GOTP Fascism Continued

So if know-nothings like Sarah Palin and Nevada GOP Tea Party Senate candidate Sharron Angle can't talk to the real (i.e. non-Faux News) press because they will be exposed for the dangerous losers that they are, do they still get to ban the press from talking to them as they walk away?

Witness Angle, who is running ahead of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the polls, running away from answering substantive questions. (Embed issues -- click link for video.)

It's criminals that run from the press when leaving court. Not politicians running for office. At least not in a real democracy. And now her campaign has banned the free press from covering them. You know, another step towards a fascist state, if these 'baggers get their wins.

Meanwhile, corporate fascists in the McDonalds world are telling their workers how to vote -- or else:

The owner of a franchise in Canton, Ohio enclosed a handbill in employees' paychecks that threatened lower wages and benefits if Republicans don't win on Tuesday.

And the fascist jackboot intimidations keep on coming.

Remember.



Meanwhile, President Obama actually keeps America safe.

Oink

The family of little Sarah Palin used to sneak across the border from Alaska to Canada to take advantage of their socialized health care system. Which would count as hypocrisy, if Palin could spell the word:

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," Palin said in her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?"

If she can spell ironic.

Meanwhile, big ol' Karl Rove is still peddling lies in his new "memoir." The summary (with full details at Media Matters):

1. Rove distorts Senate report to claim Bush didn't "lie us into the war"

2. Rove falsehood: Obama claims "Obamacare would not add to the deficit ... evidence shows just the opposite"

3. Rove revives tired smear that Gore wrongly said "that he had created the Internet"

4. Rove revives Gore-Love Story smear

5. Rove falsehood: Gore said he had "discovered the Love Canal chemical disaster"

6. Rove pals around with falsehood that Ayers was "Obama's great friend"

7. Rove wrong on number of presidents who left office by "assassination or resignation"

Lastly, spawn of Satan herself, Liz Cheney, is even pissing off Conservatives with her newfangled McCarthyist smears:

A group of 19 prominent Bush administration officials and other lawyers launched an offensive Monday, attacking Liz Cheney for a recent ad by her group, Keep America Safe, that questioned the loyalties of Department of Justice lawyers that had represented Guantanamo detainees.

In a statement signed by nine former Bush officials and 10 other lawyers, critics condemned the ads as a "shameful series of attacks...both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications."

We'll see again if the Washington press corps takes the Cheney family's dictation on this one.

In Crowd

Tonight's the second most impressive party of the year -- after the Inauguration. The White House Correspondents Dinner is the lighthearted even where swords are lowered between press and President and comedy rules. It's also the turning point event where in 2006 Stephen Colbert turned the dial up on his career and irrevocably turned the perception of the Bush Administration (and enabling journalism establishment) way down in emperor-has-no-clothes style.

Here's the guest list. My faves: Sam Jackson and Richard Belzer, and host Wanda Sykes.

Wouldn't you like to be in that room?

Our Guy at the Top

This is why:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Here's an analysis of the press conference from the classroom management point of view.

Key exchange -- Ed Henry:



"I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."

Nice.

Le Deluge?

The debate period of the past several weeks seems to have been a pause in the campaign in a way, with candidates disappearing for a day here and there to prepare for the debates, where a certain vetting went on.

That's all changing, as we've emerged into the final Act, less than three weeks to go, three Tuesdays from now. And while there's plenty of healthy fear of complacency, sudden GOP activation or hidden anti-Obama voting out there, we may also begin to witness the long-planned for flood. Starting with endorsements, maybe or maybe not including Colin Powell on Sunday, but with newspapers already weighing in, including some surprises.

For one, The Los Angeles Times rarely endorses a Presidential candidate in the General Election:

The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president.

Our nation has never before had a candidate like Obama, a man born in the 1960s, of black African and white heritage, raised and educated abroad as well as in the United States, and bringing with him a personal narrative that encompasses much of the American story but that, until now, has been reflected in little of its elected leadership. The excitement of Obama's early campaign was amplified by that newness. But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama's character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity.

Without hesitation. They go on to how the McCain they once admired is no longer recognizable, and give large consideration to how his VP choice undermines any claim of superior judgment. And their closing paragraph is moving in a patriotic way:

We may one day look back on this presidential campaign in wonder. We may marvel that Obama's critics called him an elitist, as if an Ivy League education were a source of embarrassment, and belittled his eloquence, as if a gift with words were suddenly a defect. In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be.

More stunningly, the Chicago Tribune gives their first-ever endorsement of a Democratic Presidential candidate:

On Nov. 4 we're going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.

The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama. The Tribune is proud to endorse him today for president of the United States...

...Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

They go on to recall how the newspaper's first great leader was a Republican Party founder (anti-slavery), how the current GOP has completely lost its way, how McCain is no longer comprehensible and, again, there's that Palin:

McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.

Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.

Country first, baby. Could be Obama's new slogan.

They go into more detail on Obama's reassuring past successes in Illinois legislature, and then close with this rather tear-provoking passage:

Obama is deeply grounded in the best aspirations of this country, and we need to return to those aspirations. He has had the character and the will to achieve great things despite the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S.

He has risen with his honor, grace and civility intact. He has the intelligence to understand the grave economic and national security risks that face us, to listen to good advice and make careful decisions.

When Obama said at the 2004 Democratic Convention that we weren't a nation of red states and blue states, he spoke of union the way Abraham Lincoln did.

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation's most powerful office, he will prove it wasn't so audacious after all. We are proud to add Barack Obama's name to Lincoln's in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States.

Again, no chickens before hatching time, but should a tall dark gentleman from Illinois fulfill the promise of an earlier under-experience, eloquent, tall thin President from Illinois...well, what an epic story that would be.

The next several weeks are crucial for America renewal, for making good on everything we like to say about ourselves, our good will, our strong backs and elbow grease, the miracle of a nation of many peoples united as in no other country in history.

If these editorials keep coming, if the early voting continues to look so strong for Obama, if a sense of a winner actually encourages more voting rather than complacency (after all, would you want your state to be left out when the new President looks to help those who helped elect him?), then we could see the deluge some dare not even imagine.

If you believe, then the time is now -- not November 5th or 6th or 7th -- to join the party.

Now is the time to come pitch in.

Bottom Falling

I may have become disappointed with John McCain for his opportunistic embrace of El Presidente George W. Bush during the 2004 campaign, the kissing of the ring, the hug, but I can't say that I have any reason to hate him. I'd expect most folk opposing McCain would agree. However, I don't think I can quite bring myself to pity him, at least not yet. Who knows, he could still win the election, he could drop out, he could get someone to pull his campaign together in a dignified fashion (since he clearly can't do it himself, not like Obama can lead his own campaign).

But however you look at it, this is the week, if any, that the bottom keeps falling out of the McCain campaign.

Last night on CBS, in his attempt to turn the election from a mandate for change from eight years of disastrous Republican rule to being all about the surge and trying to claw up some distrust of Barack Obama, McCain got himself interviewed by Katie Couric and promptly made another gaffe, this one confusing the chronology of the "Anbar Awakening" and the start of the surge.

Then his campaign went on today to try and split hairs about over a rather statement made by Obama at the most solemn of Israeli memorials, Yad Vashem, built in honor of the six million European Jews slaughtered under Nazi rule. Not exactly tactful. More like try anything -- desperation.

And, in one of the strangest turns of his campaign so far, McCain's campaign had arranged for him to appear in a great big photo op on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana with that state's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal...but it was suddenly canceled. The McCain campaign claims weather was the reason, and perhaps that was true. But there's also, suspiciously, this concurrent news:

The U.S. Coast Guard has closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River from New Orleans southward after a tanker and a barge collided, spilling more than 400,000 gallons of fuel oil into the river.
Tugboats hold up pieces of a barge after it collided with a tanker Wednesday in the Mississippi River in New Orleans.

The river, a major shipping route between the Midwest and Gulf of Mexico, could be closed for days during the cleanup, the Coast Guard said Wednesday.

More than 30 ships already are queued up along the river, waiting to pass through the closed zone, Coast Guard Petty Officer Jaclyn Young said.

The Coast Guard has deployed 45,000 feet of inflatable booms to contain the spill and is lining up another 29,000 feet, but it could be days before the river is reopened, she said.

The accident left a sheen over 90 percent of the area, she said.

So much for a safe drilling message, John.

Even the mainstream media has to bow to reality sometime...and it looks like they're starting to. And if they're distaste turns to pity, well, we just can't elect a man we pity to Commander-in-Chief.

So I ask again:

Will McCain make it to November 4th as the Republican Presidential nominee?

Patriotism

Anyone who doesn't think Barack Obama is an underdog until the day after the election is out of their mind. The press LOVES John McCain so much so that AP reporters take care to bring him his favorite donuts, while trying to do Karl Rove's dirty work and paint Obama as someone he isn't with every angle they can try. In a week where Obama gave a major speech on the true meaning of patriotism, he still has to respond to the left on his FISA stand and the Republicans on his Iraq comments.

Obama has the cajones to let those supporters opposed to his FISA position have a place on his website, the exact opposite of the Bush/Cheney practice of screen speech attendees. He has the cajones to address the issue in writing today and tolerate, even encourage dissent. Because he believes that without differing opinions, there is no democracy.

Happy 4th of July.

Happy Independence Day.

I've been dying for a true patriotic voice ever since Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Bush turned patriotism against us McCarthy Era style to get their Iraq War, and here it is, couldn't be clearer. While he goes on to talk about his childhood as an American and separates loyalty to country from loyalty to a particular leader of the government, and he calls for a new national service, sure to grow as a campaign theme leading into the Convention (with some of the leaders to be drawn, no doubt, from his current one million campaign activist recruits), here's what I think is the pivotal set-up passage:

My concerns here aren't simply personal, however. After all, throughout our history, men and women of far greater stature and significance than me have had their patriotism questioned in the midst of momentous debates. Thomas Jefferson was accused by the Federalists of selling out to the French. The anti-Federalists were just as convinced that John Adams was in cahoots with the British and intent on restoring monarchal rule. Likewise, even our wisest Presidents have sought to justify questionable policies on the basis of patriotism. Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans - all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic.

In other words, the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic. Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day
.
Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views - these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's traditions and institutions. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.

Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions. None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely; after all, when we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be. But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism. And surely we can arrive at a definition of patriotism that, however rough and imperfect, captures the best of America's common spirit.

The fact that this speech got drowned out by the MSM's protective hue over Wesley Clark's statement about McCain's POW experience not being in unquestionable qualification for Commander-in-Chief, that Obama has to message-battle previously planned MSM conjecture stories casting doubt on his mortgage rate without any hard evidence, barely reporting, shows what he's up against each and every day. That's one of the main reasons Nettertainment is so strongly for his candidacy, damned the purity trolls and all the other torpedoes.

Oh, and even if I believe Obama is an underdog as a challenger to the MSM status quo, let alone as a mixed race candidate trying to be the first in 44 thus far, I do believe he is a (finally, Democrats) winner at heart, and that's what makes him so important to support.

After all, he's just flipped the poll numbers against McCain in the traditionally big red state of Montana.

God bless America.

Taibbi

Matt Taibbi, the most dead-on gonzo reporter working today, hits another homer in this week's Rolling Stone with, "Giuliani: Worse Than Bush". You can read to the end to get the whole "worse" part, but it's a damning portrait of an amoral political opportunist who cashes an an accelerated World Trade Center clean-up by flouting OSHA rules to get it done faster and ruining the health of the workers to do it:

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The article begins with a very odd and revealing moment on the campaign trail and also covers Rudy's dunce-hatting of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) at the first Republican Presidential debate. Not to be missed, if you really want to know why New Yorkers were glad when Mayor Giuliani finally -- after suspending the election of his successor on his own edict -- left the job.

I'm not sure what it will take to dislodge the current lazy mainstream media story that Rudy was the hero of 9/11 (read the article to learn more reasons why not), but meanwhile former Vice President Al Gore has a new book out about the fundamental cracks in our democratic discourse, The Assault on Reason, and the old lazy mainstream media story about him being, uh, too smart has again reared it's Medusa-like head. Per Paul McLeary at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Milbank gives us an account of a recent speech by Gore that reads almost like a parody of everything we read about the candidate back in '00.

Milbank said that during the speech, Gore "waxed esoteric," "waxed erudite," and "waxed informed," as if these might be bad things to have happen during a speech. Milbank then quotes several audience members who gush over how smart Gore is, concluding that "therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble." Can't be too smart, now, or else you'll look like an egghead, right?

G*ddamn America and its anti-intellectualism.

Remember what happened when we didn't go for smart?