Mr. Entitled

At what point does somebody disqualify himself from the Presidency of the United States by nature of his own sense of entitlement?

Evidently, anyone who criticizes predatory capitalistic practices that enrich the amoral few at the expense of the working many is simply envious:



The only times we can talk about income inequality, according to Mitt's very words in this video, is in "quiet rooms." Does he mean quiet backrooms where the real political deals are made, over cigars and cognac? Or quiet, padded rooms where dissenters disappear into?

Credit where credit is due: a SuperPAC supporting Newt Gingrich just released this devastating documentary, featuring real people who lost their jobs when Mitt Romney's Bain Capital took over the companies they worked for and made hundreds of millions in overburdening the companies with debt through to bankruptcy -- heartbreaking human tragedy by people who only envy the lives they had before Mitt:



Here's to hoping Mitt enjoys a quiet room in his La Jolla estate where he retreats after losing the General Election to the sitting President in a landslide.

Elizabeth

Candidate for Massachusetts Democratic Senatorial nomination, Elizabeth Warren:

I like how Obama and Warren are attacking the GOP "class warfare" smear head-on.

And lest we forget, she spoke so intelligently on the financial crisis and need for reform, she made Jon Stewart horny.

Who Wants to Help the Rich Get Richer?

The plain fact is that the disparity of wealth in America is higher than it has ever been in history, per Robert Reich:

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

So who's on the side of the middle class? Not Sen. Mike Pence (R-IN):

"Republicans, me included, have supported numerous extensions of unemployment benefits and we're anxious to do so again," the Indiana Republican told interviewer Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." "The deficit this year is a trillion dollars for the second year in a row ... The American people have had it with runaway federal spending, deficits and debt, and they want to see men and women in Washington, D.C. make the hard choices."

After all, Pence is making his Party's hard choices like this:

"The reality is that as you study -- when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth, they expand the economy, they expand tax revenue," Pence said. "The point is we've got to get this economy moving again and we can't go back to the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats or the tax-cut-and-spend policies of the prior administration."

Study? As in studying the catastrophic failure of Bush's tax cuts on the rich?

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) explained on Wallace's show last week that "you do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

And the GOP didn't, hence our current deficit.

Maybe "maver-ick" Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has feelings for those other than, say, rich military contractors?

On the issue of unemployment benefits, of course we Republicans in the Senate under the leadership of Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl who’s doing a fantastic job, we want to extend unemployment benefits, but we want them paid for, because there are so many things that the Democrats lard onto it, whether it be for hiring new teachers or other programs, so they keep adding onto it to force us to vote yes.

Those darn teachers! That's pork to McCain, money better spent elsewhere:

I would tell the corporations which are very important, like Intel and Raytheon and others in our state, we’ll cut the corporate tax rates so that you won’t have to send jobs overseas. We’ll continue… I’ll continue to support the military and our bases and the men and women who are there and the thousands of employees, including our people over in Mesa that make the Apache helicopter and down at Raytheon that make these wonderful missiles and Intel that’s doing such a great job in employing so many people that I’ve supported for so many years.

No wonder McCain wants open-ended military commitments across the board. Otherwise, too much of that military funding would go not for "wonderful missiles" (oxymoron?) but for keeping schools like those here in SoCal from slashing teachers and loading up classrooms.

I guess you need that military money to keep those corporate leaders' kids in private school.

You know, with the lower class sizes.

Shut Up Step Off

Although she gets right maybe once or twice a decade, can ex-Reagan speechwriter and somehow pundit Peggy Noonan is once again acting her class:

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described President Obama's decision to go on five Sunday shows in one day as "boorish" -- in a Sunday show appearance of her own.

"He's doing it because he can," the former speechwriter told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos. "The media environment allows a modern leader to be something subtly damaging, and that is boorish. They get their face in your face every day all the time. It's boorish and it makes people not lean toward you but lean away from you, no matter what the merits of the issue."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/20/peggy-noonan-obama-media_n_292740.html

Ms. Noonan speaks with what Nettertainment is fond of calling "American Bullshit" accent. It's quasi-British, upper-crusty, and is usually a key indicator of being wrong.



By the way, I'm behind Obama asking New York Governor David Paterson, who got the job when Spitzer resigned has unfortunately screwed the pooch too many times, to not seek full-term election. NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is kicking butt right now, and NY needs more of that.

Max

God bless Maxine Waters:



Hang'em high.

Sayrahnara

Why, oh, why, is the McCain Campaign throwing running mate Sarah Palin under the bus the moment she's safely our of the lower 48?:



Doesn't know that the country abutting her state is 1/3 or NAFTA? That Africa is a continent, not a single country? And from Fox News? Ah, the pain of the backstab from the very organ that gave her life! And then there's the highbrow publication with it's own special leaks:

The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.

You can check out a slideshow of Palin & Family's wardrobe bought with campaign donations at HuffPo here along with this savory nugget:

Sarah Palin left the national stage Wednesday, but the controversy over her role on the ticket flared as aides to John McCain disclosed new details about her expensive wardrobe purchases and revealed that a Republican Party lawyer would be dispatched to Alaska to inventory and retrieve the clothes still in her possession...

Guess they're not trusting her to ship back every last shiny red pump herself.

At DailyKos blogger gracchus sees an element of internal GOP class conflict in the elders trying to bury Palin now, while the wounds are fresh:

The problem is that the rich folks who run the party - and run Fox News - aren't really sincere about the party's social agenda. It's just red meat for the rightwing workies. The rich - really, the country's owners - want the party to look after their class interests, which are all economic. They don't trust the petit bourgeois footsoldiers any more than you or I do.

The problem is that the crazies are getting restless, and want to run the party themselves, not just provide the voting muscle. This makes the richies nervous: you see this with the complete lack of rich-folks funding for Huckabee (who incidentally wasn't reliable on economic issues as far as the rich were concerned).

Palin also scares them, as she's drawn from the same group, but seems even more ignorant and likely to blow up the world in search of the the end of the world and the second coming. Even short of that, she seems ignorant and incompetent enough to fuck things up even more royally than the most recent occupant of the White House did, given the chance. She'd further tarnish the brand, and probably cause everyone's portfolios to blow up. And the people who run the party aren't fools, just dedicated to their own interests: they realize that she's incredibly ignorant, and probably dangerous beyond a point they're willing to tolerate.

Setting up the pins for Mitt Romney 2012, one expects.

I'm as happy as anyone that Palin is off the national stage, although very grateful for her help in electing Barack Obama President. The fact is that she needs the oxygen of media attention to survive and will do whatever she can to escape Alaska, possibly by appointing herself to Ted Stevens' Senate seat, should he turn out to have won the vote and then be stripped of his seat by the Senate, which traditionally does not seat convicted felons.

So I wouldn't count her out forever, and she has company in the likes of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) who managed to keep her Congressional seat even after calling for the news media to investigate how "American" are the Democratic members of Congress, and Sen. Obama. Bachmann is kind of a nightmarish hybrid of Sarah Palin and Katherine Harris, and today she's acting like we're all patriots:

After suggesting that Barack Obama had anti-American views in an exchange three weeks ago with MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told Politico Thursday that she was “extremely grateful that we have an African-American who has won this year.” She called his victory “a tremendous signal we sent.”

“I have not seen the United States as a racist nation,” said Bachmann, who represents Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, in the east-central part of the state. “In my district, I don’t sense racism, and that’s why I’m thankful that hopefully this will send a national signal across our country that America is not a nation made up of racists. ... On the same hand, I hope that the national media will not confuse disagreement with Obama’s policy positions with being consumed [by] racism.”

Racism, maybe not. McCarthyism...yes.

Well, let's hope the antidote has arrived. With Obama, is his victory, already assuming the mantle of American institution, he's an endorsement worth pushing, even in the Southern state of Georgia -- witness this campaign ad for Democrat Jim Miller, entering a run-off election against Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss:



"American is Back."

Yep, you can run with that.

Hothead

The Obama campaign is clearly trying out a theme that they can develop next week: McCain is a hothead.

There's evidence of this in his personal dealings, his Senate dealings, and in how he sprung up on the Georgia issue like he already thought he was President (albeit with an advisor being paid that country). There's serious talk of a McCain Presidency being a series of foreign policy crises of his own making thanks to his Cold War-era rhetoric -- "hysteria-based foreign policy."

I think the key for Obama and the Dems is to link McCain's kneejerk neoconservatism to the current Administration, to the ideology that got us all into the Iraq War and radically diminished our prestige and heft in the world in the first place. It truly can be the worst of both worlds -- bad judgment of now standard Republican neoconservatism, heightened by McCain's own disastrous trigger-happy tendencies. Essentially it's turning that media-loved maverick label against him.

And how hard can it be, when McCain endorses a new military draft with one on-the-spot answer in a town hall appearance?

Years

Another blazing success of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove Administration's War on Terra:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Rejecting a prosecution request for a severe sentence, a panel of military officers sentenced the convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden to five and a half years in prison on Thursday. The sentence means that the first detainee convicted after a war crimes trial here could complete his punishment by the end of this year.

The military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, had already said that he planned to give the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, credit for at least the 61 months he has been held since being charged, out of more than six years in all. That would bring Mr. Hamdan to the end of his criminal sentence in five months. After that his fate is unclear, because the Bush administration says that it can hold detainees here until the end of the war on terror.

Nice job, Republicans, of nailing Osama bin Laden's ex-chauffeur. I'm sure those five months will be worth all the money and brainpower spent on the conviction, although as long as Republican is President and can, like a king, keep him imprisoned indefinitely, at least more of the interrogation story won't come out.

Hey, it's not even Friday yet and there's another GOP politician in a disgraceful sexual scandal:

JEFFERSON CITY -- Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.

The alleged victim is the daughter of a state employee. The girl’s mother and Muschany -– who is married and has two children -- were romantically involved, the woman said.

A Cole County grand jury returned an indictment today charging Muschany with the Class C felony of "deviate sexual assault." The indictment identifies the victim only by initials. It says that on May 17, Muschany "had deviate sexual intercourse" with the girl, "knowing that he did so without" her consent.

Muschany, 42, was booked into the Cole County Jail today at 2:50 and he was released after posting a $5,000 bond. If convicted, Muschany faces a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to 7 years.

Only seven? Maybe he can take some of Hamdan's six.

What are the Republicans doing right, besides giving Paris Hilton some awesome new material?

They're doing what Obama said:

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq and the U.S. are near an agreement on all American combat troops leaving Iraq by October 2010, with the last soldiers out three years after that, two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. officials, however, insisted no dates had been agreed.

Hey, it's fun to mock, but there's a point to it. While grandpa McCain is putting a softer face on the deadly GOP brand, let's not forget that the same Karl Rove driving his vile and lying character smears of Obama has been driving U.S. policy for almost a decade. Let's not forget that the GOP financial and ideological party apparatus, taken over by Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Dick Cheney et al is essentially corrupt, a criminal enterprise that will take more than this election to wash through the system, if ever. It's the party of blatant hypocrisy, dividing voters with anti-gay rights laws while assaulting young boys or seeking illicit sex in airport bathrooms.

This election is about much, much more than Barack Obama. He's a vessel, sure, he brings youth and intelligence, strategy and tenacity to the Party and hopefully the Republic, and he's the right man at the right time. But this is just as much about clearing the palate, flushing the toilet, lighting sage and Native chants.

They'll try to smear Obama, to bring them down to their level. But that's just not the guy he is.

Just remember who these smearmongers are, Rove to McCain, and how much they've just gone and ruined these last eight years.

Wreckage

Criminals:

The White House predicted Monday that President Bush would leave a record $482 billion deficit to his successor, a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001, when Mr. Bush took office after three consecutive years of budget surpluses.

The worst may be yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package, or the possibility of steeper losses in tax revenues if individual income or corporate profits decline.

The new deficit numbers also do not account for any drains on the national treasury that might result from further declines in the housing market.

Wow, bad news. But remember Bushie's Law: any damage done by his and Cheney's Administration will turn out to be worse by a factor of 3x. I'll predict we're looking at closer to a one-point-three trillion dollar deficit ($1,300,000,000,000.00) to be discovered within three months following January 20, 2009. And American will have the next installment in paying down the Bush/Cheney debt.

Unless, of course, the designated Republican wins.

What else would not be properly punished? More prosecutable violations:

In her position as White House liaison for the Justice Department, Ms. Goodling was involved in hiring lawyers for both political appointments and nonpolitical career positions. Regardless of the type of position, the report said, Ms. Goodling would run applicants at interviews through the same batch of questions, asking them about their political philosophies, why they wanted to serve President Bush, and who, aside from Mr. Bush, they admired as public servants, the report found. Sometimes, Ms. Goodling would ask: “Why are you a Republican?”

In Ms. Goodling’s notes from the interviews, she would give a shorthand assessment of how well they fared on threshold political issues, as in the notation for one candidate who she wrote was aptly conservative on “god, guns + gays...”

...Such consideration of political views would have been allowed in hiring candidates to political appointments, which make up a tiny part of the Justice Department’s 110,000 employees, but it was clearly banned under both Civil Service law and the Justice Department’s internal policies, the inspector general said.

Like I said, no one will have to know any more about this if this guy gets elected. He's not interested.

Time for a new generation to lead, but is also times like this that the most recidivist element growing malignant all these years with the anger held in abeyance thanks to the exported violence and imported repression, but continued to be fed on smug mass marketed hatred and ignorance by folks like this guy read and undoubtedly listened to and watched.

I predict there will be more of them but the most important thing is to keep ourselves between them and our next President. Because even if there's blood on the hands of the lying purveyors of righteous bile and license, it's no substitute for someone as well-equipped, as poised and focused on solving these problems as any living American could hope to be.

Because this time, if anyone, it's going to take an Obama to clean up after a Bush.

Frighteningly Obvious

Here's a taste of how Obama, fresh of the plane from his whirlwind, sleep-deprived week solidifying his position as the world's most popular politician, handling a full hour interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press, this portion about a ridiculous write-up of his Berlin speech by one of the NY Times conservative columnists.

The excerpt shows how on-the-ball sharp his is, but it doesn't do justice to the full range of issues he handled smart and honestly throughout the span of the program. The big news is his immediate pivot, now that he's returned to the U.S. of A., back to the economy. As I've written, I expect him to weave together the values of his trip with his plans to put America on a winning track for the 21st Century, and sure enough he's already hitting back hard on those questioning him about the surge saying that no one is asking John McCain if he would vote to for the Iraq War again after knowing what that vote caused.

Once again, he's two corners ahead of the McCain Campaign. Once again he's prepared to steer the discourse to the economy while the McCain campaign is still whining and prevaricating about last week:

McCain's ad asserts that Obama "made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras."

The McCain campaign provides no evidence for the assertion that being told he couldn't bring media had anything to do with the trip's cancellation.

Oddly, when discussing Obama's trip to the gym, the ad uses footage of Obama playing basketball with US troops in Kuwait over the weekend.

What's up with John?

McCain going against Veteran's benefits again -- doesn't want the VA treating them unless seriously injured. A winning platform, uh. McCain fundraising off of impugning Obama's patriotism. McCain reaping oil company donations off his flipflop on oil drilling. McCain running on kicking Russia out of the G8 -- that's a WWIII we can believe in? McCain with a secret plan to capture Bin Laden.

I believe the question is rapidly moving away from whether BarackObama is qualified to be President, Chief Executive, Commander-in-Chief to whether John McCain is cracking up. We seem to be tumbling into some sort of Elia Kazan film with McCain, in a few interviews today spent beating back his inconvenient acceptance of withdrawal timetables Saturday, relying just a little too heavily a single catch-phrase:



Hey, John. Here's the conditions on the ground.

On the Move

Oh my goodness.

If you had asked me five years ago if I'd be this proud of my Governor Schwarzenegger, I wouldn't have believed it. But he did our state proud today with George Stephanopoulos today, coming out strongly on the environment, praising Jimmy Carter's energy policies, saying that cheaper oil under Reagan just meant those opportunities were discarded, strong with the state against drilling off our coast, hard against the Cheney/Bush Administration saying basically not to bother with any attempted face-saving environmental initiatives in its last few months.

And he not only said he was willing to work with Obama on energy, he was open to a post if Obama does become Chief Executive:

That apparently prompted George Stephanopoulos, the moderator of “This Week,” to ask Mr. Schwarzenegger whether he would take a phone call from Mr. Obama if he was calling with an offer to be his energy and environment czar.

“I’d take his call now, and I’d take his call when he’s president — any time,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “Remember, no matter who is president, I don’t see this as a political thing. I see this as we always have to help, no matter what the administration is.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger also offered some praise for Mr. Obama, saying he disagreed with people who have criticized the senator as a flip-flopper.

“Someone has, for 20 or 30 years, been in the wrong place with his idea and with his ideology and says: ‘You know something? I changed my mind. I am now for this,’ ” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “As long as he’s honest or she’s honest, I think that is a wonderful thing.”

Right on, Governor, and nice relief from some new magazine art. And how perfectly does that reinforce Obama's post-partisan message. As does this:

It's official: Republican Senator Chuck Hagel's office has put out an announcement that he will be joining Barack Obama on a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island...

...going on a overseas visit in the middle of the campaign season will be about as much of a vote of confidence in Obama's foreign policy vision as you could get without it turning into an outright endorsement.

Bing bing.

What I think we're seeing starting this week will be that that the Obama campaign has, understandably, taken a month to gear up after the battle with Senator Clinton, and may be putting their general election strategy fully into motion now. There will be the overseas trip establishing Obama as a world leader in the wings, the Vice Presidential nomination which will hopefully establish his wisdom.

(I'm still betting on Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, even if it alienates some Hillary as Queen Bee die-hards. Sebelius reinforces Obama's post-partisan message, has strong executive experience, was an early supporter and now friend, has chaired the Governors Association so she has great ties nationwide, and her look kind of counteracts Cindy McCain.)

As a final bellwether of this notion, the Obama making his move theory, there's his perfectly timed, crystal clear, prescient Op-Ed in Monday morning's New York Times, "My Plan for Iraq". Events are helping Obama here, as the Iraq Government rejects a longterm U.S. presence, and talk of early withdrawal crosses Administration lips, making Barack more right than ever. While he goes into detail of the 16-month, careful leave, and forcefully answers the flipflop talk, here's the heart of the unequivocal piece:

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

The time is right. Make your move, Barack.

We're ready.

Very Smart Bad Guys

The reason I hate David Addington and John Yoo is that I feel like I know them, that we all knew the very book smart, wargame playing armchair chickenhawks with a libertarian bent, but these are two particular ones who got law degrees and put them to work for Dick Cheney, their Grand Vizier writing memos declaring torture legal as long as it's under the President and only the President's authority, as long as he says he thinks he's protecting the country.

Today they squirmed in front of Congress, particularly Yoo. He knows he's in trouble underneath his own smugness, but Addington takes the cake it that department. The smugness of the geek, only that he's smug about Abu Ghraib.

Take a look, even if you have to skip through the clip a bit, but I found it f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g. The first moment of accountability since Scooter Libby got convicted (and we all know how that ended) and these guys won't answer anything they think might box them into being revealed:



Here's more of Addington, this time defining the Vice President as "attached" to the legislative branch, lots of quoting of opinions, smug ammo:



Last clip I'll link to is Addington refusing to discuss the torture policy he and Yoo designed, the shame of the U.S.A. in the eyes of the world, in our owns eyes, how far fallen from "The Greatest Generation" that actually fought a World War for which all citizens mobilized and sacrificed. He won't talk about it, because the terrorists are watching.

Makes one kinda nostalgic for Nuremberg.

Peace Talk

So Egypt has brokered a tentative truce between Israel and Hamas regarding Gaza. Who knows if it will hold but it is, as always, long overdue. The skinny:

• The truce takes effect at 6 a.m. Thursday (11 p.m. EDT Wednesday).

• All Gaza-Israel violence stops. After three days, Israel eases its blockade on Gaza, allowing more vital supplies in.

• A week later, Israel further eases restrictions at cargo crossings.

• In the final stage, talks are conducted about opening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt and a prisoner exchange to free Cpl. Gilad Schalit, held by Hamas-affiliated groups for two years.

Freeing the 21-year old Schalit is a very big deal, captured at 19 and held since then. Jimmy Carter, among others, helped mediate. This has been an open wound for the Israeli people for two years, the first Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian militants since 1994.

Meanwhile, the worst negotiator in America accuses a British journalist of slandering America when he brings up Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and illegal rendition in an interview.

Wait, is that guy still President?

Johnny Trouble

It's not a done deal and vigilance, activism and commitment are recommended, but John McCain sure looks loserish.

GOP insiders don't have much faith that he's even pulling a message together. One of his biggest supporters and friends is reinforcing the Democratic message that electing McCain means four more years of Bush policies. His treatment of his first wife is cropping up in reporting overseas, and thanks to the blogosphere is leaking over here already. And while there may be some Clinton supporters who remain bitter enough to vote for McCain this fall, it won't be because he will agree with them on or advance any of the issues that Clinton and Obama share a passion for.

And then there's the War, and then there's McCain's reliability, and both are severely critiqued in this video actually made by Ron Paul supporters:



Is America still racist, liberal-phobic and gullible enough to choose McCain over Obama?

After the past eight years, and this sudden blast of inflation and unemployment, I wouldn't bet on it.

Tragic Women

Scoured the news of the day and these two stories stood out above the sordid fray of the U.S. campaigns and the surge failure in Iraq, two women who have made grave decisions gone tragically, horrifically awry.

On one hand you have Marion Jones, once a young American Olympian and hero, a record-breaker, the fastest woman on earth. Now, at age 32 with two young children, she finds herself sentenced to six months in prison for lying to Federal prosecutors (you know, what El Presidente allowed apparatchik Scooter Libby to get out of), in financial ruin as she is stripped of five Olympic medals and all titles after 2000 erased from the record books.

One imagines she's nothing but contrite, certainly based on her public statements, and got some breaks for going against her ex-coach in a fraud investigation. It's too sad to imagine, this golden girl of Sydney 2000.

Then there's this account in BagnewsNotes of Condoleezza Rice's personal responsibility for coaxing Benizar Bhutto to return to Pakistan:

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy — and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.

...where she was promptly assassinated:

On October 26th, Wolf Blitzer also received a now highly publicized message from Bhutto, via Siegel, to be disclose only upon her death. It detailed the basic security requirements above, and asked that the reporter make it known that the four police vehicles she had requested to surround her vehicle while traveling were never supplied. ...If you haven't seen the video footage of the assassination, by the way, you might notice that not only was there no escort, but three nearby policemen supposedly tasked to protect Bhutto's car at the moment of the attack where simply idling around.

Blood on their hands.

Marion Jones' cheating meant the diminution of the second place athletes, the ones who seem to have played by the rules and had their careers eclipsed by hers. The blood of her reputation as a human being, as a member of society, whether on the national stage or buying groceries in the supermarket.

Condoleezza Rice, trying so obviously to wash the blood of Iraq off her hands (and, to some of us, some stainage from 9/11) with the renewed yet inconclusive Mideast peace initiative and the stabilizing of Pakistan.

She put her faith in another political woman, one who had once run the country to which she was being spurred to return; and then, with whatever degree of culpability, sent her to a swift and violent grave.

Support

One thing we know about the Republican leadership in the Cheney/Bush White House: they sure know how to cudgel any opposition with the phrase, "Support the Troops."

That's the myth.

How does this Administration actually treat the valiant?:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments. To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Since this story went live there's been some ass-covering from the Pentagon, but it's not good enough:

From Rep. Jason Altmire:

I am heartened by Brigadier General Michael S. Tucker’s announcement of the Army’s policy that it will not ask for repayment of bonuses paid to those soldiers who are injured in the line of duty. However, I am disappointed that the policy does not go further by stating that wounded soldiers will also receive the remaining balance of future bonus payments. It is preposterous for our government to have a policy that says that a soldier who has sustained serious injuries in the field of battle has not fulfilled his or her service obligation.

Y'know, every four years the GOP accuses the Democratic Presidential candidate of calling for a class war, and then something like this pops up and I think, isn't that war already on?

Balancing the Federal budget on the backs of broken service men and women instead while allowing Blackwater and Halliburton to pillage the Treasury, not to mention the outrageous oil industry subsidies?

Support the Troops! Support Our Troops!

Here's how to really support 'em.

Happy Thanksgiving.