McCain Using Same Robocall Firm That Helped Smear Him In 2000

Story is here.

Note: This was a reply to the following ridiculous assertion:

"Tim Russert would have gone insane this election season with so many lies going around. I imagine him with anybody of the McCain campaign with the videos and the quotes to prove their contradictions in his very elegant and respectful way to cross examine. I believe that this election would have been a landslide by today if we would have somebody like him pressuring for interviews and confronting the politicians. I still miss him on sunday mornings!!!"

My reply:

Are you serious?

Russert would have kept every freaking GOP talking point roiling right up to election day. As Arianna said, he was a captive of conventional wisdom, a lazy thinker and largely AWOL in the runup to the Iraq War.

Please, he was weaker than a Shirley Temple.

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Note: Though shalt not criticize St. Timmeh.

Why Blogs Trample on Leftist Traditions

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Don't you see an inherent contradiction here?

"Leftist traditions"? As progressives, we seek to break tradition to keep the human race moving forward, not get bogged down in the quicksand of easy sentiment and misguided atavistic echoes. So that term I just put in quotes strikes me as an oxymoron.

"They make it more difficult for new narratives to take hold."

And that is a bad thing because, well, why exactly? Communism has a nice little narrative. The cant of the neocons leading up to the Iraq War was an interesting tale. The Columbus story about sailing west to prove the world wasn't flat that was taught to those of us of a certain age as gospel truth, all three of those things are demonstrably delusional. What seeking to poke holes in seemingly neat narratives does is keep people from riding a misguided wave to their possible destruction or at least obtaining a clearer vision of the truth.

That you miss the tv show aspects of history is just inane. This was the same complaint I heard from certain segments of sports fans when Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" came out: TMI, they whined. So now we are going to sink to the level of sports fandom, in which we need heroes to the point of ignoring details of social and other history? There's a word for that and it's myopic.

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The Bailout: Why Are Bush and the Democrats Combining Against Congressional Republicans?

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Wow, James Pinkerton playing class warfare! Who woulda thunk it! What would your man Newt think Jim? And why do you hate Newt?

Of course, this is just bs Republican spin. This plan is a much more measured response than what the Bush Administration wanted. I'm not crazy about it, but doing something is nonetheless reassuring psychologically to the markets both here and abroad.

Moreover, Pinkerton completely glosses over the fact that he collaborated with the GOP to ensure that the current crisis happened by endorsing its wreckless policies.

One can also say (admittedly somewhat unfairly) that the GOP is willing to have a depression in the name of ideology.

However, if the Democrats tell the markets to get stuffed and we have a depression as a result, the Republican leadership, consistent only in its lust for power and not in holding fast to its stated ideals, will accuse the Democrats of being asleep at the switch and thus a treasonous dereliction of duty.

It is also true that if the Democrats ignored the pleas of economists for bailouts there would be ZERO Republicans that would praise them for doing so.

You can't have it both ways, Jim. Please, we aren't that dumb.

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TNR: GOP Convention Will Get Racist

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What the Republicans will do is begin running ads and sending blast faxes about whether or not Obama thinks OJ was guilty, the influence figures such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will have during his administration and they will try to peel Asians, who vote heavily Democratic, off by using statements Maxine Waters has made against Korean-Americans and Obama's sitting there and not criticizing her for it.

They will couple that with increased belligerence on immigration since they have nothing to lose since they are not going to get the Hispanic or black votes. So they will target Asian-Americans instead by playing up the bad feelings between the black and Asian communities in the U.S. and attempt to increase their working class white male voter base.

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Note: This post was intended as a warning. But I guess the moderators don't want the DNC or Obama to see what he might have to expect and prepare for. Dumb you guys. You just helped McCain in the name of a politically correct agenda by the moderator.

The Worst Vice-Presidential Nominee in U.S. History

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I have to disagree.

Spiro Agnew, a governor from Maryland who had been in office only about two years, was probably the worst vp nominee ever. He was still taking thousand dollar bribes after Nixon got elected, such was the chintzy nature of his corruption and he became the first VP ever to resign due to criminality.

After that, you have Dan Quayle, who was tapped because he didn't threaten G.H.W. Bush intellectually. There was no reason to nominate him since Indiana was a conservative state and a KKK bastion that was going to go Republican in November anyway. Until Boy George Bush was nominated for the presidency, Quayle was the stupidest man ever to become a United States executive. Marilyn Quayle would later say of Bush, "he is what they accuse my husband of being."

Outside of trying to get a state trooper removed form his job, there have been no hints of the kind of corruption by Palin that Agnew engaged in and her gubernatorial experience is about the same. She is almost certainly smarter than Quayle, who was little more than a male bimbo (known as a "himbo").

Moreover, compared to Dick Cheney, she and just about anyone else scores low on the evil meter, even if she is a religious nut. Like Quayle, though, there was no reason to nominate her since Alaska is a safe Republican district. So she scores only third in my estimation, among all time worst vp nominees.

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McCain Gets Prickly During Time Interview (Mou Ichido)

Story is here.

This is a reply to the following post:

"McCain is the physical & mental embodiment of the failing & dying Republican Party."

Yeah, a kind of Cherry Orchard (I'm referring to the Chekov story) for latter day America. Let's hope you're right.

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McCain Gets Prickly During Time Interview (La Otra Ves)

Story is here.

Actually, McCain will put in a call to the GOP's best friend, the Reverend Moon, who will rustle up a posse of his brainwashed followers to take up all those empty seats. Don't laugh. This actually could happen given Moon's relationship with the GOP.

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McCain Gets Prickly During Time Interview stumble

Story is here.

These are the same kind of empty eyed responses that Boy George was giving reporters during the 2000 election campaign. McCain is as much of an empty suit as Bush is and arguably even more dangerous. McCain wants us to legacy admit him to the presidency since he can't make his own case or stand on his own two feet.

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Why John McCain May Have More Green Staying Power

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Yeah, right. While McCain will be busy appointing Supreme Court judges that will further erode our civil rights and sever the final threads of government regulation on our runaway corporatiions, we will get greener. Yeah, an environmentally friendly version of Orwell's 1984. That would be just great.

Or not.

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Biden Throws Wrench In McCain's VP Choice

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We already have military people managing the Republican wars, It's called the Joint Chiefs. We also have a Defense Department.

We don't need a general. We need somebody who can wisely manage a deteriorating country. And legacy admit boy Crash McCain ain't it.

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Howard Wolfson Goes To War With MSNBC

Story is here.

Before my state's caucus, I was on the fence about whether to go for Hillary, who I liked a lot at the time, or Barack Obama. I ultimately chose to caucus for Obama because of his JFK-like qualities. Hillary then went Karl Rove on Obama and rightly engendered a furious amount of criticism of herself from liberal-friendly commentators (Olbermann, Maddow, etc) not because they had it in for Hillary per se, but because her behavior was so out of bounds as to be disgusting. I will never vote for her now.

If she had bowed out gracefully, which is what she should have done, then she wouldn't have taken so many verbal brickbats from liberals in the blogosphere and the media.

Wolfson thus just can't acknowledge reality and is little different from a Lee Atwater or a Roger Ailes (the Fox head, not the liberall blogger). He is just engaging in a shoot the messenger type game (how very Republican of him) and shouldn't be taken seriously.

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The Real Meaning and Real Talk of a Real Life '08 Bonnie and Clyde

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Dude, you know that Bonnie and Clyde were cold blooded killers, right? You also know that they robbed banks of hard working people's money during a time when there was no FDIC to insure their deposits, right? We don't need this asinine comparison.

It also puzzles me that the best analogy for Barack and Michelle that you could come up with were a couple of parasitic sociopaths. Surely, you could have done better than that. But you were too lazy to do so. And you may have given the GOP yet more imagery it can use against our party in this election cycle.

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This guy is just a shitbrain, pure and simple. I mean, this may be the most inappropiate analogy of the entire campaign season. What a dick.

China's Party, America's Win

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Well, all these words are very nice, but do you have any hard evidence that our showing in the olympics actually improved our image abroad? Or is this just another in what will no doubt be a long line of self-congratulatory exercises in wishful thinking by writers who, like a lot of us, are mortified at what Bush has done to not just our image overseas, but to our viablity as a nation?

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Note: What a coward. One merely asks for her to cite some actual documentation and that challenge proves to be such a n affront to her that she expunges my post. Just pathetic.

Every Country Gets the Media it Wants

The story is here.

The media is not giving the public what it wants in political discourse. It is instead echoing memes devised by political spokesmen. The media is not a profile in courage. It is, though, a profile in stenography, geared to recapitulating the cant of elites it favors (and since all the heads of the major networks are Republicans, it tends to skew in that party's direction).

The public doesn't consciously want a big heaping helping of fear and racism. Yet, that is what we have had thrown at us Jackson Pollack stylee during this election cycle. The idea by campaign handlers is that utilizing a Bernaysian propaganda mishmash oriented toward playing to atavistic impulses within people affords their side an advantage and the media has been all too glad to be the amplifier for that.

Furthermore, like it or not, most people still get their political information from the big four networks. Bloggers are largely reactive entities and their readership is relatively tiny. The big media creates context and the blogosphere attempts to reshape it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Most folks use their computers to play games, exchange emails and view or listen to entertainment anyway. So when it comes to the greater U.S. public, the participation in politically oriented discussion on the web is extremely limited

As for the public getting the media it wants, I wonder what the folks in North Korea think about that. This is, at best, a deluded notion to begin with.

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John Edwards Affair With Rielle Hunter: Will Admit Infidelity On ABC Tonight

Story is here.

This is a reply to a Republican poster, Tator, who said:

"Looks like another Democrat has made his wife into a "Hollaback Girl" such a class act."

I wrote:

And what of Bob Livingston? David Vitter? Larry Craig? Ken Calvert (arrested while getting a hummer from a street prostitute), and Newt Gingrich? Heck, Dwight Eisenhower?

Or rumored secret gays David Dreier and John Kasich? For that matter, Charlie Crist, who is about to engage in a sham marriage if that rumor is correct?

G.H.W. Bush was also rumored to be having an affair with White House employee Jennifer Fitzgerald. When asked about it, Bush only replied, "I don't answer sleaze questions." Note that the response is not a denial.

The Enquirer has also claimed in the past that G.W. Bush was having an affair with Condi Rice and that Laura had spent nights at a hotel away from the White House in anger over that affair as well as his falling off the wagon? To be fair, if you are hots on to get Edwards, then you need to bring heavier scrutiny to the Bush-Rice affair, no?

Or are Republicans willing to sell virtue down the river yet again in the name of power? If you push the virtue button dude, you have to be consistent about it.

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Schwarzenegger Sinks to New Low

Story is here.

Republicans and deficits go together like wet and water. The first deficits in California in my lifetime (and I was born in the 1950's) were under Pete Wilson, who jacked up state university tuition fees as much as he could, essentially putting the burden for his fiscal mismanagement of the state budge on the backs of college students.

The "caveman caucus," that is, Republican Assembly and Senate members from Orange County, see Schwarzenegger as a liberal and he has zero fiscal credibility with them.

For the above reason alone, voters in California need to realize Arnold is little more than a glorified placeholder and should be tossed out.

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Regrets: I Have a Few

Story is here.

Again, half the public is only in double figures in IQ and there is such a great aversion or apathy to politics that too many people either get only a drive by sketch of what is actually going on during campaigns or they don't even bother to vote because they don't feel connected to the political process enough. Or they don't just like to think.

Anyone should be able to see a lot of these political ads for what tey are, childish propaganda that attempts to divert them from contemplating the real issues facing this country. But even when the media is refusing to do that then the kind of people I described in my first paragraph here fall for it and screw themselves or they get too confused and say the heck with it and essentially forfeit their right to vote.


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