In a confusing turn of events, the 72 year old Senator is poised to reject his very own economic plans, and introduce a new one, according to Reuters. The campaign has not only been in a complete tailspin, but insiders and supporters have been denouncing Senator McCain’s economic plans, and his abusive, hate filled rants against Senator Barack Obama.
It is no surprise that after repeated calls for Senator McCain to turn away from his hate mongering that the campaign has been looking for other, less controversial measures to lie to the electorate. According to the report, the campaign has 30 some odd different economic plans they are currently mulling over, and deciding between them will take Rovian analysis as to which one will appeal to the demographics they wish to capture.
Lowest common denominator considerations can be difficult, especially when people are more concerned with their wallets and the nation’s future more so than pathetic wedge issues. I expect the campaign to announce an economic plan that conservatives will enjoy more than the wholesale wackiness of paying full face value of massively devalued mortgages to the very institutions that helped create this financial crisis.So far, the McCain campaign has offered plans that even the very few economists that support him have called out as being idiotic.
As it stands now, John McCain’s campaign is facing not only a large deficit in the polls, but also a political landscape that is poised to take a direction that John McCain has yet to appeal to. Considering the wholesale flip-flop that McCain will have to make in order to change his economic message, I expect some excitment in his base, but confusion in the independent voter’s minds. With the third and final debate just around the corner, McCain would be fool hardy to introduce the new plan before it, and silly to inject such a flip-flop into the debate’s narrative. Doing so would create a perfect opportunity for Senator Obama, and his well oiled political machinery to chew up and spit out John McCain for his confused vision of America’s future.
The Republican dominated Alaska State Legislature has found that Governor Sarah Palin has abused her powers as governor. What does this mean for the ‘Straight (Hate) Talk Express’? If she is not off the ticket by tomorrow morning, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party will be doing a disservice to the electorate, and her potential position as Vice President.
They will, no doubt, attempt to further rebuke the investigation by cries of partisanship, but the partisanship was toward the Republican side. A full 56 percent of the Alaska Legislature is Republican, so any attempts to call the findings into question is fool hardy and dishonest. There is a coalition between the Senate Democrats and some Senate Republicans, but it only because of Governor Palin’s despicable abuses.
She is now another corrupt Alaska politician, just like Ted Stevens (whose PAC she was the Director of), and should be turned away from ever holding and disgracing an office of public trust ever again. Wake up America, she is not a hockey mom, but a beast of deception and hatred. Blind, immoral abuse of power is not the stage of regular Joe six pack, but of those who wish for only their own ambition to be fulfilled.
Son of William F(you) Buckley, and famed conservative writer in his on right, has announced his support for the Democratic candidate for President, Barack ‘Hussyourdaddy’ Obama. In the article, Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama, Buckley lambastes McCain on several points:
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?
I have to agree with him on all points. I used to have a begrudging respect for John McCain, back in the days when he’d actually state what he actually believed. He can’t be accused of that anymore, he hasn’t stated a true opinion in over 7 years. It’s too bad. Here in New Hampshire, during the 2000 presidential primary, there had been quite a bit of McCainmania. He seemed passionate, honest, and was by far the best the Republicans had in their field of candidates, but that was before he found out why conservatives wouldn’t elect him. What he decided to do was change every position that he ever held, and then change them again and again. In the end, John McCain has become something of a joke. A sad, angry, old joke that seems to desire violence against his opponent.
William Milliken, the former governor of Michigan, made comments in today’s Grand Rapids Press about the tenor of John McCain’s campaign. “He is not the McCain I endorsed,” Milliken stated. He went on to scold the campaign for attacks that are far out of line in a civilized political discourse.
“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.”
I’m glad there’s one Republican that understands the dangerous waters that McCain is guiding his supporters into. When crowds at a political rally yell for the death and torture of the other candidate, you’re no longer living in the United States that is the beacon of freedom for the world, but rather a scandalous nation that is willing to allow death threats into the debate of issues.
I am, and have been, appalled at the hate baiting and implicit defining of Senator Obama as a foreign terrorist. It’s time that this conversation left the blogs, and starts on the TV screens. It’s time that it leaves our held tongues, and starts thundering in the atmosphere. No longer can we allow the McCain campaign to incite hatred and violence. No longer can we allow their rallies to double as White Power gatherings. It has got to stop, and to do so, we must start this conversation at a more visible level.
This is sure to be a controversial post, and I fully understand why. I don’t wish to wander into the deep, dark waters of intrigue and hatred, nor do I want to think of anyone on the national stage as having such naked and blind ambition as to take such a harmful tact. However, the events of the past weeks have come to pass, and they have not been imagined–they are as real as the throaty calls for death from McCain’s and Palin’s audiences. This is an unfortunate post to have to write, and I loathe the mere thought of my question being answered in an honest manner.
The day after the Vice Presidential debate, a new direction was given to the battered and languishing campaign of John McCain. They were awash in bad news on their most vulnerable issues, and this necessitated a move to refocus the electorates attention. Instead of confronting the issues at hand, or finding another legitimate issue with which to fight, they decided to use an old, haggard issue that had been beaten in to its grave months upon months ago. The Bill Ayers connection.
Hillary Clinton had used it, or tried to, anyway. It hadn’t worked. What was found out by hundreds and hundreds of reporters and opposition researchers was that no actual connection existed. Bill Ayers had been part of an educational challenge board supported by a grant by the Annenberg Foundation, a board on which Barack Obama sat. The connections ended there. There were no secret meetings, no ties to each other beside an interest in giving awards to children who performed at high levels in academic pursuits. Not exactly a smoking gun.
This couldn’t dissuade the conspiracy theorists and the rabid extremists. They knew there had to be more to it, something sinister and anti-American. After all, his middle name is Hussein. Such people are not rational. They don’t use Occam’s razor, or pose questions that may dismantle their theories, they only create more and more intricate reasons why something must be true. This has been going on for almost a year, and the cult of John McCain was ready to be exploited with the theory.
It was Sarah Palin who was first ordered to make the tactic official. She stood silently by as introductory speakers emphasized Senator Obama’s middle name, a reference meant to convey only one image—Arab terrorists. Make no mistake, there is no other reason to do it, and if you think the speakers did it on their own, well, you’ve never been involved in a federal campaign at any level worthy of mention. The crowds were prepped to think of only one thing while Sarah Palin spewed her hateful diatribes over the massive speaker systems, and it wasn’t hope, and it wasn’t change–it was a vehement wrath.
It’s not the mere connection they are trying to push between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, it’s the words they are using, and the psychology they are misusing. Bill Ayers is referred to as a domestic terrorist, and Obama as ‘Barack Hussein Obama’, these aren’t disconnected ideas, not in the minds of Americans still fearful and mourning seven years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. These words and ideas are intimately connected, Hussein, as in Saddam, and terrorist, as in the evil men who guided those massive planes to crash into the soul of every American that fateful morning.
The McCain campaign isn’t just wondering whether Barack Obama has larger connections to Bill Ayers, they are provoking people into something else. They are provoking Americans to be afraid of a man who hangs out with terrorists named Hussein, and to be scared for their lives because of this man. They are provoking audience members at their rallies to shout “Kill him!” and “Traitor!” They are provoking something greater than merely curiosity. They are provoking a violent reaction to a manufactured fear.
What is it that the McCain campaign wants those that feel this imminent terror to do? The conservative pundits would have you believe that they are only looking into to who Barack Obama really is, but some of us know this isn’t true. Some of us are scared they want something else to occur. Something outside the bounds of decency and patriotism, something outside any civilized democracy’s limits.
By inciting fear, a fear of a terrorist named Hussein taking control of their lives, the McCain campaign may very well be inciting action on that fear. What are those that believe McCain and Palin supposed to do? They cannot stand around and wait for the terrorist named Hussein to win the White House, they must act…
The question is whether that action is only a vote on November 4, or whether the act they want to occur should happen before that time. I never would desire to question the intentions of a man or an entire campaign in this manner, but the events of the past week have left us no choice but to wonder as to the true intentions of John McCain.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Declaration of Independence
I hereby dissolve any political bands that I may have with the people in the following video. I don’t want to be in the same country as them. I don’t want to think that they live on my block, or go to the same supermarket as me. These people are mindless zombies, devoid of reason, and angry for only the sake of another’s will.
John McCain and Sarah Palin have incited this type of mindset, this proto-violent wrath toward a fictitious Manchurian Candidate. They make claims that excite the fear within their constituents, a fear more base than elicited by those that speak of trilateral commissions, and UN world governments. Both parties, and also independents, have portions of their base that are vulnerable to such fear mongering. But this fear mongering isn’t a distant ill that one can stew over, this fear that they are promoting is immediate–only 20 some odd days away.
They know what they are doing, there is no ignorance in their accusations. They know that Republicans, as well as Democrats served on that educational board with Barack Obama and William Ayers. They know that William Ayers turned himself into police, and all of the charges against him had been dropped. They know that Wallis Annenberg, as well as the Annenberg Foundation (founded by Walter Annenberg, an Ambassador from the Nixon Administration, and life-long Republican), were involved with that board and educational challenge.They also know that they could be inciting violence–and they seem not to care.
Without further ado, the video of the hatred being instigated by McCain and Palin’s campaign:
68% Sen. Obama (55% before debate)
48% Sen. McCain (41% before debate)
Who understands voters needs and problems?
80% Sen. Obama (59% before debate)
44% Sen. McCain (33% before debate)
Who would bring real change?
63% Sen. Obama (51% before debate)
38% Sen. McCain (23% before debate)
Now committed to a candidate?
72% No
15% Sen. Obama
12% Sen. McCain
I think the numbers indicate something that the question “who won the debate” has trouble answering–who won the debate. People want to be ‘fair’ for some reason, but when asked more in depth questions, you see the disparity between the ‘who won’ question, and all the actual indicators of who actually came across better.
My analysis?
(please excuse my following use of very academic language)
Did I hear that right? Is Senator McCain out of his mind?
Two rounds of lay-offs this year at eBay, trying to clean up the bloated model that Meg Whitman built up, and that’s who John McCain wants as Treasury Secretary? What’s the logic there? Maybe it’s because she’s rich, and rich people must be good with money. Well, that’s not always true. It is true with Warren Buffett, as he has made his money with understanding the markets and the intricacies involved with moving money and commodities, but it isn’t true with a lot of CEO types.
A CEO isn’t always like a Warren Buffett, actually, they rarely are. In today’s day and age, CEO’s have incentives to make risky moves and move share price rather than long term fiscal policies that make sense. Meg Whitman did make eBay into a phenomenon, and much of that credit should be directly given to her. However, there are serious issues with eBay’s long term viability, and those issues are cropping up now.
I would like to know what experience or expertise Meg Whitman has in monetary policy, and economics (beyond the boardroom, which can be very different) that qualifies her to be considered for the office.
the plaid lemur 