Here's the Door Coming to Hit Them on the Ass

A sign of the times. Of times past, that is.

Had to do some rubbing it in, especially since we seem willing to admit people of color are our equals but not people with a different sexual orientation.

Goodbye and Good Luck to All the Rubbish that You've Spoken

Oh please oh please oh please....Billy Bragg sings one for John McCain, Sarah Palin, George W., and Dick Cheney. May the door hit them all on the ass, hard.



Hey, go vote. (Like I need to tell my readers.)

The Win in Darwinian

From Chris Clarke at Coyote Crossing.

Surge Iraq Is Going to Help Me

And a quick one about tonight's debate...McCain loves his "Obama still won't admit the surge worked" line as evidence of That One's bad judgment. Let's assume the surge did work for a second (not too long a second--check out this chilling article).* If we give McCain that, his argument is pretty much this: Sure we committed a murder, but I know the best way to get rid of the body.



*Actually, mostly when those who argue The Surge worked make that claim they mean fewer American soldiers are dying. For just as the dollars to find this illegal, unwinnable war are off the budget books, so is the cost in Iraqi lives.

Olly Olly Oxen Freeze

So did anyone else go "hey! McCain just had his I pick Sarah Palin moment of the debate" when we got to this portion of the financial section of the evening:

LEHRER: What I'm trying to get at this is this. Excuse me if I may, senator. Trying to get at that you all -- one of you is going to be the president of the United States come January. At the -- in the middle of a huge financial crisis that is yet to be resolved. And what I'm trying to get at is how this is going to affect you not in very specific -- small ways but in major ways and the approach to take as to the presidency.

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

Didn't you think, "McCain has never really considered this idea--it just popped into his head and he said it! He wants to be president and make shit up while live on national tv!" For perhaps he doesn't know the composition of the federal budget. Here's one way to look at it, borrowed from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

That means all that's left of the budget pie for McCain's freeze is the 21% for everything else. Side note: It's instructive he left out "interest on the debt" as if the Republican Party he's trying so hard to run from--goddamit he called himself a maverick which is just tacky--didn't build up the gigundo debt we have to pay-off. I guess being a maverick means never having to say it's your party.

What makes up that 21% we could freeze, then?

Very interesting. Even 6% of that is for vets, and we know how much he wants to support them. So I guess that means we freeze education, since, after all, children aren't our future. Or we freeze science and medical research, since we don't need alternative energy and the best way to fund science is through pork-barrel items (I see your Montana bear sperm and raise it some Alaskan seal sperm). Or we freeze transportation and infrastructure work, since American-built things are the best in the world.

The good news is that McCain returned to D.C. to save the day with the bailout plan. For if there's a sharper tool in the economic shed (a more lipsticked pig in the budgetary poke?) than McCain, I don't know who it is. After all, without his leadership of his fellow Republicans, we'd never have an agreement.

Shoot, guess they got all mavericky on him.

Fools Russian Where Neocons Fib to Trod

Time for one of those point and nod entries, but I have to admit I was sort of thinking what Robert Scheer writes about here on his Truthdig:

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

[...]

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union.

Go read the whole thing.

How the Cokie Crumbles

I'm sort of amazed I haven't ranted about Cokie Roberts in the 4 years I've been blogging for in many ways she's the perfect smarmy symbol of all that's wrong with the Washington press corps--totally insular, completely involved in perpetuating the myth of its own savvy insider know-how, ridiculously wrong about 89% of what they say. That she gets trotted out regularly on NPR is exhibit 1 that NPR isn't liberal in the slightest.

So now we get this, if you missed it. It seems Roberts thinks Obama picked the wrong place to vacation this week. According to TPM:

On ABC's This Week [she] added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. "I know Hawaii is a state, but ..." Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.

That's one wonderful construction, " I know _____ (noun) is _____ (part of a larger noun it's really part of), but _____ (eyeroll that means we all know better no matter how true silly words are)." Sort of like, "I know Cokie Roberts is a senior news analyst, but..." After all, what better place for the first African-American candidate for President to vacation than the state that still displays the honorable ole Rebel Flag in front of its state house. I hope I'm not stretching my neck out to say that there's no better place for him to do some relaxing.

Roberts didn't think her claim was a mistake, of course. Instead she repeated and deepened it, as she'd heard it before and now it most likely seemed to be received wisdom. Here's her exchange on NPR:

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he's taking a vacation, he says, because it's good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It's a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he's feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

Nice job, getting "the boy," "Kenya," and "exotic" all within 16 words of each other.

Look can we discuss the candidates' positions on things and not what we learn from their breakfast choice or favorite iPod download (oh, sorry Senator McCain, I realize an iPod is too 21st century for you to understand). As this "insight" gets offered and then repeated by a so-called "expert," we've got McCain going all apoplectic about Russia and Georgia, probably because it seems like something he can relate to--the big bad USSR pushing its neighbors around. Let's talk about that. And how the US of A would never push its neighbors around--it goes halfway around the globe to do that.

Wanna Bet We'll Long for this Level of Dirty Ad in October?

McCain's ads are so ripe it's as if they were not meant to push a candidate but instead were designed to be texts for a Stanley Fish class. Take a gander at this:



OK, done retching? Here are some of the possible messages:

1) Don't trust a politician who can draw a crowd.
2) Politicians shouldn't be celebrities (unless they have starred in movies with chimps or Brigitte Nielsen).
3) Three syllable names can be chanted. Politicians shouldn't have three syllable names.
4) Lots of Germans bad; Germans at the Fudge Haus good, especially with Lindsey Graham at your side (insert your own fudge in the closet joke here).

5) Only blond ditsy young women are celebrities.
6) Correction: and there's a youngish black guy who is one too!
7) There's a youngish black guy after our young blond women.
8) Hey, lookie here! A big black column! (Paging Mr. Freud.)
9) Now that column is rising into the frame! Is this a McCain ad 2008 or a Dole ad 2008?
10) Gas prices are soaring because we aren't drilling offshore.
11) Perhaps Obama is so popular with foreigners as they're offshore too.
12) Aw, that Obama probably won't drill for oil offshore because we won't get any of it in the 8 years he could be president. How selfish is that?
13) The only way to reduce our foreign oil dependency is to drill offshore. (We couldn't, after all, suggest there's alternative energy.)
14) Here's pre-9/11 thinking for you: New Taxes is pronounced Osama Bin Laden in Republican.
15) You know how to avoid raising taxes no matter the deficit? Fund the war that never should have happened completely off-budget. That's financial genius.
16) I'm John McCain and I'll approve of anything.
17) Or, perhaps John McCain is really Noah Cross: "See, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of... anything! "
18) No matter, for as the old-timers would say, "That's mighty white of you, John McCain."

When Orange Is Blue

So you probably thought this would be another entry about the Mets, but instead let's talk about someone else sure to lose this fall, John McCain. For an AP article claims:

Enthusiasm for McCain, especially among conservatives, is a question mark. George H.W. Bush won 241,000 votes in the 1988 primary in Orange County, long considered the state's Republican heartland. McCain, in the February primary, got 142,000 votes there.

The old Elephant Party might be in trouble if it can't get Orange County excited--after all, it's tailor made for the current Republican way, claiming ketchup is a vegetable and all, at least for children who need food programs to make it through the school day.

On the other hand the article then goes on to say you can win in CA if you're a moderate Republican, and then, of course, points to the Governator, who had enough sense to moderate his approach some after trying to ram his way down voters throats and losing at the initiative box. (Coming soon, a ballot in CA that has voters vote on every law that Sacramento could pass on its own, with two versions of each initiative almost exactly written except for one qualifier hidden amidst the legalese.)

But back to McSame. Ultimately he's too Republican for California, but not Republican enough for California Republicans.

Here's my favorite line of the article:

McCain has a single paid staffer in California.

Why oh why can't the rest of the country be more like us?