I never watched The West Wing, to which I gather this is a reference. But this made me go all waterworky. Maybe it's just hormones.


(h/t)

Labels: hope

Today's honoree: The editors of Esquire Magazine, for what is absolutely the most spot-on Barack Obama endorsement you will read this election season. It's not a ringing endorsement by any stretch, as it has many of the same concerns about Obama's innate caution that I have. But there's no arguing with the case made.

Money quote:

There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.

Labels: Barack Obama

Yelling fire in a movie theater, stirring up the crowd with a frenzied, fundamentalist, fervor meant to incite fear, in the best case, and violence in the worst. This sort of snake oil has been for sale from this traveling circus for years, building strength like a hurricane spun out of control with the inevitable little tornadoes popping up here and there.
Now begins the frantic backpedaling by a befuddled McCain and, Ive got to say, that what is glaringly clear now is that McCain's supporters, who represent a huge part of America, are either tremendously uneducated, or just terrified and propagandized to the point where the train has left the tracks and not even granddaddyMcInsane, with his lurching shoulders and his mouse in the headlights stare, can redirect it.

Trying to reposition yourself, grandpa? Well, its too fucking late.
The villagers have their torches and pitchforks and they are riding the Hate Talk Express straight to hell. I hope that O'Reilly, Hannity, Scarborough, and all the other media pundits that have thrown fuel on this fire for years are happy too. As much as they try to disengage with this thing, and enjoy the money that its earned them, they are going down in history as a major linchpin of this thing, no matter what they say or do. As I said, its too fucking late!

I learned something this week, and it came from the lips of an avid Fox News watcher who engaged me in a gun store, of all places, as I purchased a .22 rifle. First of all, Obama has a big secret about Nigeria and some election there that he manipulated by helping the campaign of a family member by giving advice...hmmm...and this is coming outsooooooon ....like last week in some nutcase book....? I also learned that liberals like me are not allowed to buy guns; that its unusual for any bleeding heart liberal to own a gun! That Obama is anti-gun in general....and that ITS NOT OVER until they get all the Obama/Osama secrets out there!
I learned all of this in the exact words and phrases of Hannity, and O'Reilly coming from the lips of this older man with a beer gut.

My answer to this guy was that I'm a liberal and I'm a patriot. I love the country and the constitution...and that the neocons have done more to hurt the constitution than the likes of me ever could. The guy said that he was unaware that a liberal could be like this; supposedly we were all anti-gun! I told him to stop watching so muchHannity and O'Reilly. I left out Limbaugh, but I imagine that's on his dial as well. Do people want to appear ignorant?

Well, the tip off of membership in that lazy Fox News club is the arrogance and lack of knowledge of the other side. Its a tone of voice and a phrasing that comes directly from the talking points ( messages that the speaker often doesn't fully realize they are delivering,)....and the seeming inability to interact properly in public without an undercurrent of seething anger. Like the priesthood and other authoritarian organizations, this movement seems to attract a certain outcast or disgruntled fringe, and somehow the presentation of that picks upalot of lazy supporters who would prefer to be just told what to think rather than to go and figure it out for themselves.

Its going to be hard to shake hands and make up at the end of this thing. The damage done is not something that can be blithely dismissed because its ongoing and will continue for years to come. So, as thewingnuts, led by grandpa McInsane himself, try to backpedal the level on this thing, I think it would behoove us all to keep strongly in mind what they've done. The next step in this is going to be to say something to the effect of "that was in the past and now we have to move forward," which is how they get us to forget so they can start planning for four and eight years from now. See, we're bad if we cling to old resentments, but its those old resentments that maybe might protect us from making the same fucking mistakes over and over again. When do we get smart about this? Or are we always looking for the good daddy underneath the seething contempt? Personally, I give up.

h/t Skippy!

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Fox News, John McCain, right-wing hatemongers, wingnuttia

Wachovia is sending its executives on a junket too:

As ailing Wachovia Corp. waits to see whether it will be acquired by Wells Fargo & Co. or Citigroup Inc. -- possibly with taxpayers paying the tab for hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans -- some of the company's top brokers are preparing to depart Saturday for an all-expenses-paid cruise of the Greek Isles.

The weeklong trip for up to 75 employees of brokerage A.G. Edwards, which Wachovia acquired last year for nearly $7 billion, will also include spouses and significant others, said Teresa Dougherty, a Wachovia spokeswoman.

"This is one way that we recognize our top financial advisors," she said.

Full disclosure: My department at my new employer is attending a company conference next month in Europe. My employer, however, is doing quite well, thank you very much, and is not seeking government bailouts.

Labels: greed

Have you ever noticed that when you see images of McCain/Palin rallies on television, you never see crowd shots? All you ever see is the people standing behind the nominees of the Party of Racial and Ethnic Hatred. And they are always white -- every last one of them. The one time I saw a black person, he turned out to be a Secret Service agent. I wonder sometimes what this guy thinks about the rhetoric coming out of the people he's assigned to protect.

But still, you never see crowd shots. I wonder why this is. Perhaps it's because the Senile Old Man/Racist Theocratic Lunatic ticket isn't drawing big crowds. After all, the lunatics may be vocal, but if there were all that many of them, lynchings would still be commonplace.

Every time I see images from an Obama rally, I marvel anew at Barack Obama's courage in taking on this challenge. He's a tall man, but he looks so small amidst these seas of tens of thousands of people -- so small, and so utterly alone. You cannot be a black man running for president in this country, faced with the ugly, infected, life-threatening, green pus-filled sore that is the American right wing, without having some serious nads.

I fear for him every day. Because the woman with the beehive and the maniacal glean in her eyes has succeeded in whipping her mindless, grinning followers into a murderous, racist frenzy. And the man who's supposed to be at the top of the ticket waited far too long to utter some feeble, and I believe ultimately pointless words in Obama's favor -- words it must have killed him to have to say. Because painting Barack Obama as a secret terrorist is the only card left in the wingnut deck.

I'm not along in my concern for what happens in this country after November 4 -- regardless of who wins.

What Kathy G said.

DCap remembers Kristallnacht.

Paul Campos dishes up some lip-smackin' tasty snark.

Max Blumenthal and Dave Neiwert on why Sarah Palin talking about shady traitorous associates is projection at its best.

What "Arab" and "Muslim" are code words for: Archcrone on the lengths some people will go to in order to keep Barack Obama from becoming president.

The Fumigator-in-Chief is more charitable towards John McCain than I am.

Bruce Wilson has seven questions the media has not asked Sarah Palin. The Constitution wants to know the answers.

Heh. A McCain meetup held in a Starbucks. Insert your own elitist joke here.

And as Jezebel points out, if the racist and hatemongers get their way, Donna Brazile is on record: She is NOT returning to the back of the bus. Can I get an Amen?

Labels: bloggers, wingnuttia

You know, I've had a cold all week. I'm two weeks into a new job that's only tangentially like my old job, I have a mountainous learning curve, and I've been firing on only two cylinders all week. Add a drive every morning on New Jersey's lovely traffic-choked highways, and I'm about ready for a weekend. Tonight I got my IRA statement AND my SRA account statement from my last job, and as I wrote earlier, I'll be working until they put my dead corpse into an oven and turn it into ashes.

When the one thing that makes you grin is when people win the double-or-nothing video bonus question on Cash Cab, you know things are at a sorry pass indeed.

I shouldn't complain. I do have a job, which is something akin to a miracle these days. I work with nice, helpful people, I have a supervisor who doesn't seem to automatically assume I'm an idiot or a chronic fuckup, and I'm sure once I get the hang of things I'll be fine. It's just harder being new when you get older. So all things considered, my life is relatively good at the moment. So I really shouldn't get upset when I hear from Brad Friedman that in an upstate New York county, absentee ballots are featuring an option to vote for "Barack Osama", I just want to put my head in the oven.

You think I'm joking?

Here you go:



And here's the source.

I'm starting to feel like Margaret Tyzack as Claudius' mother Antonia in I, Claudius, when she explains her decision to kill herself by saying, "I was born into a world of people and now I live in a pack of mad dogs." No, I'm not suicidal, but living in the same country with lunatics like McCain/Palin supporters makes me think that before it's all over, the living will envy the dead. I mean, look at the kind of morons with whom we have to share this country:

Labels: bigotry, despair, idiocy, racism, Religious Intolerance, wingnuttia

Last weekend I received my benefits enrollment package from my new employer. Part of this package was forms to enroll in the company's actually quite good retirement plan. I'm eligible for the "catch-up" contribution that you can do when you are over 50, but I had to even think twice about contributing to the plan at all. In the end I bit the bullet and decided to kick in a sizable percentage, but put almost all of it into a fixed rate fund earning just over three percent a year.

People who are close to retirement age, or already in retirement, who are invested in stocks at all, are pretty much screwed at this point. If you're in your twenties or thirties, you have plenty of time to make it up, depending on how long a global economic collapse takes to recover. I'm refusing to even look at my statements, but after having been well along the way to putting away not a lavish, but a solid chunk of money for retirement, I'd say that about half of it is gone. With sixteen years to go. And that's with a relatively balanced investment strategy.

And I'm one of the LUCKY ones, at least so far. I at least have a job (so far) and so does Mr. Brilliant. But it seems like the entire world economy is collapsing, and here we are with a guy in the White House who can't wait to drive away from yet another of the colossal screwups that have characterized his entire sorry-ass life, a Republican ticket consisting of a senile old man in an Ambien sleepwalk, and an apocalyptic white supremacist lunatic; and the electoral Jackie Robinson.

That's not to diminish Barack Obama one bit. The man is ferociously smart, and if anything can be done to try to put this Humpty Dumpty of a nation back together again he can. What worries me is whether he, if he manages to prevail over Sarah Palin's whipping white racists into a frenzy and over Republican attempts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, is going to have the trust of enough of the population and the kind of bold vision it's going to require to even start cleaning up the mess that George W. Bush and his "haves and have-mores" cronies are going to leave him.

For decades, politicians have been telliing us that if you play by the rules you can thrive in this country. Republicans are resorting to their customary "Blame the Negroes" (sic) strategy in deciding that it's minorities having the temerity to think that they should be able to have a piece of the homeownership pie for the global economic collapse. This kind of blamemongering that elevates a minority population into a myth of massive economic power used to be reserved for the Jews. But for Republicans, appeals to racism have always been powerful weapons for them, why should they stop now?

Meanwhile, all over the country, there are American workers who DID take the initiative and make the sacrifice of current spending in order to put money away for retirement. And we are all getting screwed while Henry Paulson shovels more of our money into the pockets of AIG -- while that company plans yet another luxury junket for independent agents as a bribe for selling AIG products.

I've long said that by the time I reach retirement age, they'll be lining baby boomers up against the wall and shooting us -- just because there are so many of us. I used to think this would be a bad thing. Now I'm not so sure. A quick exit might be the best thing by that point.

Labels: economic death watch

Ironically, John McCain perhaps uttered the truest words in his entire campaign in Pennsylvania yesterday when he referred to his fellow Americans as "my fellow prisoners." It was a slip of the tongue that was so astonishing that even his running mate Sarah Palin looked around to see if anyone was laughing.

It's not worth lambasting McCain over or making dumb jokes about. It was obviously a Freudian slip betraying that McCain's mind never completely left Vietnam. And, to play Devil's Advocate for a minute, who among us can blame Senator McCain for occasionally recalling a five and a half year-long detention at the "Hanoi Hilton" that was so unimaginably torturous and brutal that McCain received his medal from President Richard M. Nixon while on crutches?

Yet McCain, whom nobody would doubt is an American hero to one degree or another, is not some anonymous codger drinking beers at a VFW and trading war stories with his fellow Vietnam veterans or a harmless kook in a VA hospital diving under his bed and screaming "Incooooming!" This man who referred to we Americans as his "fellow prisoners" is in the United States Senate and is giving a younger, more historically-dynamic rival a run for his money in his quest for the presidency of the United States.

As horrified bystanders playing witness to a barely-reformed mainstream media (one that's hardly less deferential to McCain and his neverending fountain of gaffes than they were of George W. Bush), we are, indeed, prisoners on a democracy that's been taken for a Thelma and Louise joyride over a cliff with McCain now at the wheel.

The same rabid, right wing factions that supported McCain's mentor Goldwater in his own Icarus-like quest for the presidency 44 years ago are also supporting McCain today. Like roaches in a Mad Max-like post apocalyptic environment, these same Christopaths, right wing industrialists like the grandfather of the incumbent "president" who had no problem with making Washington the Berlin of North America and ultra-conservative politicians who hoarsely cried "Wolf" whether or not there were Communists to be found have not gone anywhere. They have, instead, consolidated their power and not in the comforting shadows of ignominy and obscurity.

Nothing much has changed. Just the names, faces but never, ever the ideology.

Back in Goldwater's day, he famously doomed his campaign and served a fat batting practice fastball down Broadway for Lyndon Johnson when he called for nuclear weapons to be used in North Vietnam. That was a big, hairy deal and perhaps more than any other single misstep was responsible for Goldwater losing 44 of 50 states.

Fast forward better than four decades: McCain jokes about bombing Iran, a nation that the December 2007 NIE written annually by all 16 of our known intelligence agencies claimed had suspended their nuclear weapons program shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Hardly anyone outside the liberal blogosphere blinked (kudos to Sen. Obama for mentioning it during the second presidential debate in Tennessee).

Overton's window slides ever more imperceptibly from the far right to the center.

Even if Senator McCain loses the election (as he surely will), he will lose with honor and with no shame in having given a superior opponent a better fight in the polls than anyone could've expected despite representing a party that, by all rights, should be stuffed in its entirety into a Saturn Five rocket and fired off to the farthest asteroid after what it's put us through these past nearly eight years.

McCain will return to the Senate without the stigma of being crushed by a Democrat in one of the most humiliating defeats in American political history. Because the people who tried to get their latest clueless vessel installed in the White House are not on the fringes of American society.

They are very much in power in their own right, very much in the mainstream, making the completely insane, the most heartlessly vicious sound utterly plausible and a reasonable alternative to liberal policies that are obviously America's last hope.

We are indeed all McCain's "fellow prisoners". We have been carjacked and led to believe that suspension of constitutional rights equals freedom, that torture of the legally-innocent equals safety, that an unregulated free market that's completely out of control equals prosperity.

And no New Deal that Obama may or may not pull out of his hat will make them go away any more than FDR's did.

I guess the mainstream media are jerking off to televised images of Sarah Palin too. How else do you explain the obsession with Barack Obama's passing acquaintance with someone who was a radical 40 years ago, while Sarah Palin's far more recent and far closer involvement with people who are avowedly anti-American goes ignored?

Robert Kennedy Jr. writes about Sarah 'n' Todd's affinity with the Alaska Independence Party:

But if McCarthy-era guilt-by-association is once again a valid political consideration, Palin, it would seem, has more to lose than Obama. Palin, it could be argued, following her own logic, thinks so little of America's perfection that she continues to "pal around" with a man--her husband, actually--who only recently terminated his seven-year membership in the Alaskan Independence Party. Putting plunder above patriotism, the members of this treasonous cabal aim to break our country into pieces and walk away with Alaska's rich federal oil fields and one-fifth of America's land base--an area three-fourths the size of the Civil War Confederacy.

AIP's charter commits the party "to the ultimate independence of Alaska," from the United States which it refers to as "the colonial bureaucracy in Washington." It proclaims Alaska's 1959 induction as a state "as illegal and in violation of the United Nations charter and international law."

AIP's creation was inspired by the rabidly violent anti-Americanism of its founding father Joe Vogler, "I'm an Alaskan, not an American," reads a favorite Vogler quote on AIP's current website, "I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." According to Vogler AIP's central purpose was to drive Alaska's secession from the United States. Alaska, says current Chairwoman Lynette Clark, "should be an independent nation."

Vogler was murdered in 1993 during an illegal sale of plastic explosives that went bad. The prior year, he had renounced his allegiance to the United States explaining that, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government." He cursed the stars and stripes, promising, "I won't be buried under their damned flag...when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home." Palin has never denounced Vogler or his detestable anti-Americanism.

Palin's husband Todd remained an AIP party member from 1995 to 2002. Sarah can be described in McCarthy-era palaver as a "fellow traveler." While retaining her Republican registration, she attended the AIP's 1994 convention where the party called for a draft constitution to secede from the United States and create an independent nation of Alaska. The McCain Campaign has reluctantly acknowledged that she also attended AIP's 2000 Convention. She apparently found the experience so inspiring that she agreed to give a keynote address at the AIP's 2006 convention and she recorded a video greeting for this year's 2008 convention. In other words, this is not something that happened when she was eight!

So when Palin accuses Barack of "not seeing the same America as you and me," maybe she is referring to an America without Alaska. In any case, isn't it time the media start giving equal time to Palin's buddy list of anti-American bombers and other radical associates?

My guess it's because William Ayers allows the Republicans to continue to fight the 1960's wars, both cultural and military, all over again, in perpetuity. What's interesting is that William Ayers doesn't feel the need to fight them over and over and over again; only the Nixonian/McCain side does.

Labels: domestic terrorism, Sarah Palin, wingnuttia

And these people are allowed to vote?

McCain/Palin: Because American Idiots Need Representation Too.

Labels: idiocy, wingnuttia

Nicholas Kristof:

The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.

Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.

The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.

There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims.

The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.

The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.

It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.

Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.

“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.

There is not a single person among those of us who believe that women do not cease to be human the minute they become pregnant who favors forced abortion. But how does denying contraception to millions of women do anything to end a practice of forced abortion that isn't even funded by the organization being denied funding?

The so-called "pro-life" movement extends far beyond banning abortions. If they get what they want in regard to abortion, their next target is contraception. Because as far as these lunatics are concerned, if you are a woman who has sex, or even if you are raped, you deserve to be punished, as Eve was, by a pregnancy you don't want. Forget for a moment the idiocy of using an oft-translated allegorical story as the basis of public policy. With every sledgehammer that Republicans use in an attempt to placate the flat earthers who control their party, they show ever further how pervasive their fear and loathing of female sexuality is. And no number of right-wing pundits masturbating to television images of Sarah Palin changes that fact.

Labels: contraception, feminism, wingnuttia

I kind of understand why the original bailout of AIG may have been necessary to prevent a global economic collapse (though whether it actually prevented anything remains to be seen. But I simply do not understand why AIG is being rewarded with another $37 billion of taxpayer money because it has "dwindling cash reserves"...

The Federal Reserve Board said Wednesday that it would provide up to $37.8 billion to the embattled insurer the American International Group to help it deal with a rapidly dwindling supply of cash.

The additional assistance is on top of $85 billion in a bridge loan that the Federal Reserve extended to A.I.G. in September, but it will take a different form. A spokesman for A.I.G., Nicholas Ashooh, said the new assistance was intended to keep the company from having to draw down the Fed loan so quickly.

...when it has enough money to throw a big party for its top salespeople:

Here's the tab: $139,375.30 for rooms. $147, 301.71 for "banquets." $1,488 for the Vogue Salon, which features manicures, pedicures and hairstyling. $6,939.09 on golf. $2,949 for tips. $5,016.32 at the Stonehill Tavern. $3,064.71 for in-room dining and the lobby lounge. That's part of the $440,000 bill from a recent weekend bash that an American International Group Inc. subsidiary threw for its top performers at the posh St. Regis resort, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Sounds like they had fun.

Their timing was exquisite. The AIG folks and their guests hit the spa just days after the insurance behemoth grabbed an $85 billion bailout package from U.S. taxpayers. They needed it because AIG piled up net losses of $18.5 billion in the past three quarters on write-downs tied to the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market.

Wheeee! Party on!

Some of the attendees lolled in the 3,100-square-foot presidential suite ($1,600 a night) while the company started to draw down thetaxpayers'billions. The company has already used at least $61 billion of the $85 billion loan, and the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it has engineered even more help for the company.

Outgoing CEO Robert Willumstad said at a House committee hearing on Tuesday that he didn't know about the conference and would have "prevented it." At least Willumstad has the decency to turn down his agreed-on $22 million severance package (or that's what's being reported). It will be interesting to see if any under-the-table payments are given. Funny how corporate executive suites are the only place where ignorance is regarded as a legitimate excuse.

Labels: corporatism, greed

I mean, after all...look at the people who belong to a group to which Barack Obama belongs:

Labels: humor

"My fellow prisoners?"


Looks like Johnny McDementia need a bit more of that snake oil he's taking.

Labels: John McCain, moron or senile

Entirely new vistas of wasting time online.

Labels: fun

When was this put up, like fifteen minutes after the debate? Move over, "I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions", there's a new meme in town.

Labels: Barack Obama, memes

An integral part of the extreme right-wing, black helicopter crowd has always been tax resistance -- or at least it was until a Republican took the White House in 2001. Funny how the militia types largely disappeared after that, isn't it? Funny how their objection to taxes only exists when there's a Democrat in the White House, eh?

We already know about Sarah Palin's connection to the Alaska Independence Party:

"I share your party's vision of upholding the Constitution of our great state."

Even more so than the Constitution of the United States, right, Governor?

I hate to find myself agreeing with Thomas Friedman on anything, but I think he's on to something here, something I'm not sure he intended:

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

Of course, if you're dog-whistling to the black helicopter crowd, saying that paying taxes is unpatriotic is no accident -- it's what you actually believe.

Sarah Palin: Militia Mom.

Kind of makes you wonder why someone who regards the government as so evil wants to be such an integral part of it.

More on the AIP and its resemblance to the militia movement here.

Labels: militias, Sarah Palin

Sorry I was AWOL last night, folks. Mr. Brilliant had the incredibly bad timing to come down with a cold late last week, and of course, after sounding off at my new job about how I never get sick, I got socked with it over the weekend. So last night I came home and after a bowl of homemade chicken soup and a soupç of Ben & Jerry's Light Phish Food, it was off to bed for me and light-out log-sawing before Olbermann even came on.

So while the debate is safely ensconced on our quite possibly soon-to-be-disabled DVR for later viewing, you'll have to rely on some of my compatriots for reactions.

The intrepid (and prolific) Michael Stickings liveblogged the whole thing. So did the equally intestinally fortitudinous Blue Girl. Joe Sudbay too.

John Cole wrapped it up and visited his former right-wing friends to find them in a full-blown panic. You have to wonder what Barack Obama's Whitewater nonsense is going to be once he's elected. Because remember -- Republicans only believe in democracy as long as they win. Once they don't win, all bets are off. I just hope he's up to the challenge of cleaning up eight years of Bushista mess while defending himself against bogus charges.

A lot can still happen between now and the election, and I wouldn't underestimate the Republicans' ability to pull out some kind of October Surprise. I'm frankly more worried about a November Surprise, myself -- the kind of November surprise that involves Barack Obama leading by fifteen points going into Election Day, huge lines at polling places in minority neighborhoods, mass thuggery and arrests of black people and college students for parking tickets and Obama T-shirts, a squeaker "victory" for John McCain and his dominatrix sidekick, followed by the deployment of the United States Army to quell the violence in the streets as the Republican Party wrests the presidency away once again.

Labels: 2008 election

Labels: Barack Obama, John McCain

This is pretty much how McCain looked minutes after the first debate. If it was a boxing match, Obama would've been pushed into a neutral corner, "Canvasback" McCain given a ten count followed by CPR followed by Obama being up on murder one charges.

Virtually every poll out there, whether it's the NBC/WSJ, the CNN Opinion Research poll, or the always-suspect Gallup has Obama ahead of McCain by at least 6 percentage points (always factoring in for the usual 2-3% margin of error, of course).

Hm. Think maybe McCain's constant flipflopping, pandering, or his non sequitors is finally catching up to him? Or maybe his pert and perky running mate is proving to be, as we'd predicted, his lipsticked albatross?

Or maybe more of us have been exposed for so long to the possibility that we're about to elect the first African American president that we hardly think about reaching for the rope or our rifle, anymore.

Whatever. I won't bother live-blogging the debate but I guess I'll have to do my grim duty and watch this one since the Red Sox aren't playing and I'm too lazy to pair up my gym socks so I'll be weighing in between tonight and tomorrow morning with my impressions.

In the meantime, who's playing the McCain drinking game? Everytime he says "maverick", confuses Spain with Latin America, thinks we're down to pre-surge levels in Iraq, thinks Ahmadinejad is the sole dictator of Iran, says the election will be in January, that Shi'ite Iran is funding the Sunni al Qaeda and claims that Pakistan borders with Iraq, take a shot of Geritol. Maybe that'll keep you awake long enough to get all the way through the senior abuse to which we'll once again have to play witness.