At Last

We won!

Couple senate races still up in there. More to come...

His Shrillness:

Last night wasn’t just a victory for tolerance; it wasn’t just a mandate for progressive change; it was also, I hope, the end of the monster years.

What I mean by that is that for the past 14 years America’s political life has been largely dominated by, well, monsters. Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people.

And in our national discourse, we pretended that these monsters were reasonable, respectable people. To point out that the monsters were, in fact, monsters, was “shrill.”

Four years ago it seemed as if the monsters would dominate American politics for a long time to come. But for now, at least, they’ve been banished to the wilderness.

McCain's Healthcare Policy

I eatz it.

Oops

AP:

Republican John McCain has maneuvered himself into a political dead end and has five weeks to find his way out.

Last Wednesday, McCain suspended his presidential campaign to insert himself into a $700 billion effort to rescue America's crumbling financial structure. In so doing, he tied himself far more tightly to the bill than did his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

...

Within hours, however, the measure died in the House mainly at the hands of McCain's own Republicans.

Initially, McCain went silent, choosing instead to send his chief economic adviser out with a statement that blamed Obama, claiming that the first-term Illinois senator had put his political ambitions ahead of the good of the country.

Read the whole article, it's pithy and damning.

Whiner

Sidney:

After making it through their first debate with their civility intact, the major presidential candidates today stepped up their rhetoric in attacks over how to deal with economic issues.

At a rally here, Republican John McCain accused rival Sen. Barack Obama of failing to show any leadership during the congressional negotiations over a $700-billion bailout package, which was defeated in the Houses today. Campaigning in Colorado, Obama argued that the country can't afford to gamble on McCain, according to excerpts supplied by the campaign.

Never mind that the package was set to pass last week until Senator Sissypants showed up and gave House Republicans a reason to defeat this on solely political grounds (i.e., make Democrats look bad). They made this mess, they stopped us from fixing it and somehow it's our fault? Shove it.

No Way, No How

Can Sarah Palin be VP:

In an interview with Fox News Channel, Palin said: "It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Sen. McCain chose to use because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy."

Our ideals our strong, therefore we must be a nation of whiners. Thanks, Sarah!

Business as Usual

McCain campaign:

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

We can trust him to fight for us against the special interests because he said so.

LOL

Rove:

Take it from an expert. Karl Rove, known as the architect of President George W. Bush’s electoral victories, believes White House candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have gone too far in their attacks on each other.

Rove, speaking on the television program Fox News Sunday, said an ad by the Democratic presidential nominee and Illinois senator criticizing McCain for not being e-mail savvy was unfair.

“His war injuries keep him from being able to use a keyboard. He can’t type. You know, it’s like saying he can’t do jumping jacks,” Rove said of the Arizona senator and former U.S. prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Sing it, Karl!

Adding, there's a difference of orders of magnitude between the two campaigns and Rove is trying to fudge that difference. Nice try.

Paul Krugman Writes a Column

Read it.

More Important Things to Do

Earmarks:

The total national debt, as I write this, is $9,679,000,000,000.00 (nine and a half trillion).

The Budget for 2008 is close to $3,000,000,000,000.00 (three trillion).

Our budget deficit for this year is going to range in between $400-500,000,000,000.00 (four hundred to five hundred billion, give or take a few billion).

The total value of wasteful earmarks in 2008 (according to CAGW) will be approximately $18,000,000,000.00 (eighteen billion).

In other words, when McCain talks about earmarks, he is talking about 3% of our annual budget deficit, .6% of our annual budget, and a number too small to even report when discussing our national debt. Or, put another way, he is talking about two months in Iraq, something he wants to keep going indefinitely.

John McCain is a liar and cannot solve our problems.

Liars

Republicans.

From a Jim Demint (Sen, R-SC) op-ed in today's WSJ:

Mrs. Palin also killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in her own state. Yes, she once supported the project: But after witnessing the problems created by earmarks for her state and for the nation's budget, she did what others like me have done: She changed her position and saved taxpayers millions. Even the Alaska Democratic Party credits her with killing the bridge.

That is a lie, one so completely wrong it's pathetic. But so is John McCain.

Talking Points Everyone Should Be Aware of

On pork:

At a rally today, Sen. McCain again asserted that Sen. Obama has requested nearly a billion in earmarks. In fact, the Illinois senator requested $311 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and none this year. In comparison, Gov. Palin has requested $750 million in her two years as governor -- which the AP says is the largest per-capita request in the nation.

This "reformer" talk is pure bullshit. If the press bothered to do its homework instead of just repeating his bullshit McCain would be stopped dead in his tracks, but such is our press. Same Republican party, same bullshit, different candidate.

I was only going to post that, but this is just as awful:

The priorities of Sarah Palin:

• An expensive sports complex made much more expensive because you're too incompetent to ensure the city had the land rights -- not burdensome.
  
• Paying for rape kits for rape victims -- burdensome.

(via LGM)

Once again the media is missing the ball. The issue isn't experience - it's sound judgment and understanding. If Palin can't properly administer a town of 4,000 and she doesn't understand how our government and economy work, then she does not deserve the office for which she campaigns.

John McCain represents neither reform nor change. He represents the same Bush policies that have dragged this country into the mud.

McMaverick

Not quite:

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don't care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace -- in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough's show -- the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin's scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.

Apparently they have nothing to hide.

Sarah Palin

McCain has a VP.

Avoiding a Lieberman Disaster

Says Bob Novak!

Reports of strong support within John McCain's presidential campaign for Independent Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the Republican candidate for vice president are not a fairy tale. Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it.

But they can't get away with it -- and this has been made clear to McCain by none other than Joe Lieberman himself.

Joe is stupid and ugly and nobody likes him.

McCain's Cribz

Josh is angry:

I will not stand by and watch the Obama camp try to claim McCain owns seven homes when he owns at least ten.

Get on it rabid left! Seven houses is not damning enough! It's only middle class!

Was McCain Tortured?

This is brutal, but them's the rules according to Bush and McCain:

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

...

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

I linked to Sully!

McCain Doesn't Like to Talk About Being a P.O.W.

And 500 other falsehoods propagated by his enablers in the media:

"The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous," Ms. Wallace said.

Sounds like a non-denial denial to me.

Obama Vindicated on Tire Pressure

Silly kerfluffle:

Our friends at Politifact have also looked into Sen. Barack Obama's claim about tire inflation and found it to be true -- not merely that car tune-ups and proper tire inflation will save millions of barrels of oil per year, but that it will save more energy than new off shore drilling would yield.

No one knows for sure, of course, which may be one of the reasons why our experts disagreed with Obama's claim that this conservation method would save more energy than new off shore drilling would yield.

But the salient point is that such measures are serious. Why the Republicans are mocking them at a time of energy crisis seems bizarre.

We're also reminded of this news from 1990:

"The Washington Times, September 14, 1990...The Bush administration yesterday launched an advertising blitz telling Americans they could fight oil shortages and high gas prices by conserving, while advising Congress there is no sign of price gouging by the oil industry and that gas prices are 'not unreasonable.' The slogan for the yearlong campaign, 'Do Your Part, Drive Smart,' tells consumers they can save more than 7 million gallons of gasoline a day if they keep their tires properly inflated, drive slower and join car pools.

Good luck trying to get anything fact based to stick with the Republicans. Especially principled John McCain.

McWhine

I'm a little worried his base may even get sick of him.

Credibility Gap

CBS and John McCain.