John McCain's opposition to DADT repeal explained

McCain's "charade of bigotry disguised as prudence..."

These scumbags will stop at nothing...

Hoax: McCain volunteer admits to fabricating attack story

Ashley Todd, the McCain campaign volunteer who was robbed and allegedly beaten after the assailant spotted a McCain bumper sticker on her car, has admitted to police that she made the whole thing up. KDKA:
Police tell KDKA that a campaign volunteer has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker. Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car. Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.This story was fishy from the start, and while it's sad that anyone would go to such lengths in order to fabricate a political story, I'm glad the truth has come out. This is probably the only time I'll ever say this, but kudos to Michelle Malkin and the some of the more reasonable right-wingers out there who called foul from the very start. Another interesting facet of the story: John Moody, executive VP of FOX News, is on record saying that, if true, this story could sink Obama. If not, says Moody, McCain is done. We're awaiting your update, John. Jon Perr adds: "Joe the Plumber" has been replaced by "Ashley the Fraud." UPDATE: From Jamie:
MSNBC is now reporting that in a press conference with police Todd said she didn't know how she got the B, but she may have done it herself. They also say she has had mental problems in the past. So far she is being charged with filing a false police report and other charges may still follow.
~

McCain Campaign fed the Hoax Racist Assault Story to the media!

Big news just hit the fan for McCain. I knew this was a bogus story when it came out that she refused medical treatment for her wounds. I've been through enough these last few years and know the pain would have been incredible and anyone of us would have begged for a doctor immediately. Well, it looks like the McCain campaign has their fingers all over this phony volunteer attack story and that's big trouble for him.
John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson." Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax...read on
This should hurt McCain severely. As FOX's Executive VP, John Moody said:
If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.
For Pittsburgh, a city that has done so much to shape American history over the centuries, another moment of truth is at hand.
Bozell's operation ran with it and attacked the media. "Obama Supporter Maims McCain Volunteer, Will Media Care?"Now I ask the question. Since McCain's camp was involved in trying to promote this race baiting attack story against Obama, will the media care? Let's hope so.
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"I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those."
-- John McCain in 2000, about robocalls smearing McCain made by the Bush campaign, some of which were made by FLS-Connect, a company owned by Jeff Larson.

"You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers..."
-- 2008 McCain campaign robocalls reportedly linked to a company owned by Larson.

just back away... slowwwwwly...

Former governor Milliken backs away from McCain

I'll say this for McCain/Palin - until the last few weeks I thought we already had the worst possible American citizens running the country. Now I feel like I owe Bush/Cheney an apology.

what I hate about Obama

He's got the Muslim - you can't just turn it off.

"He says he's not Muslim but I don't know if you can just turn it off like that..."

"These are low-information voters who don't read newspapers, barely watch TV news and aren't engaged in the issues..."

this is probably nothing to worry about (cont'd)

• • Member of a John McCain campaign crowd as McCain asked "Who is the real Barack Obama?" while questioning Obama's patriotism:

"A terrorist!"

• • Member of a Sarah Palin campaign crowd as Palin continued comparing Obama to terrorists:

"Kill him!"

If McCain looked impatient at times during last night's debate, it was probably because he was eager to get back to inciting violence.

living the bulls#i+ -- McCain wins!

He can actually communicate bulls#i+ backwards in time from the future. Take that, Bush!

Well, they're not lies if a P.O.W. tells them...

McCain Lies Watch: 56 and counting

McCain Contradicts Himself -- Yet Again
John McCain Abandons 26-Year Record Opposing Regulation
Unable to Understand Economy, McCain Suggests 9/11 Commission-Style Probe He Opposed

CNN Demolishes Every McCain Campaign Lie

Obama wants to teach sex to kindergarteners? Lie.
Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere? Lie.
Palin hasn’t taken earmarks as Governor? Lie.
Alaska produces 20% of America’s energy? Lie.
Palin visited Iraq and Ireland? Lie.
~

When even Karl Rove thinks you're an @sshole....

you're a YOOOOOOOOOGE @SSHOLE.

But when half the electorate is profoundly developmentally disabled, being an @sshole works.

Turdblossom: "There ought to be an adult who says, 'Do we really need to go that far in this ad?'"

Washington Post is SHOCKED to discover that McCain is an @SSHOLE

With a phony flap and a misleading attack ad, the McCain campaign sinks into silliness

How come the minute somebody mentions the word "pig," the Rethuglicans think they're talking about Palin? Oh... ok I guess I do kinda see that...

IT'S HARD to think of a presidential campaign with a wider chasm between the seriousness of the issues confronting the country and the triviality, so far anyway, of the political discourse. On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Sen. John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Sen. Barack Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.

Mr. Obama's supposedly offending remark was not only not offensive -- it also was not directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
. . .

"Obama's one accomplishment?" the narrator asks. "Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' -- to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama: wrong on education. Wrong for your family."

John McCain is a serious man who promised to wage a serious campaign. Win or lose, will he be able to look back on this one with pride? Right now, it's hard to see how.

also known as a LIE

Out of bounds: McCain ad misstates Obama sex-ed record

"This is a deliberately misleading accusation..."

That's the ticket.

My wife and I have decided that we can always use the tax cuts from the McCain/Palin administration to fly to Europe for a vacation/abortion for our son's girlfriends.

Questions? We don't want no stinkin' questions!

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Issue #1: Would you be less inclinded to vote for Barrack Hussein Obama if you knew that he has an illegitimate white baby?

McCain Sells His Soul: Hires Man Who Sunk His 2000 Campaign
By: Bill W. @ 11:00 AM - PDT

John McCain has claimed that he believes “there is a special place in hell” for Tucker Eskew and the others who were behind the push-poll that implanted the idea in S.C. voters’ minds in 2000 that he had fathered an illegitimate black child, but that sure didn’t stop him from hiring Eskew to help prepare Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Jake Tapper: McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000
Former officials of Sen. John McCain’s 2000 campaign expressed shock and disbelief Monday to learn than the GOP presidential nominee had hired South Carolina political consultant Tucker Eskew.
Eskew, along with Warren Tompkins and Neal Rhodes, were key members of then-Gov. George W. Bush’s South Carolina team during the 2000 primaries. McCain and his team long held Bush, Tompkins, Rhodes and Eskew responsible for the various smears against McCain and his family in the Palmetto state during that contentious contest. […]
Asked if the McCain campaign would have a comment about hiring one of the South Carolina strategists the senator and his 2000 campaign team once held responsible for smears against him, McCain 2008 spokesman Brian Rogers emailed, “No.”

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise after McCain hired Rove’s protegé two months ago and began running the negative campaign he pledged not to. There’s apparently no depth of depravity that McCain won’t stoop to and no issue he won’t flip-flop on in an attempt to win this election.

McCain dreams of being Teddy Roosevelt but without all the substance part....

Simply put, John McCain is a douchebag, but here's some more thoughtful commentary:

McCain has attacked Barack Obama for his popularity, on the advice of Karl Rove acolytes in his camp who think that being a global celebrity is a bad thing.

You want celebrity? As the most popular American in the dawning decade of the American Century, Teddy Roosevelt was a global superstar — “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” as Mark Twain wrote.

He spoke to throngs in Europe, gave lasting speeches at the Sorbonne and Oxford. Often, he parried with his foreign guests in their own language. During his travels throughout Europe, South America and Africa, he could not so much as bite into a sandwich without being asked to comment on the bread.

Stirring words meant something coming from Roosevelt. The man and the persona could shape world opinion.

Both McCain and Roosevelt are Republicans, though Roosevelt famously bolted from his party to run as a Progressive in 1912, trying for a third term after sitting out four years in favor of the befuddled William H. Taft.

But Roosevelt clearly tried to steer his party away from what would now be seen as its hard-right elements — big money, anti-environmentalism, race-baiting — into what he called in his autobiography “the fairly radical progressive party.”

Born of money in New York City, educated at Harvard and fussy in dress, Teddy Roosevelt might today be seen as, um, an elitist. But he turned against his class, not just busting the monopolies and promoting public ownership of natural resources, as most students of his presidency know, but taking hard verbal swipes at the predatory rich.

He called them “malefactors of great wealth” and “the most dangerous members of the criminal class — the criminals of great wealth,” in two of his best-known phrases.

Appalled by the historic gap between rich and poor, Roosevelt favored a national inheritance tax. “Of all the forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy,” he said.

A century later, in a time of similar disparity between rich and poor, McCain wants to cut the corporate tax rate, and keep those tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that ushered in the Bush age of privilege. His campaign is thick with lobbyists who embody everything about how power in Washington has shifted to the well-connected moneyed class.

“I have often been called a socialist,” Roosevelt wrote. In fact, he despised the far left as much as the far right. But he said, “I have always maintained that our worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.”

McCain sidles up to Big Oil and calls for more drilling, whereas Roosevelt went after the resource monopolies. When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to his campaign, he requested that it be sent back.

Teddy was also known for a big stick foreign policy and his heroics as a warrior; in that sense the McCain comparisons may be closer to the mark. Roosevelt was honest enough to admit that war could be stirring.

“All men who feel any power of joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart,” he wrote.

Yet, this saber-rattler was also a master diplomat, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for helping to resolve the Russo-Japanese conflict.

In at least one way, Roosevelt is closer to Obama. A prolific author who also penned more than 100,000 letters, Teddy wrote 15 books by his 40th birthday. Obama got his start as an author, and shows a literary flair rare among politicians.

On race, Roosevelt was a man of his time, sharing some of the more absurd anthropological notions of the day.

Yes, he brought the wrath of the South on him by hosting the black leader Booker T. Washington in the White House. Yet it was a different Roosevelt who wrote his friend Owen Wister on the question of what to do about “the negroes” in 1906.

“I entirely agree with you that as a race in the mass they are inferior to the whites,” he wrote. But he added, “I do not know a white man in the south who is as good a man as Booker Washington today.”

People - we need to do something with this:

Go here and you can leave comments and accumulate points to redeem for John McCain merchandise!

Basically, go around and seed blogs with comments following talking points from John McCain and then go and report them. Somebody will check it out, verify it, and then you get some points. Get enough points and you get a book that John McCain "wrote" - autographed. Or some other such bauble of love.

I'm going to leave a post over for Brain Dead Bob as well - letting him know he might be able to get an autographed hunting rifle or something....maybe this if you're really lucky!

More on the race - this New York Magazine article is good stuff...

I'm not happy with the passivity of Obama's campaign over the last five or six weeks, however, there's this feeling I have that Obama might be attempting to ride over this wave as a kind of inevitable reaction of fear to his candidacy. By allowing the fear to his candidacy to grow as ugly as possible as the Republicans seek to provoke him into a stupid response with their veritable chest-thumping "Obama's a traitor who wants to suck the gas out of your car and give it to the hoot owls while you eat out of a grocery's dumpster," it might be that at the end of this road he can come out with a some kind of sane response that gains some traction with voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida while at the same time giving the Republican attacks the true shape of their idiotic ludicrousness.

I fear though, that this isn't going to work. That the Republicans, on a national level, are very good at giving the electorate a framework through which to view the presidency and its responsibilities and necessities. I believe American voters have proven time and time again that they want somebody in there who is a ball-breaker, who won't take bullshit and who is kind of macho. This was where Hillary had her greatest success among Democratic voters and she rolled up pretty huge victories in some of the swing states - she wasn't talking issues when she was beginning to win.

As well, I think, and I know I am speaking in great generalities here, that the Republicans have done an excellent job of making decisions about things like the environment seem, time and time again, like a decision between pragmatism and loony-we-don't-care-how-much-this-hurts-you-as-long- as-it-doesn't-hurt-a-dolphin arguments. In fact, environmentalism, in pretty much every study when dealing with energy delivery or car-design and in many other directions, shows tremendous potential to actually grow the economy in some pretty exciting directions.

It's hard to imagine at this point that the election is going to be won on issues, it's another popularity contest and the way to win those is to paint mustaches and boogers on your opponent's face. I mean, who wants to hear about the detail points of saving a bleeding and rocky infrastructure when you can hear about how Obama did or did not visit troops and how come? It would be refreshing to hear more opinions about what needs to be done voiced by the American voter rather than on their opinions on one candidate or other. I think when voters are asked to respond on issues, many of them have salient and insightful points to make, sadly when asked to respond to the actors in this campaign, they seem, increasingly, to respond with the conventional fallacies that are taking the lead in determining where this election will lead.

This little article at New York Magazine seems like pretty good reading - and it's quick.

The Biggest Piece of Shit in America:

Steve Schmidt is a veteran campaign strategist and public relations expert. In his career to date he has been (from sourcewatch):

* Communications director for Senate campaign of Matt Fong. (1998)
* Chief strategist in charge of Supreme Court nominations of Samuel A. Alito. and Chief Justice John Roberts
* Counselor and spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney.
* Member of the exclusive "breakfast club" led by top White House adviser Karl Rove that ran President Bush's re-election campaign. (2004)
* Campaign Manager for re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. (2006)

Currently Steve Schmidt is working as a campaign strategist and advisor to 2008 Presidential campaign of Senator John McCain. On July 2, 2008, Schmidt was promoted to heading up day to day operations of the McCain campaign in response to concerns that the McCain campaign was losing ground to Obama.

Since that point, July 2, 2008 - the Republican attempt to win the presidency has reached new lows almost daily as McCain appears willing to sell whatever was left of his soul and the shine of his one heroic act to win the White House so that he can give his friends more money and fritter away whatever's left of the American economy and its standing in the world in the pursuit of giving that money to his friends.

This was the man who helped Frenchify John Kerry and who seems to understand that his position is basically only made in negative assertion of the other because his own candidate's positions are antithetical to any sane approach to government.

I despise McCain for his willingness to leave important issues in the stink of name-calling and pointless assertions of gym-attending, but it's the Steve Schmidts of the world who I hope to God one day are forced to give account of their actions to an awakened American public. And I hope on the day that happens that after giving account, he will have to climb back into the sewer he's emerged from and is never seen again.