Funny

These articles from The Onion are very funny. And the second.

Relax

Relax. Any polls that tell you this election is going to be anything other than a blow-out for Obama are fixed and purposefully misleading. If you want to know why and how, check out Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com

Instead, let's all have another laugh on the moosehunter in chief before she slinks her expensively-wardrobed self back to Alaska.... hopefully never to be seen again:

It's Enough

My oldest daughter challenged me the last time we discussed her reactions to this blog: "You spend a lot of time shooting down the McCain campaign, Mom," she said, "But I almost never see you write positive things about Obama."

She is right, of course. Truth told those who have read this blog from the beginning know that I have deeply ambivalent feelings about Obama. And not for any of the reasons given my McSamiacs or false independents, but because of my deeply leftist mistrust of anyone who claims to be avowedly anti-partisan in his approach. I fell out with Bill Clinton when he played conservative animosity toward the poor to his advantage (read: welfare reform), and when he reversed himself to pander to conservative hatred of gays and lesbians through DOMA.

Obama lost me early in the primary season when he hosted the cancerous Donnie McClurkin as his front early in N.C., and it is not lost on me and other gay and lesbian commentors that he has studiously avoided weighing in on Proposition 8 right now in California.

Make no mistake, people: Obama is in it to win it and if you happen to be one of the people thrown under the bus in the process you are supposed to understand and forgive.

Civil rights? FISA? Not so important until maybe after the election, when we may or may not have energy for a defense of the constitution. There will no no one held to account for the complete lawlessness of the Bush Administration. That cancer will lie dormant until some future President or Supreme Court is forced to confront it.

And still, Esquire makes its first endorsement in 75 years, and speaks in the voice of many of us as it does so:

In truth, though, Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things -- be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska -- that we own together. Barack Obama stands, however inchoately and however diffidently, for the notion that a common purpose is necessary for common problems, that "government," as it is designed in our founding documents, is our collective responsibility. It is this collective responsibility that built America into a great power without peer in the history of the world. And it is this collective responsibility that has succumbed to nearly thirty years of phony rightist populism, corporate brigandage, and the wildly cheered abandonment of a common American civic purpose.

It is shocking that in America an argument for salvaging the common good is regarded as a radical notion by anyone, but that is where we are. And that is what Barack Obama seems to stand for.

After all, as a young man with his potential, he could have headed straight to midtown Manhattan and made a fortune. Instead, he took a church job working for poor people in Chicago, and for his troubles, he and those poor people have been viciously jeered by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin.

Such is their regard for the common good. And such is Obama's promise. And in that, however inchoately and however diffidently, Obama stands not only against Bushism, but against Reaganism, which gave it birth. And that is more than enough.


Barack will not spend a penny of political capital indicting the war criminals, nor may he succeed in effecting meaningful healthcare reform, but he will return dignity and grace to the Oval Office, and to America's standing in the world and, today, that is enough.

The REAL Redistributors in Chief

John McCain is a firm believer in a philosophy of governance that's been responsible for the most dramatic redistribution of American income and wealth since the New Deal. For the past 30 years, the conservative movement has focused relentlessly on redistributing income, but always upward, toward the top. It's a great irony of the 2008 campaign: Nobody is more dedicated to redistributing wealth than adherents of the ideology that McCain represents.

Read it in AlterNet.

Then send it to any wingnuts you know.

Since Nixon or Before?

John Dean (remember him?) has made courageous and insightful statements regarding the
Bush administration's unconstitutional assumption of near-authoritarian power vis-a-vis the division of power between branches of government, the tension between civil liberties and national security, etc. He has also written two books on the subject:

Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.

Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.

Read the whole thing.

Batterers Anonymous

This is a post I should have written a long time ago, and the fact that I didn't stands as embarrassing evidence that I have tried too hard to keep my own background and experience somehow separate from the political perspective I reveal in this blog.

John McCain is a batterer. I know that in every fiber of my being because I worked around batterers -- and their victims -- for twenty some odd years. I don't have to see bruises on Cindy McCain to know it (although the evidence that he called her a "cunt" in front of numerous reporters who didn't know how to report it is ample evidence in and of itself: You can bet your house that a man who would say something like this in public is WAY WORSE in private.)

No, it is this line, which McCain has repeated every single time he is confronted about how slimy and negative his campaign has become:

"Look, I asked Senator Obama to come with me around this country to have Town Hall events in front of the people. If he had agreed to do this, we would have had a very different kind of campaign."

Tonight, on Larry King, he repeated the same justification for the slime, and I finally decided to respond:

Only batterers reason this way. And all batterers reason this way:

"If you had only listened to me.... If you had only done what I wanted you to do... If you only hadn't defied me the way you did....... I wouldn't have had to beat you."

So you see, it's never the responsibility of the person wielding the weapon or the fist or the slime..... the responsibility lies elsewhere...... in the person who, by their defiance, "forced" the batterer to become physical.

John McCain is a batterer. It's as simple as that.

WTF

The right-leaning media has gone bat-shit crazy. Now they're quoting "Joe the Plumber" on Foreign Policy and Economics! One can only conclude that no rational or credible person will any longer associate themselves with this campaign, so they have resorted to trying to burnish their support with the testimony of a small-time, unlicensed plumber from Florida.

This is beyond parody, and I can hear the writers from SNL sharpening their pencils as I type.

This is a "cleansed" screen shot taken tonight from a section on Memorandum. I've actually removed the links because I refuse to give these people any oxygen or traffic. But look at the sources: This is Fox and AP -- which has dramatically damaged its brand with the new editor's obvious bias toward McNasty.

Fox News: ‘Joe the Plumber’ Backs Claim That Obama Would Bring ‘Death to Israel’ — Joe Wurzelbacher, on his first campaign trail appearance for John McCain, says he agrees that a vote for Barack Obama would be “a vote for the death to Israel.”

Discussion: The Reaction, Political Machine, Early Returns, Political Radar and Atlas Shrugs,

Philip Elliott / Associated Press:
Joe the Plumber says Obama would make US socialist — COLUMBUS, OHIO (AP) - “Joe the Plumber,” the small business aspirant and overnight media sensation, endorsed John McCain's presidential campaign Tuesday and said Barack Obama would make America a socialist nation.
Discussion: Tom Watson, Gateway Pundit, The Heretik, Washington Times and Hot Air

This is hysterically funny, the natural, logical sequence of nominating the First Moosehunter of Alaska to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Why not? Let's put Joe in charge of Foreign Policy, and Tito the builder over HUD. Tammy the child-care worker can be put in charge of Education, and Fred the Farmer can have the Agriculture Department!

BTW -- Memeorandum is a site that tracks link traffic as a way to measure whatever topics are "the buzz" on the net. They over-sample the right, and typically only make discussion links to any blogs on the left (TPM seems to be an exception.) Their bias is clear. Yet it's a perfect way to keep track of the insanity on the right without actually having to read any of the garbage.