| Friday, July 18, 2008 |
| Campaign swings (and misses) |
Swift Boat hatchet man Bud Day has another whoopsie on behalf of Camp McCain. He said the following on a campaign conference call:
The Muslims have said either we kneel or they're going to kill us... I don't intend to kneel and I don't advocate to anybody that we kneel, and John doesn't advocate to anybody that we kneel. Yes ... right ... that'll do, Bud... that'll do...
Meanwhile, can the MSM manipulate poll data to make the presidential race look like a horse race? Yes they can!
Perhaps they're doing it to soothe poor neocon Charles Krauthammer, who, excuse my French, has gone all bitchy and whiny on us in his latest, desperate Obama rant. Take this, Krauthammer!
There, how's that. All better, I bet...
Meanwhile, the GOP once again goes after the Obama who isn't running for president, this time, in Washington State, as the RNC shrugs, calling the attacks on Michell fair game. Team Obama fires back, at John McCain. I wonder: would it be considered fair game to run an ad citing Cindy McCain's contribution to making stolen pill-popping popular among middle aged women? Brit Hume has something to say about that (in perfect, ungarbled English...):
Senator Obama is blaming the news media — and especially FOX News — for Michelle Obama's high negative ratings. Just under 30 percent of those polled had an unfavorable view of Michelle Obama in our last FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll. A Rasmussen Reports poll last month put her unfavorable rating at 42 percent.
Obama tells Glamour magazine that political spouses should be off-limits. He says the "conservative press — FOX News... went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way... spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this." Though Obama failed to mention it, his wife has made a number of official campaign stops with him and has even campaigned for him on her own. Obama then added, "If you start being subjected to rants by Sean Hannity and the like, day in day out, that'll drive up your negatives." The world's media laughs at John McCain, who will be thoroughly shunned as all the major networks caravan behind Barack Obama on his upcoming overseas tour. Foreign leaders are being careful not to look to cozy with Obama, though since George W. Bush has already begun implementing much of his foreign policy, he's kind of already president... Meanwhile the McCain compaign carries out a preempting oppo research strike. Politico has Obama's meeting list. Brit Hume has something to say about that, too:
On his upcoming overseas trip, Barack Obama will be met along the way by the anchors of the three network evening newscasts. About 200 other journalists have also asked to join Obama during his trip. But Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post reports that John McCain has taken three foreign trips in the past four months — all unaccompanied by a single network anchor and with little fanfare. The Tyndall Report, which monitors news coverage, says that since June the nightly newscasts on the three networks spent a combined 114 minutes covering Obama while devoting just 48 minutes to McCain.
Hume and Kurtz fail to mention that the McCain camp never made the ask of the networks. Don't hate on Team Obama because they were sharp enough to do so ...
Over at Market Watch, a lone voice sticks up for the New Yorker.
The magazine is sticking its finger in the eye of every bigot who hates the Obamas because they're African-Americans, every racist who seeks to polarize the electorate and every ignoramus who mistrusts the senator from Illinois without examining his record and background.
Something else is going on here as well. This criticism centers on conservatives' strong dislike -- "hatred" is such a nasty word, no? -- of both Obama and the New Yorker, two of the most visible and successful symbols of liberal America. While there was also carping in some liberal quarters, the most vocal anger seemed to come from the other side.
The liberals' opponents are jumping on the bandwagon partly in the hope of making the New Yorker look bad (i.e. unpatriotic). The magazine has written many stories blasting the Bush administration's policies, especially its handling of Iraq. Last but not least, pollster John Zogby isn't content to sock it to the McCain campaign with shock polls showing Obama winning in pretty much every swing state except Florida. Now, he plays the veepstakes, and contemplates the unthinkable: a double-brotha ticket:
If Obama were to choose Powell, 42% of likely voters nationwide said it would make them more likely to support the Democratic candidate - as did 42% of Democrats and 43% of political independents. The Zogby International telephone poll of 1,039 likely voters nationwide was conducted July 9-13, 2008, and asked respondents how the selection of certain vice presidential candidates would affect their likelihood to vote for the two leading presidential candidates. It carries a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points. Watch right wing heads exploding everywhere... oh God, there go some Democratic head explosions in West Virginia! Zogby provides the doubters with a helpful table:
Likelihood to vote for Barack Obama if he chooses ... as his Vice President |
| Likely Voters | Democrats | Independents |
| More Likely | Less Likely | More Likely | Less Likely | More Likely | Less Likely | | Colin Powell | 42% | 10% | 42% | 12% | 43% | 9% | | Hillary Clinton | 30% | 25% | 47% | 15% | 33% | 26% | | Bill Richardson | 15% | 10% | 9% | 13% | 12% | 9% | | Joe Biden | 11% | 16% | 6% | 22% | 11% | 13% | | Kathleen Sebelius | 7% | 11% | 10% | 11% | 7% | 9% | | Tim Kaine | 7% | 11% | 8% | 10% | 8% | 8% | | Evan Bayh | 6% | 12% | 9% | 9% | 7% | 9% |
What? Not much help from "Bayh Bayh Bayh"? Meanqhile, the pollster says McCain's best bets are Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Now I think that Romney will ultimately be the running mate (supporting evidence here), no matter how much Mac may still secretly hate his guts, but me thinks the pollster doth miss name recognition too much. Not that name recog doesn't count in a veep selection. Just sayin. I doubt that the respondents to the poll really sat down and thought about the idea of TWO black men running together for president.
Anyway, just to be fair, here's the GOP chart:
| Likelihood to vote for John McCain if he chooses ... as his Vice President |
| Likely Voters | Republicans | Independents |
| More Likely | Less Likely | More Likely | Less Likely | More Likely | Less Likely | | Mike Huckabee | 27% | 13% | 40% | 11% | 29% | 14% | | Mitt Romney | 26% | 11% | 41% | 8% | 30% | 13% | | Joe Lieberman | 20% | 17% | 26% | 16% | 20% | 22% | | Charlie Crist | 5% | 10% | 8% | 12% | 5% | 9% | | Bobby Jindal | 5% | 9% | 7% | 9% | 6% | 9% | | Tim Pawlenty | 3% | 8% | 3% | 5% | 1% | 7% | | Mark Sanford | 3% | 9% | 3% | 9% | 2% | 10% |
And would ya look at Miss Charlie, getting 5 percent!
| Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Bud Day, Fox News, GOP, John McCain, mainstream media, Michelle Obama, New Yorker Magazine, polls, presidential candidates, right wing smear machine, Swiftboat vets |
posted by JReid @ 1:45 PM   |
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| Monday, June 30, 2008 |
| The morning read, insomniac edition |
 Robert Mugabe retains power, dodges the Hague ... plus other morning news
Swiftboat veterans seek to reclaim the dignity of the name from the sleazeballs who attacked John Kerry's service in Vietnam in 2004. Meanwhile, T. Boone Pickens is a phony and a liar, just like the attack group he funded...
In the New York Times: Surprise! The Bush administration "advised" the Iraqi government on contract deals with five major wester oil companies:
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism. In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said. And why would they do such a thing?
Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. The United States government, too, has eagerly encouraged investment anywhere in the world that could provide new oil to alleviate the exceptionally tight global supply, which is a cause of high prices. Iraq is particularly attractive in that light, because in addition to its vast reserves, it has the potential to bring new sources of oil onto the market relatively cheaply. As sabotage on oil export pipelines has declined with improved security, this potential is closer to being realized. American military officials say the pipelines now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields.
Ah yes, the oil. The oil!
“We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.” And the story wouldn't be complete without a completely contradictory comment from Condi Rice:
Criticism like that has prompted objections by the Bush administration and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who say the deals are purely commercial matters. Ms. Rice, speaking on Fox News this month, said: “The United States government has stayed out of the matter of awarding the Iraq oil contracts. It’s a private sector matter.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post has a wrenching, first-person account of treating PTSD among our troops returning from the dual war zones.
The soldier from Ohio studied the wall carefully. It was amazing, he said, how much the layout of those picture frames resembled the layout of the street in Tikrit that was seared in his memory; the similarity had leapt out at him the first time he came in for a session. He traced the linear space between the frames, showing me where his Humvee had turned and traveled down the block, and where the two Iraqi men had been standing, close -- too close -- to the road. "I knew immediately something was wrong," he said. The explosion threw him out of the vehicle, with his comrades trapped inside, screaming. Lying on the ground, he returned fire until he drove off the insurgents. His fellow soldiers survived, but nearly four years later, their screams still haunted him. "I couldn't go to them," he told me, overwhelmed with guilt and imagined failure. "I couldn't help them." That soldier from Ohio is one of the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007; the number of diagnoses increased nearly 50 percent in 2007 over the previous year, the military said this spring. I saw a number of soldiers with war trauma while working as a psychologist for the U.S. Army. In 2006, I went to Fort Dix as a civilian contractor to treat soldiers on their way to and return from those wars. I was drawn by the immediacy of the work and the opportunity to make a difference. What the raw numbers on war trauma can't show is what I saw every day in my office: the individual stories of men and women who have sustained emotional trauma as well as physical injury, people who are still fighting an arduous postwar battle to heal, to understand a mysterious psychological condition and re-enter civilian life. As I think about the soldiers who will be rotating back home from Iraq this summer as part of the "pause" in the "surge," as well as those who will stay behind, I remember some of the people I met on their long journey back from the war. ...
Also in the WaPo, would-be gunslingers line up in D.C. ...
"We've had a lot of people inquiring," Metta said. "What's happening now is a huge history maker." He said his best-selling handguns are Glocks, Berettas and Rugers, which cost $350 to $700. People usually say they want them for self-defense, or sometimes as collector's items, he said.
...or just to generally, you know, blow someone away...
On the lighter side, the San Francisco Chronicle does an episode of "all the candiates' wives."
So now we know: Michelle Obama shops at Target, hates pantyhose ("painful") and made the "fist pump" cool. And Cindy McCain does lots of under-the-radar charity work, favors Oscar de la Renta and has a credit card bill that's been somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 this year. But rest assured, America: With a major female presidential candidate no longer in the running, there's plenty more we'll learn about the stylistic, literary, grooming and culinary penchants of the two women who aspire to be first lady of the United States.
In the Financial Times, John McCain gets the cold shoulder from workers at a GM plant in Ohio:
Three hours after John McCain’s campaign bus left General Motors’ plant in Lordstown, Ohio, workers started streaming in and out of the factory’s gates for the mid-afternoon shift change.
Only a fraction had caught a glimpse of the Republican presidential candidate when he toured the production line and still fewer attended the meeting he held in an adjacent conference room. “Management invited him,” said 38-year-old Tim Niles. “It had nothing to do with us. We’re with Obama.”
Mr Niles, a white, working-class Democrat who wears a “Bubba’s Army” T-shirt, is exactly the kind of voter Mr McCain was courting on his trip to northern Ohio on Friday. On the day Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton staged their first joint rally, Mr McCain was trying to undermine their reconciliation by wooing Mrs Clinton’s blue-collar base. His efforts appeared wasted on many. “We’re a working-class factory,” said 49-year-old Greg George. “McCain calls himself moderate, but his party has been a disaster for working people over the past eight years.” And the U.S. warns that Mexico's battle against powerful drug cartels is threatening to escalate into a crippling, all-out war.
Over at the Guardian, the thoroughly discredited dictator Robert Mugabe is sworn in after an election in Zimbabwe in which people were forcibly marched to the polls, where the results were sealed through intimidation, and in which the opposition was threatened, attacked, and forced to quit the election and flee for his life.
Meanwhile, reports the Independent, the world rises in revulsion, as Mugabe rushes to form a coalition government with the opposition he just terrorized, his fears of winding up in the Hague temporarily quelled by the phony election.
| Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, dictators, Iraq war, John McCain, Mexico, news and current affairs, politics, Robert Mugabe, Swiftboat vets, u.s. economy, veterans, Zimbabwe |
| posted by JReid @ 12:39 AM |
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| Friday, March 09, 2007 |
| The swiftboating of John McCain: a preview |
 RawStory has advance details of a coordinated effort under way to attack the Vietnam service and POW experience of Senator John McCain. Stipulating that I have no use for McCain -- in my opinion, he has morphed into an embarassing toadie to George W. Bush whose desperation to be president has rendered his judgment extremely suspect -- I have even less use for the swiftboat goons, whose sole purpose in life seems to be smearing brave men who wore the uniform at a time when many men -- including men they support (think Bush and Cheney), cut and ran. These people are dispicable. They need to get a life and leave the politics to sane people. Labels: 2008, elections, John McCain, politics, Swiftboat vets |
| posted by JReid @ 8:12 PM |
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| Wednesday, February 28, 2007 |
| Sweet (Swiftboat) revenge |
| John Kerry dishes out a little payback to a Swiftboat funder on the Hill. More on the showdown from RawStory, complete with the now obligatory Joe Lieberman praise for a right wing Republican smear merchant... Labels: John Kerry, Lieberman, politics, Swiftboat vets |
| posted by JReid @ 3:39 PM |
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