by the Fed on investment banks and money funds. As much as possible, the measure of capital should not be its book value but its market value, such as the market value of publicly traded shares of banks. Book value measures, for example, apparently badly missed the plight of Japanese banks during their decade-long banking crisis of the 1990s.
- Sell Freddie and Fannie. The government should as quickly as possible sell Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to fully private companies that receive no government insurance or other help. These two giants did not cause the housing mess, but in recent years they surely greatly contributed to it, partly through congressional pressure on them to increase their purchases of subprime loans. They have owned or guaranteed almost half of the $12 trillion in outstanding mortgages while having a small capital base. The housing market already has excessive amounts of government subsidies, such as from the tax exemption of interest on mortgages, and should not have government sponsored enterprises that insure mortgage-backed securities.
- No more bailouts. The "too big to fail" approach to banks and other companies should be abandoned as new long-term financial policies are developed. Such an approach is inconsistent with a free-market economy. It also has caused dubious company bailouts in the past, such as the large government loan years ago to Chrysler, a company that remained weak and should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy. All the American auto companies have asked for and received handouts too since they cannot compete against Japanese, Korean and German car makers, partly because these American companies have been incredibly badly managed. A "too many institutions in trouble to fail principle," as in the present financial crisis, may still be necessary on rare occasions, but failure of badly run large financial and other companies is healthy and indeed necessary for the survival of a robust free-enterprise competitive system.
Is this a final "Crisis of Global Capitalism" -- to borrow the title of a book by George Soros written shortly after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98? The crisis that kills capitalism has been said to happen during every major recession and financial crisis ever since Karl Marx prophesized the collapse of capitalism in the middle of the 19th century. Although I admit to having greatly underestimated the severity of the current crisis, I am confident that sizable world economic growth will resume before very long under a mainly capitalist world economy.
Consider, for example, that in the decade after various predictions of the collapse of global capitalism following the Asian crisis, both world GDP and world trade experienced unprecedented growth thanks to the power of market competition on a global scale. The South Korean economy, for example, was pummeled during that crisis, but has had significant economic growth since. World economic growth will recover once we are over the present severe financial difficulties.
Mr. Becker, the 1992 Nobel economics laureate, is professor of economics at the University of Chicago and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Portions of this article first appeared on his Web site."
haha...the review is much funnier than the movie:
Get Out The Tin Foil Hats: "An American Carol" Flop Blamed On Left-Wing Conspiracy
The new movie "An American Carol" is a satirical send-up of Michael Moore, wacky left-wing nutters, and stars Bill O'Reilly. It also could easily have been called "An American Movie Miss Banshee Will Never See," but that's neither here nor there. The point is that it apparently, according to the critics, sucks. Really, really sucks. And the audiences seem to agree, as it was a total flop in its opening weekend. So...what? Movies flop all the time! Some of my favorite movies were flops!
Well, not if your movie flopped because of a...wait for it...VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY!
Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuun!!!
Yeah. So the producers of "An American Carol" have battened down the hatches in their underground bomb shelters, amassed their food rations, and affixed their tin foil hats, placing the blame for the movie, well, SUCKING on a variety of paranoid delusions, including:
Tickets being misprinted to ruin the box office tally
The film, which is PG-13, being advertised as R.
The film not being part of marquee advertising.
The sound and picture being screwed up in the projector booth.
Rest assured, there is an investigation being conducted right now to find and punish, perhaps by firing squad, the perpetrators of these crimes. No word yet on monetary compensation for those who actually had to sit through the film, which, by the way, is really, really awful.
Maybe...maybe it IS a conspiracy. A conspiracy to keep really really crap movies away from the innocent public, who just wanted to sit in some air conditioning, eat Junior Mints and actually (gasp!) enjoy themselves! Yes, that's got to be it. It's all a plot, a plan, a path of destruction paved with good movies! HALP!
That's got to be it. Not at all that no matter what your political leanings, "An American Carol" is just a bad, bad movie. See the trailer for yourself. I've watched it twice, and I rolled my eyes so hard I could see my own brain stem.
McCain on defensive in 'Bush states'
51 minutes ago
INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AFP) — Less than four weeks from election day, John McCain is in trouble on supposedly safe Republican turf in a string of states which President George W. Bush won in 2004.
With time running short, latest opinion polls show McCain's attempt to take on Democrat Barack Obama in the crucial swing states that will decide the election complicated by his need to solidify his own battle lines.
McCain trails Obama in most recent state polls in Florida, Virginia, Iowa, Nevada and Colorado, all of which Bush won in his surge to reelection in 2004.
The Arizona senator is also locked in a closer-than-expected struggle with his rival in normally solidly Republican Indiana and North Carolina, where the president coasted to double-digit wins over John Kerry.
While clinging on in the 'Bush states' McCain also trails in latest polls in vital swing states Ohio and Pennsylvania, which form vital paving slabs in any candidate's road to the 270 electoral votes needed to grab the White House.
"McCain is playing a strategy of defense to protect those states that Bush won in 2004," said Dante Scala, professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.
"There seem to be all sorts of leaks in the boat."
By contrast, Obama looks strong in Kerry states, so if the race is steady until November, he may have a choice of targets which would take him over the electoral vote threshold.
McCain enlisted the help of his vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, a heroine to the Republican conservative base, to try to fire up support Wednesday in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
But it was Palin's one-day blitz in conservative strongholds in Florida earlier this week which caught the Obama campaign's eye.
"What is very clear is they are not playing offense right now," senior strategist David Axelrod told reporters on Obama's plane on Tuesday.
"They are playing defense. We are competitive in many, many states that George Bush won in 2004 and they are having to defend those states."
Already trailing in the polls, McCain's plight deepened last week when he pulled out of Michigan, a state which went Democratic in 2004 but which Republicans had hoped to capture this time.
The McCain campaign is stressing that the only poll that counts is the election on November 4.
"Nobody has voted yet," said McCain advisor Nicolle Wallace on CNN Tuesday.
McCain's political director Mike DuHaime argued on MSNBC Wednesday that Obama's advantage had come about suddenly, so could quickly shift back.
"We've got four weeks to go, 27 days, so there certainly is time, plenty of time in politics," he said.
McCain's frailty in some Republican states may have been behind the new, sharply negative turn in his campaign, which appears to be aimed at firing up Republican voters as Bush did in 2000 and 2004.
But some analysts are asking whether a "base strategy" will work at a time when the US economy is in tumult and Democrats will marshall a vastly expanded voter base of their own.
No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio, and it was in the economically struggling midwestern state that Bush finally squelched the Kerry challenge in 2004.
But with the economic crunch biting deep, the state, a toss-up just a few weeks ago, appears to be trending towards Obama in recent polling, and the Democrat was due to launch a two-day bus tour in the state Thursday.
A CNN poll Monday had Obama up three percent, while the latest ABC survey put him up six percent. A Fox/Rasmussen poll had McCain leading by a slender one percent of the vote.
In Florida, Obama has also come from behind, with polls suggesting he is profiting from the financial crisis which voters blame on Republican leadership.
Six polls over the last week and a half have Obama up by between two and seven points in the state which controversially handed Bush the White House in 2000. McCain was up in a single poll.
Another staunchly solidly Republican state, Virginia, also appears to hold promise for Obama. He leads in five of the most recent polls, while McCain is up in two.
Republicans have won the state in every presidential election since 1964, but the Democrat, helped by an influx of immigrants and young people to the Washington suburbs, has high hopes of turning the tide.
Obama led in other Bush states: Iowa, by up to 10 points, Colorado by up to six points and in Nevada between two and seven points in the most recent surveys.
The race was also in the low single figures in Indiana and North Carolina, which have been safe Republican territory for decades.
In Pennsylvania, which went Democrat in 2004, Obama had a lead of seven to 15 points in recent polls.
Evan's trolls go nuts everytime Der Lider starts to lose ground in the polls. McCain's being outspent 4+:1 and still, Obama can't seal the deal. LOL!
Barack Obama Will Defeat John McCain—This One's Over
October 09, 2008 10:00 AM ET | Robert Schlesinger | Permanent Link | Print
The presidential election is still a few weeks away, but the presidential race is over.
Sure, there's still one more presidential debate; and a month is a proverbial lifetime in politics, but a sober look at both the current electoral landscape and political history tells us that—barring a reality-altering political deus ex machina—Barack Obama will be our 44th president.
Consider: The biggest political event last week was not the Palin-Biden sideshow but the McCain campaign's surrender in Michigan. Michigan's blue-collar voters were supposed to be cold to Obama, leaving the state vulnerable to John McCain. Not so.
Consider that the McCain campaign conceded last week that six states that voted for Bush in 2004—Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio—are tossups. Ohio, Missouri, and Florida last went Democratic in 1996 (no Republican presidential candidate has ever succeeded without the Buckeye State). But North Carolina hasn't gone Democratic since 1976, when neighboring governor Jimmy Carter won it, while Virginia and Indiana haven't supported a Democrat since 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson but inaugurated the conservative era. Let's repeat: It's October, and McCain is still struggling in North Carolina (where three polls released this week have the race at either a tie, a McCain lead, or an Obama lead), Virginia (three recent polls have Obama leading from 2 to 12 points), and Indiana (two polls released this month, one rating the race a tie, the other giving McCain a 5-point lead).
More broadly, the various electoral maps that take into account polls from the 50 states show Obama over, way over, or a hair's breadth away from the magical 270-electoral-vote figure.
Nationally, the picture is just as grim for McCain: Gallup's daily tracking poll pegged Obama's national lead at 11 points yesterday. Gallup's lead seems outsize, but Rasmussen has Obama at 6 points ahead nationwide. That's closer to Real Clear Politics's average of the major national polls, which sets Obama's lead at 5.1 percentage points.
But a month in politics is several lifetimes, and anything can yet happen, smart people argue. Don't be so sure—there are historical and logical reasons to doubt a McCain comeback.
On history, Brian Schaffner at Pollster.com has written a couple of excellent analyses of historical poll numbers and has come to two conclusions: first, that major October swings in presidential polls are unlikely—once voters settle on a candidate, they rarely flip back the other way; second, virtually all candidates with big leads in October win in November.
As a practical, logical matter, what can McCain do? The bloviators after the debate Tuesday night were suggesting that McCain needs to enter the last debate with some sort of big, new idea to wow the voters. But he tried that Tuesday night, with the only obvious effect being causing some disgruntlement in his base. And at this point, voters would see through a new, whiz-bang idea: It would transparently be an electoral ploy, yet another lurch in a campaign that has not distinguished itself as having a steady hand on the tiller.
The campaign as ship at sea is an apt analogy—think of turning a big ship with lots of momentum. Think of how long it takes to turn such a ship around. And now think of how close are the shore and the shoals.
Finally there are two wild cards: race and turnout. A new Gallup Poll found that while 6 percent of voters said that Barack Obama's race made them less likely to vote for him (with a like number saying the same of John McCain, by the way), 9 percent said that Obama's race made them more likely to vote for him (7 percent for McCain). As for turnout, Obama has built a more thorough, more impressive ground organization than has McCain and figures to be on the winning side of the enthusiasm gap.
Which leaves us here: The campaign for the past several weeks has been event driven, as a smart Republican argued to me recently. McCain's chances hang on a cataclysmic event, a deus ex machin a—a terrorist attack, alien invasion, or Obama naming Jeremiah Wright to his cabinet.
Short of that, we're into political kabuki for a few weeks and an early night on November 4.
Well, it appears the "conservative" gov't is going to partially nationalize the banks, bringing a big dose of communism to the US financial sector.
This is in addition to their other massive interventions in the "free" market.
It appears that the quickest route to a socialist state is to vote GOP!
My fellow prisoners.
Have you heard about all my connections to domestic terrorists, nazi groups, lobbyists and corrupt financiers?
Well, everyone else is hearing about them, so you might as well hear it also.
Then, Sarah, my VP bimbo doll, has been caught with religious lunatics that make the Rev. Wright look like the pope. And then there's her marriage to a traitor who wants to dissolve the union with the US.
Damn, everytime we point a finger at Obama it comes boomeranging back on us in a MUCH worse form.
Any advice from you grubby little monkeys on how we can lie more effectively?
In a sign of the now pathetically low expectations of the reich, the term "seal the deal" is now entering their limited vocabulary.
They've given up on actually winning the election and now are taking consolation in claims that Obama hasn't set a complete landslide in concrete a few weeks before the voting.
Well, if they're happy with winning Okieland, I'm certainly happy to see them happy with the scraps they comfort themselves with.
BTW, have you tried sucking on the corner of a blanket? That seems to comfort some children ...of all ages.
Speaking of "Okies," the GOP can't even count on them for much longer.People are starting to see through their phony "moral" issues and to see that their economic well being is tied directly to voting Democratic:
'Rednecks for Obama' want to bridge yawning culture gap
Published: Thursday October 9, 2008
When Barack Obama's campaign bus made a swing through Missouri in July, the unlikeliest of supporters were waiting for him -- or rather two of them, holding the banner: "Rednecks for Obama."
In backing the first African-American nominee of a major party for the US presidency, the pair are on a grassroots mission to bridge a cultural gap in the United States and help usher their preferred candidate into the White House.
Tony Viessman, 74, and Les Spencer, 60, got politically active last year when it occurred to them there must be other lower income, rural, beer-drinking, gun-loving, NASCAR race enthusiasts fed up with business as usual in Washington.
Viessman had a red, white and blue "Rednecks for Obama" banner made, and began causing a stir in Missouri, which has emerged as a key battleground in the run-up to the November 4 presidential election.
"I didn't expect it would get as much steam and attention as it's gotten," Spencer told AFP on the campus of Washington University in Saint Louis, the state's biggest city and site of last week's vice-presidential debate.
"We believe in him. He's the best person for the job," Viessman, a former state trooper from Rolla, said of Obama, who met the pair briefly on that July day in Union, Missouri.
The candidate bounded off his bus and jogged back towards a roadside crowd to shake hands with the men holding the banner.
"He said 'This is incredible'," Spencer recalled.
It's been an unexpectedly gratifying run, Viessman said.
Rednecks4obama.com claims more than 800,000 online visits. In Denver, Colorado, Viessman and Spencer drew crowds at the Democratic convention, and at Washington University last Thursday they were two of the most popular senior citizens on campus.
"I'm shocked, actually, but excited" that such a demographic would be organizing support for Obama, said student Naia Ferguson, 18, said after hamming it up for pictures behind the banner.
"When most people think 'redneck,' they think conservatives, anti-change, even anti-integration," she said. "But America's changing, breaking stereotypes."
A southern comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, defines the stereotype as a "glorious lack of sophistication".
Philistines or not, he said, most rural southerners are no longer proponents of the Old South's most abhorrent ideology -- racism -- and that workaday issues such as the economy are dominating this year's election.
"We need to build the economy from the bottom up, none of this trickle down business," Spencer said. "Just because you're white and southern don't mean you have to vote Republican."
To an important degree, however, race is still the elephant in the polling booth, experts say, and according to a recent Stanford University poll, Obama could lose six points on election day due to his color.
Racism "has softened up some, but it's still there," Viessman acknowledged from Belmont University, site of Tuesday's McCain-Obama debate in Nashville, Tennessee.
Despite representing the heartland state of Illinois, and having a more working-class upbringing than his Republican rival John McCain, Obama has struggled to shoot down the impression that he is an arugula-eating elitist.
Surely he alienated many rural voters earlier this year when the Harvard-educated senator told a fundraiser that some blue-collar voters "cling to guns or religion".
But Viessman, who says he owns a dozen guns, said Obama "ain't gonna take your guns away."
The South traditionally votes Republican -- victories for southerners Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were exceptions -- but with less than a month to election day, four states in or bordering the South are considered toss-ups: Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia.
Viessman says he'd like to think his grassroots movement could sway enough people in small-town America to make a difference.
"There's lots of other rednecks for Obama too," he said. "And the ones that's not, we're trying our best to convince them."
Democrats Look To Possible Obama Landslide
Politico: As Large States Shift Towards Democrat In Wake Of Economic Upheaval, Talk Of Possible Electoral
Oct 9, 2008
(The Politico) This story was written by David Paul Kuhn.
Three weeks of historic economic upheaval has done more than just tilt a handful of once-reliably Republican states in Barack Obama’s direction. Democratic strategists are now optimistic that the ongoing crisis could lead to a landslide Obama victory.
Four large states John McCain once seemed well-positioned to win-Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida-have in recent weeks shifted toward Obama. If Obama were to win those four states-a scenario that would represent a remarkable turn of events-he would likely surpass 350 electoral votes.
Under almost any feasible scenario, McCain cannot win the presidency if he loses any of those four states. And if Obama actually captured all four states, it would almost certainly signal a strong electoral tide that would likely sweep the Southwestern swing states-Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada-not to mention battlegrounds from New Hampshire to Iowa to Missouri.
One month ago Democratic strategist Paul Maslin, who closely tracks the electoral map, thought that perhaps Democrats would win by a couple percentage points. At best, he thought Obama might earn a slight majority as Democrats earned in 1976, the last time the party’s presidential nominee cracked the 50 percent barrier.
“Now it’s a whole different world,” Maslin said. “The economy is way beyond 1992. In 1980, it was Iran hostage crisis and the economy. I’ve never seen an issue take this kind of prominence.”
Gallup finds that 69 percent of Americans believe the economy is the most important issue facing the nation. The second most cited issue, the war in Iraq, is named by only 11 percent of voters.
Bill Clinton’s former pollster Doug Schoen calls this the “economic tsunami.”
And it’s this tsunami that has altered the electoral map in a way that Obama himself could not.
“The Obama campaign did a lot of important foundation work to expand the Democratic map. And I give them credit for that,” Maslin said. “But the real expansion of the map is coming from an outside event, namely the economy, and not the tactics of the Obama campaign.
“Obama has not changed the map,” Schoen said. The map has changed because, in light of the economic turmoil, “McCain has become an almost unacceptable alternative” to President Bush.
Only one in four Americans have a positive view of the president, according to Gallup, the lowest rating of Bush’s presidency. That is only one point above Richard Nixon’s floor, 24 percent-which he registered when disgrace forced the first presidential resignation-and just three points higher than the lowest public approval ever, which was notched by Harry Truman in 1952 during the Korean War.
Only 9 percent of Americans are “satisfied” with the direction of the United States, the lowest level since the question was first asked by the Gallup Poll in the late 1970s.
Nearly six in ten Americans believe that the United States could be on the verge of entering an economic spiral similar to the Great Depression, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted over the weekend.
“These events are conspiring against McCain,” said Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole. “The only thing that we can hope is that these circumstances change in terms of being off the front page.
“We are playing defense in places we shouldn’t,” he continued, speaking of the electoral map. “It will take something ground-shaking, earth-shaking,” to reorient the map to where it was even one month ago.
It was only a month ago that McCain seemed poised to overcome the public’s poor view of the Republican Party, having literally lifted the GOP’s prospects with his own and largely escaped the political deadweight of President Bush.
That changed September 15 whe the stock market tumbled 505 points and McCain observed that that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” before pivoting to use the language of an “economic crisis.”
“McCain could have changed the direction of the river. He could have opposed the bailout. Made clear it was a massive bailout loaded with pork. And he was not party to the Bush-Obama plan,” Schoen said.
“Barring a terrorist attack,” said Maslin, “in the face of what’s happened to the United States economy, the world economy, in the last two weeks how does this trend reverse itself?”
Multiple surveys in the past two weeks, like the CNN/ORC poll, have shown Obama with his highest-level of support in the general election.
Until September 15 Obama had only reached 50 percent support in the Gallup tracking poll once, at the peak of his Democratic convention bounce. Since September 15, Obama has at least hit 50 percent mark eight times, including for the last five days.
Tuesday, for the first time in Gallup tracking, Obama surpassed the 50 percent threshold and now leads McCain 52 to 41 percent, the largest margin of the campaign.
That same tracking shows that in the last 12 days Obama’s support has stabilized between 48 and 52 percent while McCain’s has stabilized between 41 and 44 percent, outside the bounds of the fleeting fluctuations that gave Obama his last 9 point lead following his international trip in late July.
Many veteran GOP and Democratic pollsters who have been skeptical of Obama’s effort to win red states like North Carolina now believe the economic turmoil has put them well within reach.
“Here, events have made the economy dramatically the issue. More people are concerned about the economy now than even in 1992,” said Mark Penn, who has both served as Hillary Clinton’s and Bill Clinton’s pollster. “What we are seeing is more and more voters who are saying they are voting on the economy because I don’t have any confidence from McCain and George Bush that they can handle the economy.”
Obama is seen in multiple polls as the more capable economic steward by double-digit margins. McCain had briefly drawn about even on the question following the GOP convention.
“There is the complete utter loss of faith in GOP politics,” argued Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist. “This is chickens coming home to roost in a way that was almost unimaginable a year ago.”
If you seedy, little pinheads are ready to stop worrying about them homerseckshools and atheists and are tired of having your overall pockets picked by the Wall Street elitists, it's time to get some common sense and visit...
rednecks4obama.com
What was the psycho saying about the good guys being in the ascendance?
He gets more grotesque every time he posts:
10/9: Hotline/Diageo Pres-Tracker: Obama 47%, McCain 41%
10/9: Rasmussen Pres-Tracker: Obama 50%, McCain 45%
10/9: Res. 2000 Pres-Tracker: Obama 51%, McCain 41%
10/9: Zogby Pres-Tracker: Obama 48%, McCain 44%
10/8: Gallup Pres-Tracker: Obama 52%, McCain 41%
10/9: PPP (D) VA: Obama 51%, McCain 43%
10/9: Str. Vision (R) GA: McCain 50%, Obama 43%
10/8: Rasmussen MN: Obama 52%, McCain 45%
10/8: Rasmussen WI: Obama 54%, McCain 44%
10/7: SurveyUSA NC: McCain 49%, Obama 46%
10/7: SurveyUSA WI: Obama 52%, McCain 42%
This is some funny shit...and I see the crackpot is still lying about the NOW endorsement:
Despite the best efforts of the wholly corrupt leftist media to portray Governor Sarah Palin as a naive rube -- you know, the kind of person who "clings" to Christianity because she's stupid, bigoted and bitter -- Governor Palin has reemerged as the real American hero that she is.
On successive days in the R2K poll, Obama was up +9 Mon, +8 Tues and +12 Wed. The highest Obama single day lead was +13. Wednesday's sample was picking up post-debate polling. Obama's number remains steadily at or above 50.
Sarah Palin's fav/unfav today is at - 17, AN ALL-TIME LOW.
McCain's is at - 7, also an ALL-TIME LOW.
Palin's Effect On Independents
Increasingly toxic, as McCain continues to turn the GOP into a rancid rump of far-right haters. Call it the Fey Effect:
About 33 percent of independents said the "Tina Fey effect" is hurting the McCain-Palin ticket, compared with 9 percent who said it was helpful, a Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports survey says...
The Oct. 1-2 Rasmussen poll found that 43 percent of independents say Mrs. Palin is "hurting" Mr. McCain's chances to win the presidency, compared with 35 percent who see her as "helping" and another 22 percent who saw no impact or were not sure. Overall, the poll respondents split about evenly - 40 percent to 41 percent - on whether Mrs. Palin was an asset to the ticket.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken over the weekend also found a sharp shift in sentiment among independents toward Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama. Independents in the poll favored Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain by 42 percent to 38 percent, erasing a 13 percentage point lead for the Republican in the same survey just two weeks earlier.
Obama in position to steal Virginia from GOPStory Highlights
Poll of polls has Sen. Obama leading Sen. McCain 49 percent to 45 percent
Rapid growth of suburbs around Washington has made Virginia more liberal
Conservatives angered by McCain's support for bailout, mortgage buyouts
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Virginia hasn't backed a Democrat for president in 44 years, but economic concerns and changing demographics are giving Sen. Barack Obama a chance to steal the once reliably red state from Republicans.
Sen. Barack Obama waves as rain falls on a rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in late September.
1 of 2 Polls earlier this year showed Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, leading Obama, his Democratic rival, in Virginia by a healthy margin.
A Virginia Commonwealth University poll taken May 12-18 had McCain leading 47 percent to 39 percent.
But as the financial crisis has shaken voters' confidence in the economy, Obama has begun to open a lead in the state, as he has done in other battleground states.
The latest CNN poll of polls has Obama leading McCain 49 percent to 45 percent. A CNN/TIME/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted September 28-30 shows Obama with an even bigger lead over McCain, 53 percent to 44 percent. The CNN poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Polls show that voters have more confidence in Obama to handle the economic crisis than they do in McCain, and are more likely to blame Republicans for the recent turmoil than Democrats.
Beside an advantage on the economy, Obama is also benefiting from a demographic shift that has reshaped Virginia politics.
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For the last 10 presidential elections, Republicans have been able to bank on Virginia delivering its 13 electoral votes to the GOP. President Bush won Virginia by 8 percentage points in both 2000 and 2004, and President Bill Clinton was never able to capture the state when he ran in 1992 and 1996.
But the explosive growth of Northern Virginia in the last decade has changed the state's electorate. Drawn by government jobs in nearby Washington and high-tech jobs in the Dulles corridor, the growing population in Northern Virginia is more liberal than the mostly rural southern portion of the state, which has remained reliably Republican.
In 2000, Bush carried Northern Virginia 49 percent to 47 percent, but in 2004, Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, carried the area 51 percent to 48 percent.
Virginia "is not as red as people think," said Doc Thompson, a conservative talk show host for WRVA radio. "A third of the population in Northern Virginia is pretty liberal. A lot of people are buying into [Obama's] notion of change."
Virginia Democrats have been able to exploit the changes in the electorate into statewide electoral success after years in which the Republicans had a virtual lock on the state.
In fact, Virginia Republicans have not won a statewide race since Mark Warner, a former mobile phone company executive, captured the governorship for the Democrats in 2001 by emphasizing economic growth.
Democrat Tim Kaine, who was Warner's lieutenant governor, succeeded Warner in 2005. And in what may have been the most surprising result of the 2006 election cycle, Democrat Jim Webb defeated the incumbent Republican George Allen in the race for one of Virginia's seats in the U.S. Senate.
The trend favoring the Democrats is expected to continue this year, which is expected to help drive Virginia Democrats to the polls.
The extremely popular Warner is almost certain to win this year's race against another former governor, Republican Jim Gilmore, to replace Virginia's long-standing Republican senator, John Warner, who is retiring. (The two Warners are not related, and John Warner was unopposed in 2002.)
A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in late September found Warner leading Gilmore by 30 points, and Warner's victory would give Democrats control of both of Virginia's seats in the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1970.
While conservatives may be demoralized by Gilmore's poor showing, McCain may also face eroding support from Virginia conservatives for his recent proposals for the government to become heavily involved in the U.S. economy, said Thompson, the radio talk show host.
During Tuesday night's presidential debate, McCain suggested that the government directly buy up to $300 billion in home mortgages to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
Thompson said that proposal, along with his support for a $700 billion bailout package to help Wall Street firms that McCain voted for last week, are two signs that McCain is breaking from the free-market principles that Virginia conservatives support and not stopping "the march toward socialism" that has begun since the economic crisis started.
"They missed a real opportunity, certainly, in Virginia with my listeners who say they want someone who is fiscally conservative," said Thompson, who added that he's considering voting for a third-party candidate. "They could have come out and said, 'no more spending.'
New Poll Shows Obama Leads North Carolina by 6%
Elections-US, Politics-US, The Vote, Vote 2008
Concerns about efforts to suppress voter turnout now mounting
A Public Policy Polling survey of North Carolina voters gives Sen. Barack Obama a 6% point lead over Sen. John McCain, in a state no Democrat has carried since 1976. Reports suggest that new voter registration favors Democrats 6 to 1, and some have expressed concern that Republican party operatives may try to stop first-time voters from casting votes, challenging their registration or misdirecting them to incorrect polling places. The state may move toward Obama because he is “connecting” with voters on economic issues.
Obama’s campaign has launched a massive grass-roots voter-registration drive, which has successfully registered more voters than any recent effort in the state. The state’s Democratic governor says the state has a “responsability and a Constitutional duty” to make sure every registered voter is able to cast their ballot. He said that vote-suppression efforts have occurred, are real and “not a myth”, and that his government is instructing election workers that all registered voters must be given a chance to vote.
It is already estimated that some 395,000 voters have been expelled from registration rolls in North Carolina, as many as 2 million in Georgia, 1 million in Alabama, and over 700,000 in Ohio. It has now been observed that in each case, the states seem to be using the Social Security database to cross-reference voter-registration files, an illegal use of the federal system, and one which may also violate the individual civil rights of American citizens.
Today, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough observed that he believed Obama could win 350 Electoral College votes, “if the election were held today”. Even Karl Rove’s analysis of the electoral map last week gave Obama a firm hold on no less than 260 Electoral College votes, leaving him in need of only 10 more votes to win the election. The figure of 350 is one of the boldest estimates yet, but is bolstered by Obama’s strong numbers in key “battleground” states, according to a number of recent Electoral College map analyses.
The Republican party began organizing against new voter registration drives in battleground states in 2000, and intensified its efforts in 2004, alleging a widespread “voter fraud” crisis. The allegation was that liberal groups were illegally registering voters not qualified to vote in specific precincts, then somehow casting ballots for deceased or fictional voters. A federal judge has found there is no evidence of such activity, and that even in specific isolate cases of incomplete or erroneous registration documents, there does not appear to be any conspiracy to commit fraud.
In Ohio, in 2004, with a Republican governor and the Republican secretary of state officially presiding over the election process, the Republican party installed “challengers” at polling places across the state, who were empowered to “challenge” the legality of individual voters, based almost solely on their physical appearance. A later court ruling suggested the tactic was flawed in that in was not evidence-based, and did not include safeguards to protect against race-based voter-suppression or to provide for alternate provisional ballots for challenged voters.
Bush approval ratings reach new low, poll finds
3:44:37 PM October 6th, 2008
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The approval ratings for President George W. Bush have hit a new low, as only 25% of Americans like the way the nation’s 43rd chief executive has performed, according to the most recent survey from Gallup Poll.
Gallup says Bush’s approval rating eclipses the old record set for the president in the group’s most recent survey, which was 27% for the poll released Sept. 30. Bush’s popularity has been bumping along in the low 30s to high 20s for several months.
The 25% rating is one point higher than the 24% low handed Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974, just before he resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.
Harry Truman holds the record for all-time lowest approval rating, which was 22% in February 1952. Bush is on pace to eclipse Truman’s record of 27 months with an approval rating of less than 40%. Should Bush’s rating stay below that threshold until a new president is inaugurated Jan. 20, he’ll beat Truman’s record by about two weeks.
The poll surveyed 1,011 adults and was conducted Oct. 3-5. Five percent of Democrats gave Bush the thumbs up, compared with 55% of Republicans and 19% of independents. Last week, 3% of Democrats approved Bush’s ratings, compared with 64% Republicans and 22% independents.
– Russ Britt, MarketWatch
The true elite has always been in the minority.
Ah, hah! You are showing your true colors, John - you are an elitist!
Here's where we stand, lunatic...700 point plunge in the DOW.
And still a few months to go in the Hoover II administration.
Financial disaster = GOP.
Why did the dumbastards forget that in the first place?
McCain continues to turn the GOP into a rancid rump of far-right haters.
hahaha...good one.
Rancid rumps are now in the minority, too...and they only look elite to cockroaches.
TINA BROWN: ON THE NEW DAILY BEAST ON THE ELECTION
There were two key moments in last night's debate. The first when Obama spoke about the chance missed by Bush to rally the nation to service after 9/11 and the second when Mc Cain in his closing words talked about his unique qualifications of toughness in tough times-but in doing so, essentially said farewell. The moments, an hour apart, were linked by the powerful emotional undertow of an election that has little to do with the war of manufactured "gaffes", factual distortions and outright lies that both sides have been propagating in their desperate desire to win.
As always on TV, the moments were enhanced by the cruel physicality of the screen. The received wisdom so far has been that Town Halls are better for McCain because he can loosen up and relax and make direct contact with what are nowadays called "real people." But a Town Hall also meant the public saw a tall lithe young senator primed for the terrors of the future, against a stiff, hunched old guy hobbling around the stage in a body held together by an act of will
During the campaign McCain has aged dramatically. Like Dorian Gray, the bargains he has made with his conscience are reflected in the mirror. He has developed a strange Jimmy Cagney rasp and new verbal eccentricities that seem to have fused the speaking styles of Bob Dole and Ross Perot. Critics have already pounced on the explosive contempt of his jab, "You know who voted for [the energy bill] THAT ONE." The younger man watched him from his Frank Sinatra stool with the look of a family visitor marveling at the antics of the household's resident crazy uncle.
This is all horrible to those of us who once fell in love with McCain's flinty heroism and independence. It's as if he when he made the decision that fateful day on August 10th, 2004 in Pensacola, Florida to grit his teeth and bear hug Bush, he contracted a political virus that ate away at the nobility of his soul. The most telling moment in the campaign was on Monday when in Albuquerque, New Mexico, McCain shouted at the crowd, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" and an audience member yelled back, "A terrorist!" And there was a panicked look on his face that said, "My God, what have I done?"
Whatever compromises with the truth Obama has made on his chilly rise to the top, he understands the central zeitgeist of the moment. Raising 9/11 at the debate as a psychic event rather than one of national security was a masterstroke that won the day.
"You know, a lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11 and where you were on that day," he told the small studio audience, "and, you know, how all of the country was ready to come together and make enormous changes to make us not only safer, but to make us a better country and a more unified country. And President Bush did some smart things at the outset, but one of the opportunities that was missed was, when he spoke to the American people, he said, "Go out and shop. That wasn't the kind of call to service that I think the American people were looking for. And so it's important to understand that the - I think the American people are hungry for the kind of leadership that is going to tackle these problems not just in government, but outside of government."
"Ah, hah! You are showing your true colors, John - you are an elitist!"
For the umpteenth time, "elite" and "elitist/elitism" are not synonymous (although elitists think they are).
Palin is drawing huge crowds wherever she goes, and she will drag the old guy over the finish line ahead of the lawyers. That's good enough to make her a hero in my book, and her selection is enough to affirm McCain's good judgement.
I recently summarized:
1) The causus causata of the snowballed meltdown has been identified: The subprime lending corruption at Fannie & Freddie.
(2) A look at the timeline makes clear that the practice of sub-prime lending began in the Clinton era and was called to the carpet in 2004 when it started getting out of hand and raised red flags to number crunchers. The Republican-backed snooping was beaten back by Democrats like Barney Frank, Reid, and others.
(3) The "community organizing" that Barack has on the top of his resume' for "experience" refers to his activities with ACORN--which worked hand-in-hand with Franklin Raines at Fannie.
(4) Raines is now "economic advisor" to Obama.
Furthermore, Senator Obama blames "Republican deregulation" for the breakdown. That's demonstrably false. There's been no "deregulation" in the financial sector that Barack can point to. Nada. Zip.
When additional regulation was sought for Fannie Mae specifically--by Republicans (like McCain himself) who recognized a potential S&L redux--it was Democrats like Dodd and Frank who bullied and blocked it.
Fannie Mae, as mentioned, worked hand-in-hand with the group ACORN to get sub-prime loans out to indigents, and packaged those very loans and unloaded them for big bucks that were enjoyed by Fannie Mae executives like Raines, Mudd, and Wilkinson, who then gave large contributions to the Obama campaigns.
Meanwhile, the group ACORN is all over the news now for serial voter fraud.
Recall also that Barack was the lawyer and trainer for ACORN, which is the "community organizing" outfit he refers to for his "experience."
HELLO?!?!?
Farrakhan on Obama:
"When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking."
Obama 52% Victory Forecast by Yale Professor's Economy Model
By Matthew Benjamin
Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- With 25 days before Election Day, a forecasting model that has called the top vote-getter in the last three presidential races predicts a solid victory for Barack Obama.
The Democratic presidential candidate will get about 52 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, according to an economic model developed by Yale University Professor Ray Fair.
``The model has predicted all along that the Democrat will get the majority of the two-party vote, and it's still saying that,'' Fair, who has been forecasting a Democratic victory since November 2006, said in a telephone interview from New Haven, Connecticut.
Fair, 66, cautions that his algorithm doesn't measure the effects of race, age or foreign policy, all of which may play an outsize role this election, the first in which a black candidate is a major-party nominee. ``All the political stuff isn't accounted for,'' said Fair.
The only economic data that Fair's vote equation uses that are still unknown are third-quarter gross domestic product growth and inflation. Assuming a 0.2 percent decline in GDP this quarter, the median of a recent Bloomberg survey of 52 economists, and 3 percent inflation, the model forecasts Republican John McCain will receive 48 percent of the vote.
The margin of error of 2.5 percentage points means some probability remains that McCain will win. Fair said the chances that his model will incorrectly predict the election result are roughly 20 percent to 25 percent.
Financial Crisis
Fair's methodology also doesn't take into account the current financial crisis that is roiling credit and equity markets and generating fears of an acute recession among consumers and investors. The crisis, which has triggered bank failures and sweeping government interventions in the economy, is expected to have its biggest impact on official statistics in the fourth quarter and beyond.
``If people perceive the economy to be worse than the variables we're using, then the equation will be underestimating the Democratic share of the vote,'' said Fair.
Eight in 10 respondents to a Sept. 19-22 Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times survey said the economy is doing badly, and more than half said very badly. Asked which candidate has better ideas for strengthening the economy, respondents said Obama by a margin of 46 percent to 32 percent.
They said Obama, 47, an Illinois senator, would be better than Arizona Senator McCain, 72, at handling the financial crisis by a margin of 45 percent to 33 percent.
Voter Anxiety
Economic anxiety is pushing many voters toward Obama. The McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan last week, an economically hard-hit battleground state that until last month was one of the Republican's top targets.
National polls show Obama widening his national lead in recent weeks. An Oct. 5-7 Gallup tracking poll showed voters favoring the Democrat by a margin of 52 percent to 41 percent. Other polls portray a narrower race. The Diageo/Hotline poll says Obama leads by a single point, 45 percent to 44 percent; a C-Span poll has Obama leading by about 2 percentage points.
Fair's equation takes into account which party currently holds the White House and for how long, whether the incumbent is running, growth and inflation. One variable he calls ``good news'' is the number of quarters in the last four years in which GDP growth exceeded 4.2 percent.
Fair's model would have correctly predicted the winner of the two-party vote in all but three elections since 1916, according to a 2002 paper published on his Web site. Before the three most recent elections, he accurately forecast who would get more votes without always getting the margin right.
In August 1996, he said the data suggested a narrow victory for incumbent President Bill Clinton in a race that was too close to call ``with any confidence.'' Clinton won 49.2 percent of the popular vote; Republican Robert Dole got 40.7 percent.
Pollster says John McCain needs Hail Mary
By Dave Wedge
Friday, October 10, 2008 - Updated 10h ago
+ Recent Articles + Email + Bio Boston Herald Chief Enterprise Reporter
Wedge is the Herald's Chief Enterprise Reporter and writes Sunday's "Pols & Politics" column. He also covers music for "The Edge" entertainment section.
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Sen. John McCain’s sinking campaign needs some drama to propel him on the road to the White House - or for Barack Obama’s surging bid to implode under scrutiny - if he’s to pull off another come-from-behind victory, one of the nation’s leading pollsters says.
“John McCain probably needs an outside event to win the White House,” pollster Scott Rasmussen told the Herald. “He’s a little bit like a football team in the fourth quarter, down by a couple of touchdowns. You can’t make it all up in one play. And you still need a break or two.”
Rasmussen said the election took a sharp turn in favor of Obama almost immediately after Lehman Brothers collapsed, touching off the worst economic crisis the nation has seen in decades.
Over the past two weeks, Obama has held firm with 50 to 52 percent support nationally, compared to McCain’s 44 to 45 percent, according to Rasmussen’s polling.
“Obama is clearly the favorite. His lead has been amazingly steady,” Rasmussen said.
But the coming weeks will be telling. As the frontrunner, Obama will be under even more intense scrutiny as undecided voters take a closer final look at him.
“Whenever the spotlight shines on almost any politician these days, their support goes down,” he said. “That’s somewhat of an opening for John McCain.”
But the best chance for a McCain rally could be out of the Arizona Republican’s hands and instead may depend on the turbulent economy.
“The race changed with the economic meltdown,” Rasmussen said. “It changed from being about Obama and McCain to being a referendum on the Bush administration, which is bad for Republicans everywhere.”
Another national pollster, John Zogby, told the Herald this week the race is still too close to call and that it could come down to the final weekend. Zogby’s latest tracking poll shows Obama with a “slight advantage” of 3.6 percentage points over McCain. The poll, conducted for Reuters and C-Span, had the Illinois senator at 47.8 percent to McCain’s 44.2 with 8 percent listed as other/unsure.
McCain losing ground with working-class whites
By KIMBERLY HEFLING – 5 hours ago
KITTANNING, Pa. (AP) — The steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania helped fuel the nation's economic engine. Today, old factory shells and boarded-up storefronts stand as bleak reminders of those once-prosperous times.
But the voters in working-class enclaves such as this still are a sought-after prize in presidential politics, and many are belatedly coming around to Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
In the Democratic primaries, working-class whites consistently backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Later polls showed them overwhelmingly favoring Republican nominee John McCain.
Now, driven by fears that their personal finances could further deteriorate, many see Obama as the better choice — their thinking in some cases driven more by concern about how McCain would handle the economy than any growing admiration for his rival.
"I don't know that there's anything I particularly like about him (Obama), but I dislike McCain, and I dislike the way the country is, and Republicans need to change," said lifelong Republican Ruth Ann Michel, 64, a retiree shopping in a market in Butler on a recent day. She said her vote for Obama would be her first for a Democratic presidential candidate.
While talk in these parts is mostly about the economy, a prominent — if not unspoken subtext — is race. A study of the impact of racial attitudes on the election conducted by The Associated Press with Yahoo News and Stanford University found that whites without a college education were much more likely to hold negative views of blacks than those with a college education.
Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell says a drowning man doesn't care what color the person is who throws him a life preserver.
"This election is going to be decided when a husband and wife sit at a kitchen table, or a single parent sits at the kitchen table, looks at their bills and figures out who is most likely to help them with their financial condition," Rendell said. "If the answer's Barack Obama, nobody's going to care whether he's black, green, orange, purple, fuchsia or whatever."
In April, Rendell backed Clinton in the primary and had to answer questions after saying some whites in his state were likely to vote against Obama because of his race.
Darryl Hendon, 50, of Beaver Falls, who is black and on disability, said he thinks some white Democrats are reluctant to back Obama because of his race.
Since early September, growing numbers of whites who have not finished college have been expressing the view that Obama cares about people like them, even as fewer say so about McCain, according to AP-GfK polling.
In early September, McCain had a 26-point advantage among white voters without a college degree who were likely to vote, according to the poll. But by late September, the advantage had dropped to 7 points, with McCain leading 46 percent to 39 percent among this group.
For Obama, that's far better than Democrats have done in recent presidential elections. President Bush carried whites who haven't finished college by 23 points in 2004 and by 17 points in 2000.
In Pennsylvania, a recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Obama with a double-digit lead over McCain, compared with a close race after the political conventions. Clay Richards, a Quinnipiac pollster, said that's because support among working-class voters in the state is growing, and he suspects many former Clinton supporters are moving to Obama's camp.
The candidates' campaign schedules make clear the importance they attach to Pennsylvania's working-class voters.
McCain and running mate Sarah Palin staged a rally Wednesday in the former steel town of Bethlehem in northeast Pennsylvania. On Friday, Palin was stopping in Pittsburgh, then heading for Johnstown in western Pennsylvania, where unemployment recently topped 7 percent. The self-described hockey mom planned to drop the ceremonial first puck when the Philadelphia Flyers open their season against the New York Rangers on Saturday.
Obama, for his part, will be in Philadelphia on Saturday. And on Sunday, his running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, will be joined in his blue-collar hometown of Scranton by Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton.
In western Pennsylvania, Republican and Democratic voters alike tend to be socially conservative, pro-gun and anti-abortion rights. Many are so-called Reagan Democrats willing to vote for a Republican because of social issues.
While some pockets in this region have recovered and flourished after hard times in the 1980s, many never did. Populations have dwindled and many of those left are elderly.
"The ones who can get a good education ... they leave, which I don't blame them because there's nothing here, really," said Georgia Lutz, 55, who was eating breakfast at a diner in Beaver Falls recently with Hendon. "The economy is absolutely horrible and we're going into a depression right now."
The working-class vote is particularly important in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, where the percentage of adults without a college degree ranks exceeds the national average.
They also are a key voting bloc because those personally affected by the current economic woes appear to be among the more persuadable voters, according to a recent AP-Yahoo News poll. Among them is Michelle Smith, 41, who works retail during the day at a surplus shop in Kittanning and tends bar at night. Combined, she and her husband have six kids.
"Decent working families can't survive. It's very sad," Smith said. "They raised minimum wage, but now you're paying triple in gas to get to work. It evens itself out."
A Democrat, Smith said she's leaning toward McCain. While she said she likes Obama on a personal level, she wonders if Obama has what it takes to fix the economy.
Obama's already won over Don Melochick, 58, a construction worker from Whitehall, Pa., in northeast Pennsylvania. A registered Democrat who's voted Republican in the past, Melochick said he plans to vote for Obama because he's "somewhat better" than McCain.
If McCain "hasn't changed nothing in his 30 years ... he's not going to change anything now," Melochick said, from the counter of a diner outside Philadelphia. But he adds: "I don't think Obama will either."
GOP poll: Obama 48%, McCain 46%By Justin Miller
Category: PresidentTags: polls, John McCain, 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden, economy
Republican polling firm Strategic Vision surveyed likely voters in Ohio the day before, day of and day after the second presidential debate.
The race is within the margin of error, showing Barack Obama at 48 percent to John McCain's 46 percent. Four percent are undecided.
A majority believe Obama is the better man to handle the economy, while 34 percent believe the same for McCain. Ten percent are undecided.
Obama and Sarah Palin are viewed favorably by 51 percent, whlie McCain and Biden have ratings of 47 percent.
Eighty-one percent said the country is on the wrong track.
The poll has a margin of error of 3 points.
"The reports are piling up of ugliness at the campaign rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin," John Kerry writes. "Audience members hurl insults and racial epithets, call out 'Kill Him!' and 'Off With His Head,' and yell 'treason' when Senator Obama's name is mentioned. I strongly condemn language like this which can only be described as hate-filled."
Kerry also put the comments on his "anti-"smear" site. And he added in the fundraising appeal: "According to reports, every ad paid for by the John McCain campaign is now a negative ad - every single one! McCain allows his running mate to make outrageous charges that only a few years ago would have disqualified someone from serious consideration for national office."
Exactly. "Until only a few years ago" when the Left went into full Bush Derangement Syndrome.
FOX News Poll: Obama Maintains Lead Over McCain
Friday, October 10, 2008
By Dana Blanton
Barack Obama leads John McCain by 46 percent to 39 percent, according to a FOX News national registered voter poll released Friday. Two weeks ago Obama led by 45 percent to 39 percent (Sept. 22-23).
Obama's advantage comes mainly from doing better among women, blacks, young voters, those with a college degree, and unmarried voters. He has increased his edge over McCain among women to 16 percentage points, up from a 4-point edge last month (Sept. 8-9).
Obama has also improved his standing with his party faithful. A month ago, 79 percent of Democrats were backing Obama. Today it is 86 percent. McCain has consistently received the backing of over 80 percent of Republicans and is backed by 83 percent today.
Independents split their vote 34 percent Obama and 32 percent McCain, with 24 percent unsure. That's little changed from two weeks ago when Obama was up by 36 percent to 31 percent and 29 percent undecided.
A 61 percent majority of voters believes Obama is going to win the election — more than three times as many as believe McCain will (18 percent). A month ago it was evenly divided: 41 percent Obama and 40 percent McCain (Sept. 8-9). This summer, voters were more likely to say Obama would win: 51 percent Obama and 27 percent McCain (July 22-23).
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FOX News Poll: Clinton Leads in Ohio; Obama Up in Texas FOX News Poll: Obama Has Slim Edge Over McCain, Half Would Never Vote for Clinton FOX News Poll: Clinton Seen as Ready, Most Likely To 'Do Anything' To Win FOX News Poll: McCain Ahead in South Carolina, Many Voters Still Undecided FOX News Poll: McCain Takes the Lead in South Carolina GOP Primary FOX News Poll: McCain Makes Late Surge In New Hampshire�Takes Top Spot FOX News Poll: Three-Way Toss-Up in Republican Presidential Sweeps All of the interviews for the poll were conducted after the town-hall style presidential debate held on Tuesday, Oct. 7. Opinion Dynamics Corp. conducted the national telephone poll of 900 registered voters for FOX News from Oct. 8 to Oct. 9. The poll has a 3-point error margin.
There is no doubt the economy remains the single most important issue to voters this election. It is picked by 49 percent, which is more than all the other issues combined.
By 50 percent to 35 percent, Obama tops McCain as the candidate voters trust to handle the economy. Obama has the edge on all other issues tested save two — on handling the war on terrorism McCain is preferred by 14 points and on Iraq by 5 points.
The Obama-Biden ticket has a clear advantage on "having better judgment" (+ 7 points), "bringing the right change to Washington" (+ 15 points), "better understands American families and their problems" (+ 24 points). By a slim margin the Democratic ticket is also seen as better understanding "America's importance in the world" (+ 3 points).
The McCain-Palin ticket has a significant edge on "having more experience" (+ 28 points).
What about the gut check question? If you had to make the toughest decision of your life, which candidate would you go to for advice? 42 percent say Obama and 41 percent McCain. That's a significant shift from a month ago when 50 percent said they would go to McCain and 34 percent Obama (Sept. 8-9).
Among independent voters: 37 percent say they would go to McCain for advice and 32 percent Obama and 22 percent say neither.
Obama lead over McCain remains in double digits, new poll says
With less than a month to go before the election, Barack Obama has just completed a week of double digit leads over John McCain in Gallup's daily tracking poll.
Obama, who moved into a campaign-high 11 point lead over McCain earlier this week, is finishing it with a 10 point, 51 percent to 41 percent edge.
Registered voter opinion has swung sharply to the Democrat as the financial crisis has worsened during the past couple weeks.
The Gallup daily poll (which we follow regularly on here not as a definitive statement, but as a good indicator of trends and a snapshot of voter thinking) has a margin of error of +/- 2 pts. And while it is only a poll, and is still weeks out (and is national, not state by state) is does seem to convey that we are heading into desparate times for the McCain campaign. In fact, the tone of McCain's campaign has gotten more biting of late, with the re-introduction of William Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and today Obama's admitted drug use .
The poll would seem to indicate that these are not sticking with registered voters, however. This poll would reflect reaction to their second debate, so if the one point shift is an actual shift, and not just within the margin of error, it might indicate that McCain's performance at the least did not hurt his chances, and might have swayed a few voters towards him.
The week of polls, however, would seem to point to the importance of the final debate Wednesday.
Joe Sixpack snubs Sarah Palin
Posted by Susan J. Demas | Analysis | Capitol Chronicles October 09, 2008 23:11PM
Associated Press
Sarah PalinDoggone it, if it weren't for that George W. Bush, America would be head-over-heels for Sarah Palin.
They're both plain folks, who play up their folksy accents that are just as American as all get-out. Their unflinching, moral absolutist vision of the world is distilled into simple sound bites, unlike some snooty, professorial Harvard-types, Barack. They tap into our hopes and especially fears because they "don't blink" or ever "wave the white flag of surrender" to terrorists.
In this "American Idol" era, we're supposed to go for the guy we can chug a beer with or the gal we can giggle with over a skinny mocha latte.
But not this time.
Why? Been there, done that.
We've already rolled the dice on a president with a fatal allergy to intellectual curiosity, demanding only "yes" men who won't challenge his chillingly narrow view of the world. We tried likeable and down-home and wound up with war(s?) we cannot win, a $10 trillion debt and an economy that bears more than a casual resemblance to the one Herbert Hoover bequeathed to us in the 1930s.
So, ya know, we're kinda sayin' "thanks, but no thanks" to that sweet Sarah Palin.
As Joe Biden's mother might say, "God love her," but this ain't amateur hour, kiddies.
But this raises a more important question: How can we trust John McCain when he's willing to entrust the country he loves so deeply with someone so inexperienced and unintellectual?
That fancy-pants know-it-all Obama doesn't seem like such a bad guy to steer us through a financial meltdown no one seems to comprehend. As conservative icon Charles Krauthammer ruefully observes, the Democrat has a "first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."
He won't lurch from stunt to stunt, as McCain jarringly has for his entire campaign. And Obama doesn't need flash cards to solve the crisis, like Palin brought to her debate last week.
Afterward, the talking heads (those evil Eastern elites) were convinced Joe Sixpack would go as ga-ga for Palin as they did, because the pretty lady said "Joe Sixpack," "hockey mom" and the Reagan classic, "There you go again."
We didn't. Why? Americans are smarter than a fifth grader. We do value substance over style. The fact that she can only spout scant talking points on the bailout and doesn't grasp McCain's position on Pakistan bothers us. That's why every poll showed Biden wiped the floor with her.
Deflated conservatives still insist the self-proclaimed Sarahcuda is connecting with Main Street Americans. Dozens of polls say otherwise; she can't win over women or independents.
No matter. Her flinty winks literally sent hard-up right-wingers like Rich Lowry into a fit of embarrassing ecstasy, mooning over the "little starbursts" he felt through the teevee. Ahem.
Sarah should have been the perfect focus-grouped candidate, down to the effortless way she drops her g's and winks at you (only you). The GOP couldn't have built a better veep if they'd finagled some of that sci-fi-style cloning technology the pro-life loonies warn will take over Michigan if the pro-embryonic stem cell Proposal 2 passes.
Palin would have killed in the heyday of Newt Gingrich, as the apple-cheeked, high-heeled embodiment of gun-totin' rugged individualism. But now we're back to the era of big government, aided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The country has changed, snapping back to the middle and even (gasp!) the left.
For too many years, we've plucked presidential candidates with criteria fit for a glitzy Hollywood biopic, not the leader of the free world. That was part of the problem with John Edwards, a coiffed empty suit whom desperate Democrats projected their hopes and dreams onto because he came in a slick, Southern-fried wrapper.
On the campaign trail, Palin brings the heat to a movement running cold. "This is not a man who sees America as you and I do - as the greatest force for good in the world," she drawls (rhetoric that incited one cultured fan to shout, "Kill him!")
She's warned us. Obama "pals around with terrorists" and will maniacally raise our taxes. We know blood will be on our hands.
And yet, a clear majority of us are planning to vote for him. She doesn't do it for us.
Palin will soon be relegated to irrelevance, perhaps the de facto leader of the far-right fringe of a party teetering on the brink of combustion. That's why David Brooks calls her brand of anti-intellectual populism a "fatal cancer to the Republican party."
I hope it eats the party alive so it reverts back to the civil spirit of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower. But instead of looking backward to '80s-style solutions, the young Turks will have to embrace a 21st century realism to the staggering problems ahead.
Palin can serve as a parable for the dangers of always choosing glib politics over good policy. She can invigorate the GOP, perhaps by destroying it as Democrats take both houses of Congress, the White House, most governor's mansions and more state and local seats across the country.
And for that, let's salute ya, Sister Sarah.
Greenspan-Bashing Goes Mainstream
Henry Blodget
Five years ago it was only cranks like Jeremy Grantham and Stephen
Roach who were appalled by the serial bubble-blowing habits of Fed
Chairman Alan Greenspan. In those days, Greenspan was still the
Maestro, and the country was worrying about how it could possibly get
along without him.
How times change.
Now, if there's one universal scapegoat for the housing bust, it's Alan
Greenspan--the man who made money free for years, pooh-poohed the idea
of a housing bubble, and rubber-stamped adjustable rate mortgages. And
lately, as derivative bombs have been exploding in the holds of one
titanic financial institution after another, people are remembering
that Greenspan fought tooth and nail against any form of derivative
regulation.
How far has Greenspan-bashing progressed? Now even the New York Times
has jumped aboard. Specifically, it is "Taking A Hard New Look At The
Greenspan Legacy". Greenspan himself declined to be interviewed.
Wingbats Totally Demoralized
Have given up except for the occasional declaration of coming victory or moronic repetitions of past claims about Democratic deregulationatoristarians bringing down the economy.
All spoken as though moved by some mindless remnant of a former belief no longer held even by them.
Like corpses rising one last time in rigor to cough out some deeply ingrained talking point which had become an automatic response to the reality they always hated.
The Gist of the ACORN Story
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.
ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.
I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...
At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.
But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.
Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.
The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
It's that simple.
Late Update: McCain's sleaze and disgrace just runs deeper and deeper. This just in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."
McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack and his army of gangsters and black street hustlers.
Former Michigan Governor Regretting McCain Endorsement
Former Republican Governor William Milliken is having second thoughts about that McCain endorsement:
"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.
"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."
Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party's moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain's candidacy.
More evidence that the McCain VP pick of a creationist pushing, anti-choice advocate, and otherwise wholly unqualified candidate has scared the living daylights out of the moderate Republicans. Coupled with McCain's embrace of Bush's epic economic failures and there appears to be a full-on fracture occurring within the Republican party. Governor Milliken is hardly the only one:
"That's not my kind of Republicanism," said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. "I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what's happened now. In eight short years they've taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they've torn it into tatters."
As for McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, "there's no question she's totally unqualified," Chafee said.
He had similar reservations about Obama's lack of experience, but said the Democrat's handling of the campaign convinced him he's ready to lead.
Chafee said he has spoken with several other moderate Republican leaders, and "there are a whole lot of us deserting."
Thankfully, these moderates appear to be willing to truly put "Country First" by voting for the most qualified candidate to lead America into the future -- Barack Obama. As long as the McCain/Palin campaign continues down the self-destructive path of hate and divisiveness, while offering no real, progressive solutions for the future, look for more moderates to abandon the GOP ship next month and beyond.
Enough is enough -- moderates seem to be getting the message.
Obama leads McCain solidly in two national polls
By The Associated Press – 1 hour ago
THE POLL: Fox News/Opinion Dynamics, national presidential race among registered voters
THE NUMBERS: Barack Obama 46 percent, John McCain 39 percent
OF INTEREST: Obama's lead in this poll is about the same as in late September. Having Joe Biden as Obama's running mate makes people 11 percentage points likelier to support the Democrats, while McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is an 8-point drag on the Republican ticket. Half say the economy is the election's top issue, with no other problem coming close. More trust Obama than McCain with handling the economy, 50 percent to 35 percent, including a majority of independents. More view Obama favorably than unfavorably by 26 points; the difference is half that for McCain. More expect Obama than McCain to win the election by a 3-to-1 margin.
DETAILS: Conducted Oct. 8-9 by telephone with 900 registered voters. Sampling error margin plus or minus 3 percentage points.
MORE: http://www.foxnews.com
THE POLL: Newsweek poll, national presidential race among registered voters
THE NUMBERS: Barack Obama 52 percent, John McCain 41 percent
OF INTEREST: A month ago, Obama and McCain were tied at 46 percent apiece in this poll. Whites and independents are about evenly split, while Obama leads among both sexes and every age group, including those 65 and over. Four in 10 think McCain's campaign has been too negative, four times the number who say so about Obama's. The Democrat has a solid lead as the candidate who'd do better with the economy and the financial crisis, and the one likelier to bring change. Thirty-four percent say Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, makes them likelier to vote for McCain while 64 percent say she does not.
DETAILS: Conducted Oct. 8-9 by telephone with 1,035 registered voters. Sampling error maring plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
MORE: http://www.newsweek.com
Republicans are such crass idiots:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081010/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_angry_crowds;_ylt=Amc6qAGDreF6omHWvY6dqmWs0NUE
PS Kudos to McCain for being classy though.
But really, at this point who even is surprised by anything this corrupt hick does:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state's public safety commissioner.
The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn't the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
``Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired,'' the report issued today in Anchorage.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor's sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.
Another conservative--son of the father of modern(?) consevatism--jumps ship
The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
Troopergate Report: Palin Abused Power
Unanimous but Contentious Vote to
Release the Report to the Public
By JUSTIN ROOD and JESSICA RUTHERFORD
Oct. 10, 2008
An Alaskan state investigation concluded today that Gov. Sarah Palin had abused her power when she fired her Public Safety Commissioner in July.
(AP Graphic)Sarah Palin abused her power when she fired her Public Safety Commissioner this July, a state investigation has concluded.
The Alaska legislature voted to release the 263-page report on the "Troopergate" scandal, a state kerfuffle which has come to haunt Gov. Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid. The scandal centered around her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Monegan and others believed Palin fired him because he refused to take action against Mike Wooten, a state trooper under him who had been involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister, Molly.
The investigator, Stephen Branchflower, found that Monegan's refusal to fire Wooten "was not the sole reason" but was "likely a contributing factor" to his firing.
Branchflower also said Palin's attorney general failed to provide him with emails of Palin's that he had requested as part of the probe.
Palin violated the state Ethics Act, Branchflower found.
"The evidence supports the conclusion that Governor Palin, at the least, engaged in 'official action' by her inaction if not her active participation or assistance to her husband in attempting to get Trooper Wooten fired [and there is evidence of her active participation]," he concluded.
Related
click here: For Complete Coverage of Troopergate and Alaskan Governor Sarah PalinFired Official: Governor Palin Did Not Tell the Truth to ABCMore from Brian Ross and the Investigative Team"[Palin] knowingly ... permitted [husband] Todd Palin to use the Governor's office and the resources of the Governor's office ... in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired."
The McCain-Palin campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 14-member, Republican-dominated Legislative Council met in closed session this morning with Branchflower. After seven hours of exhaustive review, the legislators voted unanimously to release the report to the public.
"I'm going to vote to release it, but it's not a vote in total agreement," said Republican Sen. Gary Stevens.
"There's not a consensus for the conclusion," said GOP Rep. Bill Stoltze. He said he expected there would be "robust and vigorous intellectual debate on that in other corners."
Stoltze said he had received hundreds of e-mails from all over the country calling for the public release of the report. The state added extra servers to handle the traffic expected when the report is posted electronically to the legislature's Web site.
The Legislative Council voted unanimously to initiate the investigation in late July, shortly after Palin fired Monegan . The probe was to determine whether she fired Monegan because he refused to take action against a state trooper who had been through a messy divorce from Palin's sister.
Palin denied wrongdoing and initially voiced support for the investigation. But after she joined the national Republican ticket, she and her supporters said the legislature had no right to investigate her, and accused legislators involved in the probe of supporting Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid.
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Troopergate Report: Palin Abused Power
Unanimous but Contentious Vote to
Release the Report to the Public
By JUSTIN ROOD and JESSICA RUTHERFORD
Oct. 10, 2008
An Alaskan state investigation concluded today that Gov. Sarah Palin had abused her power when she fired her Public Safety Commissioner in July.
(AP Graphic)Sarah Palin abused her power when she fired her Public Safety Commissioner this July, a state investigation has concluded.
The Alaska legislature voted to release the 263-page report on the "Troopergate" scandal, a state kerfuffle which has come to haunt Gov. Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid. The scandal centered around her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Monegan and others believed Palin fired him because he refused to take action against Mike Wooten, a state trooper under him who had been involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister, Molly.
The investigator, Stephen Branchflower, found that Monegan's refusal to fire Wooten "was not the sole reason" but was "likely a contributing factor" to his firing.
Branchflower also said Palin's attorney general failed to provide him with emails of Palin's that he had requested as part of the probe.
Palin violated the state Ethics Act, Branchflower found.
"The evidence supports the conclusion that Governor Palin, at the least, engaged in 'official action' by her inaction if not her active participation or assistance to her husband in attempting to get Trooper Wooten fired [and there is evidence of her active participation]," he concluded.
Related
click here: For Complete Coverage of Troopergate and Alaskan Governor Sarah PalinFired Official: Governor Palin Did Not Tell the Truth to ABCMore from Brian Ross and the Investigative Team"[Palin] knowingly ... permitted [husband] Todd Palin to use the Governor's office and the resources of the Governor's office ... in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired."
The McCain-Palin campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 14-member, Republican-dominated Legislative Council met in closed session this morning with Branchflower. After seven hours of exhaustive review, the legislators voted unanimously to release the report to the public.
"I'm going to vote to release it, but it's not a vote in total agreement," said Republican Sen. Gary Stevens.
"There's not a consensus for the conclusion," said GOP Rep. Bill Stoltze. He said he expected there would be "robust and vigorous intellectual debate on that in other corners."
Stoltze said he had received hundreds of e-mails from all over the country calling for the public release of the report. The state added extra servers to handle the traffic expected when the report is posted electronically to the legislature's Web site.
The Legislative Council voted unanimously to initiate the investigation in late July, shortly after Palin fired Monegan . The probe was to determine whether she fired Monegan because he refused to take action against a state trooper who had been through a messy divorce from Palin's sister.
Palin denied wrongdoing and initially voiced support for the investigation. But after she joined the national Republican ticket, she and her supporters said the legislature had no right to investigate her, and accused legislators involved in the probe of supporting Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid.
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Break their backs
This election is about the importance of not just winning, but breaking their backs and crushing their spirits.
How do we do this? We currently have a 38 seat majority -- 236 to 198. Stephanie Tubbs Jones seat, a safe Democratic one, is vacant.
So get this. We get 31 seats, that would give Democrats a 101 seat majority in the House, 268 to 167.
Can we get to 31? I've thought so all year. Now we have the "respected" electoral prognosticators jumping aboard that bandwagon, like Stu Rothenbeg:
While I recently increased my expectation of Democratic House gains to 10-20 seats, that range looks too low. Hardly any Democratic-held seats are at great risk — Democratic incumbents Kanjorski, Carol Shea-Porter (N.H.), Nick Lampson (Texas), Tim Mahoney (Fla.) and Don Cazayoux (La.), as well as an open seat in Alabama, are a few obvious exceptions — so the DCCC is almost entirely on offense.
Democrats are now likely to net at least 20 seats, with gains closer to 30 quite possible given the cycle’s dynamics, poll numbers we are seeing and the Democratic financial advantage. This is the kind of cycle when even one or two third-tier Democratic challengers will win, inflating the party’s net gain even further.
When was the last time a party held an advantage in the triple digits? Remember the big Gingrich revolution in 1994? That was just a 26 seat majority. We have to go back to the 102nd Congress, 1991-1993, to get that kind of massive majority -- 270 Democrats to 164 Republicans -- and that was a Dixiecrat-infested majority.
We're already seeing Republicans blame their imminent presidential loss on the fact that McCain is "not conservative". Remember, conservatism can never fail, it's just people who fail conservatism. But we oust enough Republicans to give Dems a triple-digit majority? There's no way to spin losing people like John Shadegg, Randy Kuhl, Marylin Musgrave, Tim Walberg, Robin Hayes, Mean Jean Schmidt, Steve Chabot and so on Republicans being "too liberal". We get a triple majority, there's no excuse they'll be able to hide behind.
This isn't about winning. It's about destroying the conservative movement, and their dangerous incompetence has given us an historic opportunity to deliver a killing blow. Leave everything on the roa
October 10, 2008
The New "Welfare Queens"
By Ed Kilgore
Throughout this long presidential campaign, there's been endless discussion of race as a factor. But until recently, such talk revolved around hard-to-assess white fears about Barack Obama's racial identity, along with efforts to conjure up the ancient hobgoblin of the Scary Black Man via images of Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, racism has entered the campaign conversation from an unexpected direction. In the fever swamps of conservatism, there's a growing drumbeat of claims that the entire housing mess, and its financial consequences, are the result of "socialist" schemes to give mortgages to shiftless black people whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by good, decent, white folks.
Some of this talk is in thinly-veiled code, via endless discussions on conservative web sites (though it spilled over into Congress during the bailout debate) attributing the subprime mortgage meltdown to the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was aimed at fighting the common practice of mortgage "redlining" in low-income and/or minority areas (basically, a refusal to make any mortgages, regardless of the creditworthiness of individual applicants, in such areas).
In truth, the CRA didn't require lending to unqualified applicants (though it did provide that applicants' credit-worthiness could be established through means more sophisticated that standard credit scores), and in any event, CRA doesn't even apply to the non-bank lenders responsible for the vast majority of bad mortgages. (Sara Robinson has a very useful primer on CRA at the OurFuture blog).
A closely associated and even more racially tinged element of the conservative narrative on the financial crisis focuses on lurid claims about the vast influence of ACORN, a national non-profit group active in advocacy work for low-income Americans. Among its many activities, ACORN has promoted low-income and minority homeownership, mainly through personal counseling. More to the point, though it's unrelated to any of the claims about ACORN's alleged role in the financial crisis, the group worked with Barack Obama back in his community organizing days on the South Side of Chicago.
Now as it happens, I've never been a huge fan of ACORN, mainly because its ham-handed voter registration efforts in recent years have supplied Republicans with their only shred of evidence that "voter fraud" is a legitimate concern in this country. But ACORN, a relatively marginal group, had no real influence over toxic mortgage practices, which again, to state the crucial point, had little to do with CRA-enabled loans to low-income and minority homeowners. Google "ACORN financial crisis" and you'll be treated to an amazingly huge number of articles and blog posts on the subject, virtually all of them from conservatives. None of them, so far as I can tell, establish that the group has had any significant involvement in mortgage decisions, mainly because most subprime loans were made in areas where ACORN activists would never set foot. ACORN is being singled out by conservatives for a leading role in the crisis simply because it's crucial to the whole CRA/Socialist/Minorities/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obama narrative about the financial crisis. And that narrative is not simply all over the internet: it's common on the airwaves as well, from Lou Dobbs to an assortment of "analysts" at Fox.
While some conservatives are careful not to get too explicit about the racial underpinnings of this argument, others aren't. As usual, we can rely on Ann Coulter to expose the raw id of conservative sentiment, as in a post on the financial crisis with the title: "They Gave Your Mortgage To a Less Qualified Minority," which deliberately played off the theme of a famous Jesse Helms campaign ad demonizing affirmative action.
Here's Coulter's take on the alleged impact of CRA:
Instead of looking at "outdated criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."
Nice. The coda of Coulter's "argument" plows some very familar furrows:
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.
There you have it: once again, rich liberals in league with shiftless minority "welfare recipients" are sticking it to Joe Sixpack.
Coulter's uninhibited take seems to be closer to what we are now seeing and hearing among grassroots conservatives, whose anger is now visibly spilling onto the campaign trail, than the more circumspect "analysis" of her more "responsible" colleagues.
It shouldn't be that surprising. Let's say you are a classic Main Street conservative, a white middle-class man near or past retirement age. You own your home, you pay your bills. Maybe at some point you benefitted from a government-subsidized or underwritten home loan. Maybe you were lucky enough to do your own modest real estate speculation in the mid-80s or mid-90s or early 00's, when it all worked. Maybe you even have a defined-benefit pension that insulates you from the immediate effects of the stock market collapse. But still, you've played by the rules, and are entirely innocent. And now the whole economy is collapsing around you, and worse yet, many hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars are being tossed around Washington to "bail out" everybody but you. Two kinds of explanations are being offered to you for what went wrong. One involves an impenetrable haze of financial jargon about the securitization of mortgages and derivative instruments and hedge funds, which only a handful of people in the country can even pretend to understand. The other is Ann Coulter's. What are you going to believe?
Perhaps it's an ironic sign of social progress that today's emerging racist stereotypes involve minorities getting behind on their mortgage payments, rather than "welfare queens" using change from their food stamps to buy vodka (the famous Ronald Reagan anecdote) or black men impregnating their girlfriends to live off those bountiful welfare payments. But it's still disgusting. As Rick Perlstein has righteously argued, it's a blood libel on people who exert no real power in this country.
As the foregoing meditation indicates, I'm less inclined to blame those fist-shaking angry Main Street conservatives at McCain's rallies than the conservative "thinkers" who promote racist stereotypes as part of a broader effort to deflect responsibility anywhere, everywhere, than towards the corruption and ideological manias of their own leaders.
UPDATE: Perhaps folks are too freaked out today about "Black Friday" in the stock market to give much thought to a post about racism towards black people. But it does occur to me that I didn't quite close the loop on one element of my argument about what's going on with grassroots conservatives. When people at a McCain rally in Wisconsin started chanting "ACORN! ACORN!" earlier this week, most observers thought they were just upset about allegations of voter registration fraud (for a discussion of that subject, see Adam Serwer). I've convinced something much deeper was going on.
Grassroots conservatives have been fed a steady, toxic diet in recent weeks, on talk radio, on Fox, and in the blogs, of a narrative that suggests "Obama's ACORN" (with the complicity of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) created the financial crisis, is benefitting massively from the bailout, and is now trying to steal the election. This is a race-based Unified Field Theory that connects everything these folks fear and hate, and they want John McCain to talk about it, instead of all this bushwa about greedy lobbyists and bipartisanship.
On a broader front, this may represent the ultimate climax in the original and central dilemma of the McCain campaign: how to stay "bipartisan" and mavericky while channeling the passions of the conservative base. The whole contrived balancing act could well be blowing up, at McCain's own rallies.
A nation's underbelly is exposed
This is the week, Joe Biden said, that John McCain decided to take the low road to the White House. A partisan observation, certainly. But true just the same.
With increasing desperation, McCain and his presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, have depicted Barack Obama as a naive, untrustworthy, Manchurian candidate who "pals around with terrorists."
Irony is not given to Republicans. McCain attacked Obama this week as the cause of the global financial crisis, when it was the Republicans' sustained effort to remove the bars from the Wall Street zoo that culminated in the current spectacular mess.
McCain's proof of Obama's doubtful patriotism is the Illinoisan's vote against an Iraq-war funding bill that McCain also voted against because it was too pork-laden. But the ugliest and most potent McCain-Palin charge is that the Democratic Party's presidential nominee is not one of us.
"This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America," Palin told a rally this week – an allusion to Obama's skin colour, foreign-born father, and "exotic" upbringing, in Indonesia and mostly Hawaii.
McCain, as it happens, was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a quasi-sovereign but U.S.-administered jurisdiction at the time. The latter status negated objections earlier this year that McCain is foreign-born and thus disqualified for the presidency under the Constitution.
But Obama is blessed with the quality of growing on people the more they see of him – pretty much the opposite effect that Stephen Harper has. Thus Obama's improbable triumph over Hillary Clinton, and success in winning the first two presidential debates.
With victory prospects dimming – Obama has a commanding electoral college edge in states already in his column and others leaning that way – McCain has gone heavily negative, not on Obama's policies but the rival himself.
Even Karl Rove has said McCain steps outside the bounds of truth. So it wasn't a surprise this week that, with the GOP character-assassination machine in high gear, The New York Times editorialized that McCain and Palin "have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember, (entering) the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia."
What McCain has been doing this week is inadvertently exposing the underside of the country he professes to love. As Palin has inveighed against Obama's supposed intellectual snobbery, his fleeting affiliations with Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers, and his supposed disdain for the troops (elaborate praise for whom figures into most Obama speeches), crowds in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere this week have shouted, "Traitor!" and "Kill him!"
Palin has made no effort to restrain these animal spirits. This is the part of America that time forgot. Where an angry white McCain supporter approached an African-American TV technician this week and yelled: "Sit down, boy!"
With his appeal to suspicion of "the other," McCain has identified that part of America not ready for the challenges of the 21st century – the very people Obama's policies, and especially his commitment to education reforms, are meant to help. These are the past and future victims of outsourcing, few with better than a high school certificate, who will be left behind in a global, knowledge-based economy. Obama grasps the implications, proposing steps to revive U.S. competitiveness. McCain exploits them as a wedge issue.
In the twilight of his career in presidential politics, McCain is shaping a legacy for himself not as a problem-solver, but one hopes as the last White House candidate determined to showcase for the world the worst of America.
You can feel the "conservative" movement withering and dying right here on this site.
It's a beautiful thing seeing that bloated corpse rotting in the autumn sun.
haha...yes, lovely. As a last gasp, the fool blogger declares a bracing upswing in the polls for them...just as Obama is increasing and solidifying his lead!!
How pathetic.
And, McCorpse and the Alaskan bimbo bitch racing around the country working up their hate filled, vicious, medieval minions.
How appropriate that this is the Halloween season.
"Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board" with 57, 435 rejected for faulty information. "Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures, addresses that do not exist, and duplicate registrations. In one case, a man was registered to vote more than 15 times since the Primary election."
Obama isn't even an American, and so can't be president.
Jailed political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who helped launch Barack Obama on his political career, is whispering secrets to federal prosecutors about corruption in Illinois and the political fallout could be explosive.
Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose administration faces multiple federal investigations over how it handed out jobs and money with advice from Rezko, is considered the most vulnerable.
Rezko also was friendly with Obama - offering him a job when he finished law school, funding his earliest political campaigns and purchasing a lot next to his house. But based on the known facts, charges so far and testimony at Rezko's trial, there's no indication there'll be an October surprise that could hurt the Democratic presidential nominee - even though Rezko says prosecutors are pressing him for dirt about Obama.
Civil Rights Icon Compares McCain to Segregationist Gov. George Wallace
Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis of Georgia accuses John McCain and Sarah Palin of stoking hate at their campaign events
FOXNews.com
Saturday, October 11, 2008
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Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights-era icon , invoked segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama in accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of fanning the flames of hatred at Republican campaign events.
"What I am seeing reminds me of too much of another destructive period in American history," Lewis said in a statement released to FOX News. "Senator McCain and Governor Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."
"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights," Lewis added. "Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."
He then accused McCain and Palin of "playing with fire" in a way that "disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy."
McCain immediately responded, calling on Obama to denounce Lewis' statement.
"Congressman John Lewis' comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale," McCain said in a written statement. "The notion that legitimate criticism of Senator Obama's record and positions could be compared to Governor George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign.
For years, McCain has been an admirer of Lewis, including praising him in a book on courage and bravery. McCain cited Lewis as one of "three wise men" he would consult as president during a forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in August.
There is no doubt about it, right-wing thuggery is in its death throes. In a matter of months a determined liberal President, supported by a fillibuster-proof Congress (and eventually a like-minded judiciary) will take office and begin the arduous task of reversing the catastrophic policies of the Bush administration. The Republicans will not be able to put any obstacles in the way - Democrats will be firmly in the saddle for many years to come.
lol...Rezko, Acorn...blah,blah, blah...
No one but wingbat morons care about any of that silliness. Even if any of it was true, it makes ZEEEEEEERO difference to anyone.
Give up.
Die.
Wow. You liberals are truly some of the most hateful people on the planet. And to hide behind 'anonymous'?
How cowardly.
eh.
whatever.
ACORN? What's Acorn?
Typical Obama voter.
Clearly the anything-for-a-buck, leftist blog trolls are back in full force. They must have a tracking system somewhere that lets them register their "posts" in order to get paid. Fifty rants cut and pasted from the liberal diatribe repository = $50. I guess this is what you have to do to feed yourself when all you have is a degree in political science (or radio television & film) and can't get a real job. It's really unfair you know. That job at the university library really *should* pay $50K/year, but it only pays $5/hour because some greedy, evil corporation wants to suppress the little people. And that second job they had to take at Starbucks to make the payments on the Prius only pays $6 plus tips!
So Evan, we should really think about cutting them some slack here. Outside of the earned income tax credit they get once a year, how else are these poor liberals going to make a living? Sadly, it's going to take many, many years before any business owner with a brain would ever even consider hiring them...
Hey, Globalwarmer, here's more bile from the liberal diatribe repository. I just made another 50 cents!
Obama, Democrats on track toward decisive victory
By STEVEN THOMMA
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Barring a dramatic change in the political landscape over the next three weeks, Democrats appear headed toward a decisive victory on Election Day that would give them broad power over the federal government.
The victory would send Barack Obama to the White House and give him larger Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate - and perhaps a filibuster-proof margin there.
That could mark a historic realignment of the country's politics on a scale with 1932 or 1980, when the out party was given power it held for a generation, and used it to transform government's role in American society.
Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, is now well-positioned to win the Electoral College. He's comfortably holding most of the "blue" states that went for Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry in past elections, polls show, and he's gaining momentum to take away several "red" states that have voted Republican in recent elections, including Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Virginia.
The Democrats are also widely expected to take big gains in House and Senate races. Like Obama, they're reaching deep into once solid Republican territory. Even such stalwarts as North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, could be in jeopardy.
Building on the Democrats' sweeping wins two years ago when they seized control of both chambers of Congress, big gains this year would be reminiscent of the Republican gains in 1978 and 1980 that delivered "the Reagan Revolution."
Former Reagan political adviser Ed Rollins likened today's landscape to that in 1980, when voters were angry at President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats and turned to Reagan in droves once they felt comfortable with the idea of him as president.
"Barack has met the threshold," Rollins said. "Once Reagan met the threshold, people wanted to get rid of Carter and they did in a landslide. This is going to turn into a landslide."
Democrats already had a political advantage heading into the fall campaign, with just 9 percent of Americans thinking the country's on the right track, the lowest ever recorded. President Bush's approval rating last week was only a point higher than Richard Nixon's on the day he was forced to resign from office, reflecting voter anger at Republicans as the party controlling the White House.
Add the collapse of stock prices and anxiety about the economy, and polls show public opinion surging in favor of Democrats.
"The fundamentals have come together almost perfectly and at just the right moment for the Democrats," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "It could hardly look better for the Democrats."
"This election right now is exclusively about economy," said independent analyst Charlie Cook. "Despite the fact that the House and Senate are in Democratic hands, Republicans seem to have total ownership of the problem. Fair or not, it's true."
It's also made it much more difficult for Republican John McCain to score with his escalating attacks on Obama for his ties to such controversial figures as William Ayers, a former member of a violent Vietnam War-era protest group. "You can't break through with the economy being so overwhelming," Rollins said. "No one cares."
Obama's strength is evident on the political map.
Confident of holding all the states that went for Kerry in 2004, Obama's playing offense in several Republican states. He has an edge or is competitive in such states as:
-Colorado, where he's up by an average of 4 percentage points, according to recent polls there compiled by RealClearPolitics.com.
-Florida, where he's up by 3 points.
-Nevada, where he's up by 3 points.
-Ohio, where he's up by 3 points.
-Virginia, where's up by 5 points.
Most of those are still close enough to be considered toss-ups.
But Obama now leads in enough states to secure more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
He could lose some of those leads, of course. There's still one more presidential debate on Wednesday. And events could change. A terrorist attack, for example, could turn voters back to McCain's political strength: his standing on foreign policy and national security.
"But I don't know if even that would work," Cook said. "It's not like people would forget their pocketbooks."
Democrats also are expected to expand their majority in the House, which they now control 235-199 with one vacancy, and in the Senate, which they control 51-49 with the support of two independents.
Three renowned analysts of congressional races - Cook, Sabato and Stuart Rothenberg - last week all increased their forecasts of Democratic gains.
In the House, they expect the Democrats to pick up 15 to 30 seats. In the Senate, they expect the Democrats to pick up six to nine.
"I now can't rule out 60 seats for this November," Rothenberg said. That's the magic number a majority needs under Senate rules to break filibusters - and something that no party or president has enjoyed for nearly three decades.
All tend to agree that the Democrats are all but certain to pick up Senate seats in New Mexico and Virginia. Other potential gains are in Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, Oregon, Minnesota, Mississippi, Kentucky and North Carolina.
In North Carolina, Dole trails by an average of 2 points. In Kentucky, McConnell leads by an average of just 7 points - he won by 65 percent to 35 percent in 2002.
Even in solidly Republican Georgia, Sen. Saxby Chambliss finds himself in a fight, leading by only 3 points.
"When you're paying attention to Georgia and Kentucky, wow," Cook said. "Who would have thought Republicans would be having problems in places like this?"
Added Rothenberg: "Republicans appear to be heading into a disastrous election that will usher in a very bleak period for the party. A new generation of party leaders will have to figure out how to pick up the pieces and make their party relevant after November."
ON THE WEB
For more from Cook: http://www.cookpolitical.com/
For more from Rothenberg: http://www.rothenbergpoliticalreport.blogspot.com/
For more from Sabato: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/
Globalwarmer, I just made another 50 cents!!!
Palin around with traitors
By MIKE ARGENTO
Daily Record/Sunday News
Article Launched: 10/12/2008 12:44:59 AM EDT
John McCain's campaign thinks it's entirely fair to bring up the issue of whether Barack Obama is an acquaintance of a man who performed some detestable acts when Obama was 8 years old, acts that Obama has denounced. Obama has given absolutely no indication that he agrees with the political beliefs that brought them about.
Well, then, if that's so, it's entirely fair to point out that McCain's running mate has had an ongoing sexual relationship with someone who could be considered a traitor, who was part of a movement that had ties to a white supremacist group.
Or that she has ties to a minister who performs witch hunts and was responsible for the murder of a suspected witch's pet snake.
Or that McCain himself is somehow connected to the infamous suicide of the former treasurer of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on live TV.
Or that McCain belonged to a group that had ties to Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.
Or that McCain is culpable for the current financial meltdown that threatens to destroy the world's economy.
Or that McCain is essentially a snake-oil salesman, a narcissistic con artist whose personal ambition trumps his alleged patriotism, a hypocrite who condemns those who secrete sleaze into our discourse while vomiting huge amounts of political bile, all while sporting that reptilian grin of his.
That would be entirely fair under the standards set forth by McCain and his running mate, Caribou Barbie.
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Let's start with Sarah Palin and the allegations of having an ongoing sexual relationship with a would-be traitor.
Her husband, the Toddmeister, was a member of the Alaska Independence Party from 1995 to 2002. The Alaska Independence Party has pushed for Alaska to secede from the United States. Advocating secession could be considered treasonous. (And just plain stupid, considering that Alaska is the biggest federal welfare state in the country, getting back much more federal tax dollars than its residents pay, according to the Tax Foundation.)
The Alaska Independence Party has ties to a group called the League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group with white supremacist leanings.
And Palin lives with a guy who belonged to the secessionist party.
The party proudly displays this quote from founder Joe Vogler on its Web site: "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."
Palin herself hasn't distanced herself from the group. In March, she sent a videotaped speech to the group's convention thanking it for its "good work."
Palin has also suggested bringing up the issue of Obama's former minister, a man whose wacky beliefs Obama has rejected. If that's fair, let's look at one of Palin's minister buddies, a man whose beliefs she has not rejected in the slightest.
The preacher in question is a guy named Thomas Muthee, an African evangelist known for his witch-detecting skills. Muthee prayed over Palin during a service at her church, asking God to make her governor of Alaska. Palin's response? "That was awesome, Pastor Muthee!"
Leaving aside the theological question of whether God cares who governs Alaska, let's take a look at Muthee. In his hometown of Kiambu, suburb of Nairobi, in Kenya, Muthee identified a woman as a witch, claiming that she used her special powers to cause car accidents.
Seriously.
The pastor led a crusade against the car-accident-causing witch, which prompted police to storm into the suspected witch's home and shoot her pet python.
You can't make up stuff that good.
Anyway, the mob ran the witch out of town, forcing her to relocate somewhere else where she was apparently free to cause car accidents.
And Palin, according to the Associated Press, praises the guy. "Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he's so bold," she said on a video making the rounds on YouTube.
Call it building a bridge to the 14th century.
Moving on to John McCain, the co-chair of his Pennsylvania campaign is a guy from suburban Philadelphia named Robert Asher, a bigwig in Republican circles.
Asher is also a convicted felon, having been found guilty of perjury, racketeering, conspiracy and bribery charges in the same case that brought down former state Treasurer Budd Dwyer in 1987. Dwyer, of course, is notorious for ending his final press conference with a .357 magnum.
McCain hasn't said anything about that, as far as I know. Nor has he said anything about the multitude of lobbyists for the industries that are currently leading the American economy down the drain who staff his campaign.
He has spoken in the past about his infamous membership in the Keating Five. If you'll recall, the Keating Five stood accused of helping savings and loan swindler Charles Keating avoid federal regulation while he defrauded investors out of more than $1 billion. Keating gave McCain and the four other senators in the group some $1.3 million in campaign contributions.
When his savings and loan collapsed, it cost taxpayers more than $2 billion.
That was a lot of money in 1989.
McCain said he learned his lesson from that, but what the lesson was remains unclear. He still pushes for deregulation of financial institutions, which is what led to the savings and loan collapse in the'80s and the current debacle that may wind up costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion.
And let's not even start on McCain's own preacher problem - such as seeking the endorsement of an evangelist who blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina and supports the state of Israel because it will bring about Armageddon.
Or McCain's membership in the U.S. Council for World Freedom, a group that ran guns to anti-government rebels in Central America and was tied to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. The group has been tied to Nazi collaborators and anti-Semites, the Associated Press reported.
The lesson, I suppose, is people in glass houses - or in the case of Caribou Barbie, glass igloos - well, you know the rest.
McCain has taken to asking, "Who is the real Barack Obama?"
The question could easily be turned around: "Who is the real John McCain?"
Did he ever have any principles or integrity? Was it all an act? Did he, as some people have suggested, sell his soul to win this election and now the Devil is screwing him over?
Back in 2000, when McCain was the victim of the kind of sleazy politics he is practicing now, he told Jim Lehrer of PBS's NewsHour, "Uh, I, I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it."
Sounds about right. He can't win with his ideas, such as they are. He has to resort to sleaze.
Back in March, McCain promised that he would run "a respectful campaign."
It would be more than fair to point out that he was lying.
Hey, Pinky...have you been out yelling "Lynch the nigger," with the rest of the wingbats at your last McCain rally ?
Sentiments of revulsion are coming in from all quarters, including from sane Republicans, over the viciousness and bigotry and baseness of the Republican masses being elicited and exploited at the McPalin rallies.
The few decent and smart GOPs, like Chris Buckley, are abandoning the GOP garbage scow. Soon, nothing but the very lowest dregs of America will be left aboard the rotting hulk.
Let's hope it goes to the bottom with all hairy hands aboard...you know, for the sake of evolution.
Let's hear it for ACORN...one of the great organizations in America for increasing the enfranchisement of the dispossessed.
Of course, these are the very people the GOP monkey masses hate...they're afraid they'll get their burger flipping jobs.
The Palin strategy seems to have been that if they could nominate a goofy enough candidate with enough crimes under her belt that no one would notice how they'd destroyed the economy of the United States for the SECOND time in less than a hundred years.
It has worked to a certain extent. She's a one woman carnival of horrors.
Skroo the economy...what about this burning question?
Did 'American Carol' flop at the box office because of our poor economy or because it's a rotten movie.
In either case it might be said that the GOP is responsible.
I believe it flopped so badly because of a vast left wing conspiracy to not count ticket sales correctly.
The theatres were empty because of a VLWC to ...well, ok, I donno how the fuck they did that.
The GOP wingnuts are getting more and more desperate - they know their goose is cooked:
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday Oct. 12, 2008 12:06 EDT
Virginia GOP Chairman claims “connection between Obama and bin Laden”
(updated below - Update II)
In the post below, I referenced an angry defense of the McCain/Palin campaign from Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who mocked accusations that the McCain campaign was exploiting racist themes as nothing more than the by-product of “the outrage industry, ever on the lookout for any sign of racism and quick to pounce even when it’s not there.” To do so, Martin dismissed a truly vile and overtly racist newspaper article (.pdf) written by Bobby May — McCain’s County Chairman in Buchanan County, Virginia and former GOP County Treasurer — as nothing more than “one isolated piece from a low-level party activist in a rural paper.”
Today, Time’s Karen Tumulty reports on what she heard after being invited by the McCain campaign to observe its “ground game” in Southern Virginia. Tumulty reports on a speech she heard delivered to gathered McCain volunteers by the Chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, Jeffrey M. Frederick — no “low-level party activist” he:
With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: “Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” he said. “That is scary.”
After noting that this is “not exactly true,” Tumulty described how that accusation was nonetheless “enough to get the volunteers stoked”:
“And he won’t salute the flag,” one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, “We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born.” Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.
This is why it is so disgraceful for reporters and pundits to minimize and dismiss what the McCain/Palin campaign, and Republicans generally, have been doing as they become increasingly desperate. Here is the top Republican official for the State of Virginia comparing Obama to Osama bin Laden and provoking claims that he hates the flag and isn’t really even American. The raw tribalism and resentments that are being stoked here, and the pure hatred against Obama based on his Terroristic Foreignness, is unprecedentedly ugly and dangerous, and reporters who dismiss and minimize it all through false equivalencies and other justifications are doing nothing less than aiding and abetting it.
The GOP wingnuts are getting more and more desperate - they know their goose is cooked:
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday Oct. 12, 2008 12:06 EDT
Virginia GOP Chairman claims “connection between Obama and bin Laden”
(updated below - Update II)
In the post below, I referenced an angry defense of the McCain/Palin campaign from Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who mocked accusations that the McCain campaign was exploiting racist themes as nothing more than the by-product of “the outrage industry, ever on the lookout for any sign of racism and quick to pounce even when it’s not there.” To do so, Martin dismissed a truly vile and overtly racist newspaper article (.pdf) written by Bobby May — McCain’s County Chairman in Buchanan County, Virginia and former GOP County Treasurer — as nothing more than “one isolated piece from a low-level party activist in a rural paper.”
Today, Time’s Karen Tumulty reports on what she heard after being invited by the McCain campaign to observe its “ground game” in Southern Virginia. Tumulty reports on a speech she heard delivered to gathered McCain volunteers by the Chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, Jeffrey M. Frederick — no “low-level party activist” he:
With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: “Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” he said. “That is scary.”
After noting that this is “not exactly true,” Tumulty described how that accusation was nonetheless “enough to get the volunteers stoked”:
“And he won’t salute the flag,” one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, “We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born.” Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.
This is why it is so disgraceful for reporters and pundits to minimize and dismiss what the McCain/Palin campaign, and Republicans generally, have been doing as they become increasingly desperate. Here is the top Republican official for the State of Virginia comparing Obama to Osama bin Laden and provoking claims that he hates the flag and isn’t really even American. The raw tribalism and resentments that are being stoked here, and the pure hatred against Obama based on his Terroristic Foreignness, is unprecedentedly ugly and dangerous, and reporters who dismiss and minimize it all through false equivalencies and other justifications are doing nothing less than aiding and abetting it.
Here's "where we stand."
The Freepers are praying for McCain's death so Palin can take over and bring in the Dominionist,fascist state they all yearn for in their shrivelled, frightened, hateful, little "souls."
Obama opens 6-point lead over McCain
Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:03am EDT By Andrew Quinn
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 6-point lead over Republican rival John McCain in the U.S. presidential race, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Sunday.
Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 43 percent among likely U.S. voters in the latest four-day tracking poll, his widest lead since the poll was started on Tuesday. It was up from a 4-point lead on Saturday. The poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
Pollster John Zogby said Obama's lead was now statistically significant.
"As we watch each day, it is clear that he has gone from a 2-point lead to a 3-point lead on up to 6 points," Zogby said. "It is certainly trending his way."
With just over three weeks to go before the November 4 election, the poll showed Obama gaining traction among independent voters who now back him by a 21-point margin.
Among women, another crucial group, the Illinois senator held a solid 12-point lead, while the two candidates were tied among male voters at 45 percent apiece.
Obama has widened his lead as weeks of economic turmoil shook financial markets, causing stock markets to plunge and fueling voter concern over pocketbook issues.
Young voters aged 18 to 29 backed Obama by a 20-point margin, and he also held a double-digit lead among those who reported they had registered to vote in the past six months.
McCain had a 10-point lead among white voters, while Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, won the support of 92 percent of black voters, one of the Democratic Party's most loyal constituencies.
Zogby said McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, appeared to be failing to connect with many voters on the issue of the economy, and a wave of attacks leveled against Obama by the McCain campaign also fell flat.
"Clearly the negative campaigning isn't working," Zogby said, noting that Obama was winning support among some voters in even the strongest traditional Republican voting blocs.
"He's getting 19 percent support among conservatives and 35 support among born-again or evangelical (Christian) voters, which is pretty substantial. I wonder if the McCain campaign ought to be raising some red flags," he said.
The rolling tracking poll surveyed 1,206 likely voters in the presidential election. In a tracking poll, the most recent day's results are added while the oldest day's results are dropped in an effort to track changing momentum.
The Mailer That Put the Final Nail in the McCain Campaign Coffin
Close to 100 million Americans received mailers last week, or will receive them next week that will put the last nail in the coffin of the McCain Pailin campaign.
It wasn't sent by Obama, nor by 527 group, not by any non-profit or even a political organization.
It didn't mention McCain or Pailin, Obama or Biden. Didn't mention taxes or Iraq, Gay Marriage or Abortion or any other campaign hot button topic.
But the mailer, personalized, received by tens of millions of Americans, perhaps 100 million, in the past week, or in the next week, is the single envelope that will have caused John McCain and many republican incumbents to lose their seats.
I got one addressed to my youngest son on Thursday, then another addressed to me on Friday.
Then I talked to friends, members of my synagogue, fellow activists at a local fundraiser. Just about everyone had received them. The message was the same for everyone.
Th first envelope I received, for my son, was a quarterly mutual fund report-- where we have most of his college savings. The letter reported that since the beginning of the year, the savings were down 30%-- even though the fund was a "blend" fund.
The next envelope, which I received on Friday, was a quarterly report on my IRA, also down over 30%.
These reports were sent out on September 30th, before the market dropped an additional 19%.I knew the numbers I was looking at were much worse, just ten days later.
Tens of millions of Americans, maybe over 100 million Americans have received their quarterly statments this week for IRAs, mutual funds, 401Ks, etc.. They're all get a mailer that is causing much pain, much stress, acute realization that the economic crisis has hit home.
They're probably still arriving, as I write this, for a few more days. We've seen the result in the polls. The response will grow. The pundits, if they've guessed this is about anything else, are probably wrong.
It's hard to imagine, after eight years of Bush and primarily Republican rule, most Americans not concluding that the GOP and its approach to government and the economy caused their pain, their loss, their fear for the future.
It's hard to imagine McCain's campaign getting anywhere with their desperate gambits-- abortion this week, what, terrorism next week? Or raising taxes? They saved the average family $2000 or $5000 in taxes over the past eight years and cost them $35,000 or $200,000 in lost retirement savings or depreciated home value.
No. The most powerful election-affecting mailer this cycle is being sent by the financial companies that so many Americans put their trust in. Those quarterly notices are all Obama needs. If he and the DSCC and DCCC congressional campaign committees are smart, they'll run ads this week referring to those notices. They'll remind the voters who discontinued the regulations that prevented financial institutions from leveraging themselves so badly-- Henry Paulson. They'll remind voters who pushed for earlier deregulations-- Phil Gramm, McCain's primary economic mentor.
But that's all icing on the cake. Obama and most of the Democrats running for congress could probably do almost nothing, from this point on (they don't want people to think that, of course. They want the campaign to re-double efforts.)
These are sad times. Reality is far more powerful than any campaign words. For the neocons, the corporatists and their theocon supporters, the chickens have indeed come home to roost-- and they've shit all over almost every American. Now, go out and ask anyone you talk to and tie the mailer together with the election, if they haven't tied it together for themselves yet.
I'm a whore for the GOP.
It hurt so bad to see O up by six.
I admit I had to lie a little.
He's really up by a lot more.
My fellow prisoners:
I'm a former POW, you assholes.
Vote for me.
What's wrong with you?!!
Obama poised to win Electoral College
On July 31, White House '08 projected an impending Obama victory in the Electoral College with 273 electoral votes.
This was premised on Barack Obama carrying all the states carried by Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 - a safe bet even before the economic tsunami that is now dominating the campaign - with one key addition of Colorado to those blue states.
This is the July 31 map.
Obama can win without carrying Ohio or Florida or Virginia or North Carolina or Nevada - states in which Obama is leading today. Obama most likely cannot win without Pennsylvania - and he is leading there today.
Larry Sabato, one of America's leading political scientists came to the same conclusion in a column for the Rasmussen poll political page last week.
Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Centre for Politics and Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at UVA, wrote: "It is always theoretically possible that the final presidential debate or another intervening 'big event' domestically or in foreign affairs could give McCain an electoral shot in the arm, so that he can make up some or all of the lost ground.
"One could argue that there is enough time for the momentum to shift once, or even twice, depending on developments. While Americans personally like both candidates, some have doubts about Obama because of his inexperience, yet many see a McCain triumph as rewarding the deeply disliked President Bush (he's back at 25 per cent in the Gallup poll, a point below where Richard Nixon stood on the day he resigned).
"These contrary evaluations might produce a bit of blowback for the candidate who holds the lead. Yet time is growing short for major upheavals.
"For the moment, and probably longer, Obama has begun to build up margins in some of the previous toss-up states. With this issue, the Crystal Ball now has Obama over the magic number of 270 for the first time, with potentially many more electoral votes to be piled on top.
"It is difficult to believe that John McCain is going to carry all the remaining toss-up states, which have a total of 86 electoral votes. The GOP nightmare is that McCain will carry few of them, pushing Obama's Electoral College total well above 300."
Sabato's map coincides with that of White House '08, and adds Nevada.
Yes, there are the continuing character attacks by the McCain camp on Obama. There is the issue of whether America is in fact ready to elect an African-American as their president (White House 08 will revisit this issue in the near future).
However, the American people are right now in the process of locking in a decision on their next president, and they are locking in Barack Obama.
Well, it looks like you stand neck deep in pig shit, whack job.
RedState co-founder Joshua Trevino writes on his blog that he can't bring himself to vote for the Republican ticket:
In the end, I couldn't do it. My California ballot arrived in the mail today, and I opened it fully intending to vote for John McCain. I filled out the state propositions first -- yes on 8, no on everything proposing a new bond or new spending -- then the local offices, straight Republican excepting Kevin Johnson for (nonpartisan) Sacramento mayor. Finally, the vote for President of the United States: an academic exercise in California, where Barack Obama will surely win by a crushing margin. But good citizenship demands voting as if it matters. Do I believe in John McCain? Not as much as I used to. Do I believe in Sarah Palin? Despite my early enthusiasm for her, now not at all. Do I believe in the national Republican Party? Not in the slightest -- even though I see no meaningful alternative to it. So, my choice for President in 2008, scrawled in my ballot as an act of futile protest, is Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. If nothing else, I am confident this is the first of several votes I will cast for him in years to come.
Obama Gains in Iowa, Florida Give Him National Boost (Update2)
By James Rowley and Kristin Jensen
Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is ahead in a series of new polls from Florida to Iowa, gains that are helping him maintain a national lead over Republican John McCain.
Obama was on top in seven of 11 new state polls, while McCain claimed the advantage in Alabama, and the two were statistically tied in Georgia, North Carolina and one Ohio poll. The Democrat's edge, on average, is now more than 7 percentage points in national polls, according to realclearpolitics.com.
McCain is losing ground to Obama as Americans become more focused on the financial crisis. Polls have long shown that voters trust Obama more than McCain when it comes to handling the economy, and Obama is focusing on the issue at every stop.
``When the economy's in crisis, people want real answers,'' Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, said on the ``Fox News Sunday'' program. ``Senator Obama has lengthened his lead, and that should be a clear message to the McCain campaign'' that recent personal attacks on Obama aren't working, Rendell said.
He said Obama's lead in Pennsylvania polls has widened from 2 percentage points to 13 since the economic crisis erupted.
Seeking Balance
Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota said voters will choose McCain's experience to avoid ``the entire nation run, imbalanced and without a check, by the Democrats.''
``I think people are going to come back to that reality as they get closer to the election,'' Pawlenty said on Fox today. ``I think people like balance.''
Senator Obama of Illinois has led McCain by at least 7 percentage points in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking survey in each of the last 10 days. The latest survey of 2,783 voters conducted Oct. 9-11 showed Obama ahead by 50 percent to 43 percent. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The gains are reflected in state polls.
In Florida, Obama is ahead 49 percent to 44 percent for McCain, according to a survey by Research 2000 of 600 likely voters taken Oct. 6-8. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. In a poll in mid-September, McCain led Obama 46 percent to 45 percent.
Lead in Pennsylvania
Obama holds a 12-point lead in Pennsylvania, according to a Muhlenberg College tracking poll of 602 likely voters. That has grown from just 4 points in late September, equal to the survey's margin of error.
In Iowa, a state that President George W. Bush narrowly won four years ago, Obama leads McCain 54 percent to 41 percent, according to a SurveyUSA poll of 692 likely voters conducted Oct. 8-9. Three weeks ago, Obama's lead was 54 percent to 43 percent.
In Colorado, Obama is ahead 52 percent to 42 percent, according to a Public Policy Polling survey of 1,331 likely voters conducted Oct. 8-10. That is up from 7 points three weeks ago.
``I think people are starting to say to themselves, we're tired of the old ideology,'' Obama, 47, told about 250 donors at an Oct. 10 fundraiser in Philadelphia. He noted that the campaign was gaining in Republican strongholds such as Virginia, North Carolina and Montana.
Key for Republicans
Ohio is of particular interest because no Republican candidate has won the presidency without carrying the state. Two recent polls showed gains for Obama, with one giving him the lead in the state and the other a statistical tie.
An Ohio newspaper poll taken Oct. 4-8 of 876 likely voters found that McCain had 48 percent support to Obama's 46 percent, within the survey's 3.3 percentage point margin of error. Still, Obama gained 4 points over a similar survey three weeks ago, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, one of the newspapers involved in sponsoring the poll.
Obama is leading McCain 49 percent to 44 percent in Ohio, according to an Oct. 9 InsiderAdvantage/Poll Position survey of 509 likely voters with a sampling error of 4 percentage points. That is up from a 2-point lead in a Sept. 29 poll.
The race is tight in other battleground states such as North Carolina. McCain leads 48 percent to 46 percent there, according to a WSCO-TV poll taken Oct. 6-7 with a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points. In Georgia, McCain led Obama 49-46 percent, according to an Oct. 9 Insider Advantage/Poll Position survey of 531 likely voters with a sampling error of 4 percentage points.
Solid Leads
Each candidate still has solid leads in states that traditionally go for his party. A Survey USA poll in Alabama taken Oct. 8-9 showed McCain, 72, an Arizona senator, leading 62 percent to 35 percent among 697 likely and actual voters.
In Oregon, Obama leads McCain by 54 percent to 43 percent in a Rasmussen survey of 700 likely voters taken on Oct. 9 with a margin of error of 4 percentage points. In the previous poll on Sept. 15, Obama led 51-47.
An Oct. 6 Rasmussen poll in Vermont gave Obama a lead of 65 percent to 32 percent for McCain.
Obama picked up some support from editorial boards in major battleground states this weekend, winning the endorsements of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Missouri, the Dayton Daily News in Ohio and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Pennsylvania.
The candidates don't have any major public events today. McCain is in the Washington area, while Obama flew to Ohio, where he will spend time preparing for the final presidential debate Oct. 15.
This afternoon Obama knocked on doors in a neighborhood in Holland, Ohio, near Toledo, before he was surrounded by crowds on the street. Several times the candidate reminded well wishers that early voting was available in Ohio and was rewarded by hearing that some in the neighborhood had already gone to the polls.
This Week In Conservatism
by DarkSyde
Sat Oct 11, 2008 at 08:00:06 AM PDT
It's chilling to contemplate just how many more weeks like this one the country can take. Bad week, real bad; ugly start to nasty finish. What sucks even more is the entire nation is gripped ever more tightly in an eternal conservative nightmare from which it cannot yet wake.
This Week in Conservatism we learned that even as Lady Liberty stumbles and falls to her knees, crying out for a candidate that will unite us in purpose and lead us to solutions, the Plain-McSame campaign somehow concluded that what the Homeland really, actually, desperately needs is more hatred, ignorance, and division amongst ourselves. We learned that Conservative economic ideology leads to economic collapse with all too real and all too terrible consequences. And we learned that Sarah Palin is an official bald-faced liar.
Exhibit I: What a wondrous & magical free, unregulated market the GOP has brought us. This week we followed that conservative incarnation of the miraculous free market to its logical end: utter collapse. If the stock market part of the market is a forward looking indicator, The Great Republican Recession is almost upon us and, hey, it could get even worse:
"I've never seen a panic like this," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's. "I've seen stock market drops, but not an overall panic." The plunge came in a stomach-churning 90 minutes. The Dow was down just 140 points in the early afternoon. But then, wave after wave of selling began to roll through the market. Stocks are on track for their worst year since 1937.
Exhibit II: I'm pretty sure, given the level of prideful ignorance and raw hatred on display at GOP rallies these days, that even if McCain did know the "projector" he used to diss Obama was a cosmic space-time learning machine for humans, he wouldn't have cared, in part because he truly does not comprehend the technical advances made in FX/Graphics in the last four decades:
Well, shock of shocks — it turns out McCain’s characterization of this was all wrong. In fact, I would call it a lie. He knows it wasn’t for an overhead projector, a piece of classroom equipment that costs a couple of hundred dollars. That money was for Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI star projector: a venerable piece of precision fabricated equipment that projects the stars, constellations, and other objects inside the planetarium dome. Adler’s Zeiss is 40 years old ...
Exhibit 3: Sarah Palin abused her power and violated Alaskan statutes
Thanks for proving my point, Karen.
They do that all the time, pinky, and are oblivious to it because they've developed mental illnesses from all the Kool Aid they guzzled.
It'd be sad if the manifested symptoms weren't so repulsive.
congratulations, red state founder, you just voted for the messi-duh by not voting for mcCain.
I'd vote for my dentist against this dope who Kool Aid drinkers love so much.
CELEBS love him! FARRAKHAN admires him! Ayers LOVES him! Wright loves him! Fleger admires him!
That Obama's ahead shows something SO WRONG in America it takes one's breath away, doesn't it?
CHANGE at ANY cost. NOBODY asking how he'll pay for this change, what he means when he tells ACORN he wants them with him to help 'set his agenda'..Cheating liars who're ruining democracy will be in the WH setting THE AGENDA!? WHAT?
Nobody on the left is intellectually curious enough to treat themselves to the Obama YouTube videos that expose him? Like a cross to a vampire, huh?
Anybody see a future president give the finger to Hillary? That's CLASS! But then, who expects the Obama nuts to have class???
Evan's so right. And the rightness of his words is obvious when you see the real leftwing nuts come out and so nastily slam him. I don't know why they're SO scared. Obama's playing by Alinsky rules...he almost can't lose. Alinsky SAID there'd be people like the commenters here, just ripe for the socialist picking, but they don't get it.
THEY will get FREEBIES if they vote for Obama. and MAYBE America might be less safe in the bargain, too! WHo needs a SUPER POWER? WE don't deserve it!! right?
I wonder how they'll feel when Russia or China's the super power... scared? complacent? Ya, complacent, that's what Obama and Alinsky want them. Just PERFECT.
pitiful bunch of creepz
John McCain seeks quick solution as polls spell doom for the Republicans
Robert Lusetich, Los Angeles correspondent | October 14, 2008
WITH every major poll showing Barack Obama will be the next president of the US, Republicans yesterday desperately urged John McCain to quickly find a new way to connect with voters.
"He has to make the case that he's different than Bush and better than Obama on the economy," said former house Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of many influential Republicans concerned that the White House is slipping away.
"If he doesn't win that case, it's all over, and it's going to be a very bad year for Republicans."
Matthew Dowd, a key strategist for George W. Bush in both his victories, admitted that Senator McCain now had to hope for either a huge blunder by his rival or an event that would change the face of the election.
"At this point, the campaign is totally out of John McCain's hands," he said.
Ronald Reagan's chief strategist, Ed Rollins, went so far as to predict a landslide for the Democrats, comparing this election to that of 1980, when fed-up Americans turfed out Jimmy Carter.
"Barack has met the threshold," Rollins said yesterday. "Once Reagan met the threshold, people wanted to get rid of Carter, and they did in a landslide. This is going to turn into a landslide."
Every credible poll shows Senator Obama with a lead of between six and 11 percentage points. A Gallup Poll yesterday showed the Democrats' lead narrow by a point in the past week to seven points - 50 to 43.
However, Newsweek's poll has Senator Obama ahead of his opponent by double figures.
Senator McCain's fortunes have been in decline since the second week of last month, when he held an average lead of about three points. He has been unable to stem the tide in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown - for which two-thirds of Americans blame the Republicans - and his two mediocre performances in the presidential debates.
Since Gallup began polling presidential races 72 years ago, only Reagan was able to overcome a lead this substantial with three weeks to go.
"We're a couple of points down, OK, nationally, but we're right in this game," Senator McCain said at a rally yesterday, "The economy has hurt us a little bit in the last week or two, but in the last few days, we've seen it come back up because they want experience, they want knowledge and they want vision. We'll give that to America."
Senator McCain vowed to "whip" his rival's "you-know-what" in the final debate, to be held this Thursday (AEST).
He was meeting economic advisers yesterday trying to come up with a coherent package of proposals for stabilising the markets to present in the debate.
One of Senator McCain's closest advisers said yesterday the Republican candidate was considering new tax cuts to spur economic investment.
"It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes," Senator Lindsey Graham told CBS.
"Now is the time to lower tax rates for investors - capital-gains tax, dividend tax rates - to make sure we can get the economy jump-started."
Senator McCain's campaign came to a fork in the road over the weekend when Senator McCain had to defend Senator Obama's character from a supporter at a rally who called the Democrat leader "an Arab".
Senator McCain was jeered by some at the rally when he said the Democratic nominee was "a decent family man" whom Americans need not fear. While some Republicans were calling on Senator McCain to get tougher in the campaign, others said the sort of cynical attack advertisements his campaign had been rolling out had not resonated with the voters. Mark Salter, Senator McCain's closest adviser, defended the campaign from accusations that what vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden yesterday termed "unbecoming personal attacks" - especially from running mate Sarah Palin - had fuelled hatred.
"I think there have been quite a few reporters recently who have sort of implied, or made more than implications, that somehow we're responsible for the occasional nut who shows up and yells something about Barack Obama," Mr Salter said.
"We're not."
lol, where are all those conservatives coming out for Obama getting their Kool ade?
Are the lefties sneaking in in the night and feeding them through a tube?
Oh, thanks for proving my point, Pinky...duh, whatever that stale cleeshay means in your tiny mind.
I HAVE been watching all those anti-Obama videos.
They're hilarious. So lame you can see why nobody but wingdings are buying them.
"cleeshay."
Anyway, although all elitists think that they're actually elite, the elitists here aren't even a part of the elitist elite.
Think of the elitist elite being comprised of a Dark Lord Sauron (or 2-3 of him) and the 9 Dark Riders, or the Nazgul, from Tolkein's epic trilogy of Good vs. Evil.
Those are the gurus at the top of the food chain who mouth talking points and give marching orders that their minion hordes--the orcs and trolls--mindlessly parrot and carry out.
And who we have here are the orcs and trolls. Thy're just snorting, grunting, and guffawing arrow-shooting pests who, like hydras, grow two more heads everytime you cut one off (because they have a nigh-endless supply of cannon fodder and stooges from Burke's swinish multitudes, as enlistment outfits like ACORN recruit from, exploiting the flaw in Democracy that the Founding Father's themselves were wary of, rejecting a pure democracy by plebiscite and setting up a Constitutional republic, instead, though the cunning dark lords and the Nazgul have managed to fiddle with and rig the electoral asylum so as to have it run by the inmates, the orcs and trolls themselves, as the first Democrat (and psycho war-machine, slave owner, and Indian killer) Andrew Jackson figured out (and managing to beat the truly elite John Q. Adams, the second time around, anyway, by essentially calling him an elitist).
The truly elite elitist has millions of dollars (and/or euros) in their tax-sheltered bank accounts. They have private chauffeurs, pilots, chefs, and other servants (including lawyers and image consultants). They have advanced degrees and are bi or trilingual. Along with English, they speak a foreign language (e.g. French) and the made-up elitist liberal language of Esperanto.
They are all aesthetically-challenged and resort to cosmetic surgery (once they amass their ill-gotten gains) in the attempt to acquire some ever-elusive sex appeal and quell the insecurity that has plaqued them since the awkward adolescence they never quite grow out of (and harboring eternal, traumatized hate for the naturally handsome/pretty and mentally and physically healthy conservatives in high school who traumatized them by their confident, bon vivant air, likeability, and popularity that they would never know).
The conservative's attractivenness, however, originates from an inner quality engendered by benevolent nurturing, and you can see it in their faces (particularly the eyes) persisting well into middle age even after the superficial qualities of comeliness (like snmooth skin, for example) fade.
Yet it is the superficial qualities that the aging, still insecure (despite all the "accomplishments" and accolades by their circle-jerking peers) elite elitist thinks that the secret lies in, so you have visages of old liberals stretched and made ghastly by cosmetic procedures performed with more and more regularity in tandem with each passing year, desperately trying to preserve the beautiful youth they never had, anyway, and never able to extinguish the envious, angry, devious, and hateful gleam in their eyes that made then unattractive--if not repulsive-- to begin with, and what really separated them from the conservatives.
Just compare the lineup--aesthetically, male and female-- at Foxnews vs. the lineup at MSNBC.
And that iss the source of their gloating, vindictive, schaudenfreud (i.e. childhood/adolescent inferiority complexes transmogrified into seething resentment towards the source of their envy, the conservatives).
The point is, it is a superior inner quality of character, a benevolent nobility, whether rich or poor, that marks the conservative, a quality that the liberal tries to ape by superficial means, which is why they're shallow, empty suits who never quite get it.
Anyway, it is those elite elitists at the top of the food chain that the bottom-dwelling elitists here look up to and try to emulate by quoting them as authorities with papal infallibility, and mindlessly parroting talking points and tactics, making them nothing but pests oblivious to--if not accepting of, which is even worse-- the sinister, Marxist ideology and agenda that the elite elitist gurus are engendered by and try to sow widely by first dispatching their orcs and trolls across the free land and blogosphere to instill hate and rage, create confusion, and set the stage for the political messiah who appears out of nowhere to blame the pre-existing order for the hate, rage, and confusion, and promising hope and change to "fix it."
And the fix is in.
Bill Clinton managed to do it (despite being a buffoon), John Kerry tried it (but was even more buffoonish than Clinton), and Barack Obama has learned from both
--e.g. "Hope & Change" was plagiarized from Clinton, and the tough guy "We're-Mad-As-Hell-And-We're-Not-Going-To-Take-It-Anymore!" belligerence is directly related to the trauma of Kerry's 2004 loss, blamed on his (guilty) silence when swiftboated by swiftboaters.
Anyway, the orcs and trolls here are just plain dumb, contradicting themselves from one posting to the next (if not within the same posting), but if McCain blows what quickly dwindling chances he has left to beat back the anti-surge surge here, I'm afraid that the good (but gullible, bless 'em)American people might have to get used to the orcish thuggery (because it will only get worse once electorally empowered as a "mandate").
The "The Anointed One's" name is Barack Obama.
Who came up with "The Anointed One's"???? That's about as dumb as modern liberal.
People have a name (not a label) - use it! You can be part of the solution but only if you use actual facts and actual names. GET IT YET EVAN?
I know most of you usually don't read this guy's screeds, but you've gotta read this one. It's the most grotesquely hilarious thing I've seen in a long time.
Talk about a desperate, little monkey with a typical inferiority complex (as everyone knows they're "conservative" because they're so ruled by fear that can't plunge into a new world of change and adventure) trying to make himself feel good about himself. Anyway, his writhings and shrillness are even funnier than Sayet's.
As someone said earlier, "Stay tuned for the carnival." These poor guys are so twisted out of shape by the collapse of their movement that their usual dementia is reaching cosmic proportions.
Oh, did you know conservatives were all beautiful and possessed of a wonderful inner light?
I guess that's why Hollywood is so right wing. And, that inner light...is that just blissful idiocy?
Oh, the screed I'm referring to is John's ...just above.
"Karin" has no real degree, no real money, zero real accomplishments, is monolingual, never deviates from liberal orthodoxy (as set by the liberal popes), has zero free thinking creativity and just parrots party lines, and is aestheticaly challenged with no taste or discernment.
She is envious, resentful, and malicious to degree that has triggered neuroses, and contributes nothing to political discourse--or life, for that matter--but hate, divisiveness, and other qualities which give human beings a bad name and are at the black heart of terrorism, murder, and war.
She thinks "class" is what she sees on the red carpet during the Oscars (despite the fact that the glittering Yves St. Laurens she gapes at are borrowed by the royals she ogles over, who themselves can barely read and are the true trailer park trash she accuses the conservatives of being, have had more knives used on their faces than a fish at Benihanas, and more plastic injected than the factory molds at Mattel toys).
She has been spoonfed shit daily since she's been a little girl and is now running around vomiting it up, or running in here to squat and defecate, because she's full of it and can't get enough of it out of her system to just stfu and get a life.
She's just a sniveling orcling who never even makes it onto the battlefields, but lives in the caves of Moria beating a little tin drum in the dark and clapping her hands together with widespread fingers like a retarded little child and squeaking "Yayyyy!" when the truly elite elitist balrog appears.
She hates hatefulness, will not tolerate alleged intolerance, and feels fit to judge judgmentalism.
In short, she suffers from the mental illness called "liberalism."
Hey John... "Liberalism" is NOT a mental illness... after 20 years in the Mental Health field I know that for a fact!
However... renaming someone in a derogatory way definitely points to an AXIS II problem.
John... have you sought help for this problem?
You mean the way your sane crowd keeps calling people names like "Manichaean" and "Neocon" and "Shrub" and "moron" and "Hitler" and "McSame" and "McBush" and "reicho" and "trog" and "Xtian freak" and "Repugs" and "Repigs" and "grotesques," hyuck-hyuck?
Sorry. I meant "doctor."
And btw, "renaming someone in a derogatory way" (e.g. see immediately above) and using metaphors, drawing analogies, and speaking allegorically (as I did with the Lord of the Rings references) are two different things, doc.
I guess post-Structural (a.k.a. "New Age") therapists/counselors aren't required to know that to get licensed by Kabbalists or Scientologists (or whatever "Mental Health" school of thought you're coming from).
I disagree with you about Karin, John. She sounds cultured, humane and rational - everything you are not. I don't care if she "has no real money," whatever that means, or that she lacks the degree in electronics from Dvry which you possess. Like me, however, she will rejoice at the triumph of the secular progressives, drowning out for good the illiterate braying of your party.
Anonymous sniped:
"I disagree with you about Karin, John."
Good God, NO!
"She sounds cultured..."
lol
"...humane..."
LOL
"...and rational..."
Please, stop it. You're killing me.
"- everything you are not."
So I'm uncultured, inhumane, and irrational because...
...I make fun of liberals for thinking that they're "cultured"?
Well, most are monolingual, all are trendy and superficial, historically and literarily illiterate, have no real talent in anything but whining, propagandizing, demagoguery, and oral sex, and can only boast of contact with foreign cultures by their semester abroad experiences which amount to nothing but travel junkets financed by daddy--or other people's taxes-- and the opportunity to get sexually molested by a Third Worlder so they can boast to their friends back home--in a faked, pretentious accent--of "My wonderful and passionate romance with a beautiful village boy" (who at that very minute is high-fiving his friends back in the disco for sexually humiliating the stupid American whore).
And while they send money to impoverished, uneducated villages abroad and adopt their children to "prove" their "cultured" humanitarianism, they do nothing but denigrate and call for the disenfranchizement and cut-off of tax-paid subsidies for uneducated American citizens living in poverty (the caucasian Christian ones in the Red States, anyway), and complain that they should have aborted their children, demonstrating a disgraceful, provincial, and elitist contempt for homegrown American culture.
So yeah, the pretension of liberals being "cultured" is laughable.
I'm "uncultured, inhumane, and irrational" because I make fun of liberals for thinking that they're "humane"?
Well, they think think nothing of violently terminating entire generations of gestating humans and will deprive mature ones their energy needs for the sake of exotic insects and hoofed animals, feel pleasure at the misfortune--even deaths--of the hated political opposition, i.e. fellow humans (I'm sure you crossed your fingers today when the vice president was rushed to the hospital), and cheer on terrorist insurgents and jihadists out of sheer spite when they cut off heads and try to sabotage a democracy by violent means because you hate Bush and All-Things-Bush (like the democratization of Iraq) and so welcome mayhem and death if the alternative means a successful legacy for Bush.
So, yeah, the liberal pretension of being "humane" is very selective, at best, but more a cruel joke and demonstrably inhumane in fact, and so risible in its delusion.
I'm "uncultured, inhumane, and irrational" because I make fun of liberals for thinking that they're "rational"?
How is it "rational" to call conservative/Republican and even some Democrat caucasians "racist" if they don't support Obama but it's not racist when 95% of African-Americans do?
How is it "rational" to call the American liberation force of Iraq "terrorists," and the terrorist insurgents "Freedom Fighters?"
How is it rational to hail Senator Obama an "outsider" and Hillary Clinton a "pioneer" but then attack a true outsider and pioneer like Sarah Palin as an alien freak and backward thinker?
How is it rational to attack-attack-attack and divide and marginalize and bully en masse
with the pre-meditated intent to intimidate and conquer and then accuse the targets of the attack as being "divisive bullies" when they fight back?
Actually, that one doesn't fall under the category of "Rationality," but Alinsky 101.
What rationality justifies vindictive behavior?
Two wrongs making a right?
Isn't that what justifies, in your minds, ACORN's self-evident and aggressive attempts to steal the election, because "They did it to us first in 2000 and 2004"?
And how is it rational, in the end, to hate hatefulness, not tolerate (alleged) intolerance, and judge judgmentalism?
So, yeah, the liberal pretension of being "rational" is not only insulting to the intelligence but worthy of ridicule.
"I don't care if she 'has no real money,' whatever that means..."
It means, by the elitist liberals' own standards of what comprises an elite(ist)--e.g. wealth, power, advanced educational degrees, etc. in contrast to the more modest circumstances of Redstate rustics/yokels/rednecks/"trogs"--she disqualifies herself from an entitlement to the imagined superior status of liberal elitists.
But I suppose she's an honorary plebe to the elitist club because she's a loyal footsoldier and atheist (or at least anti-Christian).
"...or that she lacks the degree in electronics from Dvry which you possess."
\
Well, I ain't no rocket scientist, anon, but it doesn't take one to quickly figure out that you sure as hell ain't either.
"Like me, however, she will rejoice at the triumph of the secular progressives, drowning out for good the illiterate braying of your party."
You're a projecting, historically illiterate braying fool who's clueless to the philosophical underpinnings of the duelling ideologies and so grossly overestimates the strength of a murderous, nihilistic, and ultimately dead-end materialism and underestimates the power of the conservative human mind, heart, and soul, which exalts Life, and Love.
It's Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield.
And you know who ultimately wins (despite desperate, vicious cheating).
(by the LOSER)
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