Blue Hearts

Hey All,

Good news. The numbers are looking better and people are motivated and working hard. I walked precincts for 3 hours on Saturday. Although we encountered a number of "McPalin" supporters, we found a few undecideds and have reported them back to base camp. I'm hopeful all the work of so many people now will end up meaning targeted and effective work on 11/4.

Also, it's confirmed. Please come to an event Planned Parenthood is having that I'm co-chairing with Steve Chick. Christine Pelosi (speaker Nancy's daughter) is coming to town to give us a training session on her book, Campaign Boot Camp: Basic Training for Future Leaders.

She speaks about your call to service and how to be more effective in your efforts, whether it's for leadership or for your special causes.

When: Friday, Oct. 17
Time: 11:30-1:00
Where: 5252 Sunset Drive
Cost: $100, $500, $1000

Lunch and a book included!

Since I'm the one who asked Christine to come to KC (for the first time), I would REALLY appreciate your attendance at this event.

Also, if you're available, I'm co-hosting a fund raiser to help raise money to purchase Obama/Biden yard signs for out-state MO. This is a great way to be supportive of the cause, even if you're limited on time. The difference these signs can make in Republican areas might help sway voters. "If Joe is voting that way, I guess it's okay for me."

Please Join Us! Historic Journey: Round Two

Hosted By:

Pat Jordan/ Sharon & John Hoffman/ Marion Wheeler/ Robert Barrientos
Ursula Terrasi /Kristin Amend/ Gregory Glore /Marti Rigby


Barack Obama for President

Fund Raiser and Debate Watch*

5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Thursday, October 2nd

Harper’s – 18th & Vine

Bring Your Contribution

$100 (or However Much You Can Give)

No Reservations Required

Stop by For Volunteer Sign Up
Pick Up Yard Signs/Bumper Stickers/Buttons

Obama Still Needs Contributions and Volunteers!!!
He Still Needs You!!!

For Further Information Call

Pat Jordan 816.645.1052
Sharon Hoffman 816.221.9920
Marion Wheeler 816.213.3194
Kristin Amend 816.729.1138
Robert Barrientos 816.589.3580

* Vice Presidential Debate – St. Louis, Missouri



Super thanks,
Kristin



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GENERAL


Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2008
Sarah Palin's Myth of America
By JOE KLEIN

Sarah Palin has arrived in our midst with the force of a rocket-propelled grenade. She has boosted John McCain's candidacy and overwhelmed the presidential process in a way that no vice-presidential pick has since Thomas Eagleton did the precise opposite — sinking his sponsor, George McGovern, in 1972. Obviously, something beyond politics is happening here. We don't really know Palin as a politician yet, whether she is wise or foolhardy, substantive or empty. Our fascination with her — and it is a nonpartisan phenomenon — is driven by something more primal. The Palin surge illuminates the mythic power of the Republican Party's message since the advent of Ronald Reagan.

To start with the obvious, she's attractive. Her husband ("And two decades and five children later, he's still my guy...") is a hunk. They have a gorgeous family, made more touching and credible by the challenges their children face. Her voice is more distinctive than her looks: that flat, northern twang that screams, I'm just like you! Actually, the real message is: I'm just like you want to be, a brilliantly spectacular ... average American. The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: "We grow good people in our small towns ..." And then added, "I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America."

Except that's not really true. We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American ... includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were — at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia for a courtly antebellum South that never really existed.

During the past 50 years, the rest of the country has caught up to the South in the nostalgia department. We lost a war in Vietnam; Iraq hasn't gone so well either. And there are two other developments that have cut into the sense of American perfection. The middle class has begun to lose altitude — there isn't the certainty anymore that our children will live better than we do. More important, the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 — the widespread use of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the feminist and gay-rights revolutions, the breakdown of the two-parent family. With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns. The political impact was a conservative reaction of enormous vehemence.

Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street ... at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.


http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1840388,00.html
Copyright 2008 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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September 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in
kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms.
Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy
Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the 0Aheckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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chicagotribune.com
Memo to Obama
Dumb it down
Clarence Page
September 17, 2008


After months in the lead, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has slipped in the polls to dead even with Republican challenger Sen. John McCain.

As we enter the season of high political anxiety, here's my advice to Democrats: Dumb it down.

I don't need to give that advice to Republicans. They've been dumbing it down for years. That's why they keep winning.

Do I sound condescending? Do I sound like I am talking down to Joe and Josephine Six Pack out there in working-class America? No way. I come from working-class America. I know. It takes smarts to dumb the issues down well enough to help people make an intelligent choice.

Winston Churchill was condescending. "The best argument against democracy," he is widely quoted as saying, "is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter."

But Churchill was old-fashioned. He apparently was raised, as I was, with the notion that voters in a democracy should seek the best and the brightest to run their governments. "Elites," in other words. Elite is a dirty word these days. It sounds too much like "elitist," which to most people is the same as a snob. Nobody likes snobs. Not even snobs.

Democrats too often have missed that point. Clark Clifford, a Democratic lawyer and Washington wise man, called Ronald Reagan an "amiable dunce." As if Reagan cared. The amiable dunce happily smiled his way through two successful presidential campaigns, right into the history books as a conservative icon.

President George W. Bush won re-election, too, although hardly anyone has associated him with the word "genius." His approval ratings have fallen to around 33 percent from around 80 percent after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet, the big message in his party's recent convention went sort of like this: Washington is messed up, so if you're looking for real change, vote for the same party that put you in this mess. The result? His party's ticket is well-positioned to pull off a victory. Why? A big reason, as everyone seems to know these days, is how McCain and Sarah Palin, his pick for vice president, have outmatched Obama's elegant charisma in winning the support of working-class white voters.

This is hardly a new problem for Democrats. Ever since the late 1960s, Republicans have achieved remarkable success with tagging Democrats as "limousine liberals," even when they don't have limousines. The term actually serves as shorthand for "people who are not like you" and "don't share your values." And, you know what? Sometimes the shorthand is accurate. It's not that Democrats don't share the values of ordinary hardworking Americans. It's just that their candidates sometimes have a hard time expressing those values.

That makes the upcoming presidential debates an acid test for Obama. He has shown great eloquence at speeches but uneven performances in debates. His college professor side tends to show. He gets too conversational. He does not speak in bumper stickers. His speech often hesitates and ponders too much—like someone who is still reconsidering their views. Debates are a time to speak not just eloquently but strategically. Even when you're uncertain, try to sound certain.

This problem showed itself almost painfully during a televised forum with McCain at the Saddleback Church in California in Obama's passionless answer to the question of when he thinks life begins. He said the answer was "above my pay grade." McCain simply said he believed life begins "at conception." The conservative crowd cheered. McCain won the moment by leaving the details of his belief, like his past support for embryonic stem-cell research, for some other time.

Michael Dukakis revealed a similar absence of human emotion when asked during a 1988 presidential debate whether his opposition to capital punishment would change if his own wife were raped and murdered. With his passionless answer, he lost the evening. You don't have to be a snob to sound like one. Or a zombie.

Al Gore ran into a similar problem back in 2000. The vice president obviously had a more confident command of the facts and policies than Texas Gov. George W. Bush. But Gore let his confidence get away from him. His audible, impatient sighs reminded many of the smarty-pants kid who could never let the rest of the class forget that he was the smartest kid in the school.

Bush, meanwhile, reminded everybody of the sociable but less-mentally-agile kid, the "amiable dunce" to whom everybody wanted to lend a hand.

That vision came to mind last week as I watched Palin try to answer ABC's Charles Gibson's question about "the Bush doctrine." She obviously didn't know much about what Gibson was talking about, but she gave a decent boilerplate version of Bush's foreign policy. Synopsis: We got to get them terrorists.

That's the kind of answer voters tend to like. Short and strong. It sounds resolute, even if it lacks the nuance or flexibility that virtues like wisdom and experience bring. We Americans like candidates who share our values and at least sound like people who know what they are talking about. We get fooled a lot.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune


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Op-Ed Contributor
Blocking Care for Women

By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON and CECILE RICHARDS
Published: September 18, 2008

LAST month, the Bush administration launched the latest salvo in its eight-year campaign to undermine women’s rights and women’s health by placing ideology ahead of science: a proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would govern family planning. It would require that any health care entity that receives federal financing — whether it’s a physician in private practice, a hospital or a state government — certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way with medical services they find objectionable.

Laws that have been on the books for some 30 years already allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further, ensuring that all employees and volunteers for health care entities can refuse to aid in providing any treatment they object to, which could include not only abortion and sterilization but also contraception.
Health and Human=2 0Services estimates that the rule, which would affect nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics and other health care providers, would cost $44.5 million a year to administer. Astonishingly, the department does not even address the real cost to patients who might be refused access to these critical services. Women patients, who look to their health care providers as an unbiased source of medical information, might not even know they were being deprived of advice about their options or denied access to care.

The definition of abortion in the proposed rule is left open to interpretation. An earlier draft included a medically inaccurate definition that included commonly prescribed forms of contraception like birth control pills, IUD’s and emergency contraception. That language has been removed, but because the current version includes no definition at all, individual health care providers could decide on their own that birth control is the same as abortion.

The rule would also allow providers to refuse to participate in unspecified “other medical procedures” that contradict their religious beliefs or moral convictions. This, too, could be interpreted as a free pass to deny access to contraception.
Many circumstances unrelated to reproductive health could also fall under the umbrella of “other medical procedures.” Could physicians object to helping patients whose sexual orientation they find objectionable? Could a receptionist refuse to book an appointment for an H.I.V. test? What about an emergency room doctor who wishes to deny emergency contraception to a rape victim? Or a pharmacist who prefers not to refill a birth control prescription?

The Bush administration argues that the rule is designed to protect a provider’s conscience. But where are the protections for patients?

The 30-day comment period on the proposed rule runs until Sept. 25. Everyone who believes that women should have full access to medical care should make their voices heard. Basic, quality care for millions of women is at stake.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic senator from New York. Cecile Richards is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
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John McCain's hot air

He may claim to be green, but McCain's environmental record is every bit as dirty as that of Sen. James "global warming is a hoax" Inhofe.
By Joseph Romm

Sep. 20, 2008 | Few politicians in history have more successfully sold a phony image about caring for the environment than Sen. John McCain. His deceptions and distortions and lies would fill a book.

Understandably, an overwhelming majority of the public strongly believes we need a major push toward alternative energy. So as a presidential candidate, McCain has repeatedly claimed to be a long-standing supporter of clean energy.

"We must shift our entire energy economy toward new and cleaner power sources such as wind, solar, biofuels. It will include a variety of new automotive and fuel technologies," he claims in a recent ad. When it comes to breaking with the energy policies of the current and past administrations, and achieving energy security for America, he says, "I know how to do that, and I will do it."

If McCain knows how to do it, it is a better-kept secret than the location of Osama bin Laden. McCain has a two-decade history in Washington of consistently opposing all efforts to shift our economy to clean energy.

The facts are clear. All you have to do is look at his voting record. It reveals that McCain has long been one of the strongest opponents of clean energy in Congress, with a record matching that of James Inhofe, the most hardcore global-warming denier in the Senate, who comes from the heart of the oil patch in Oklahoma.

Recently the Associated Press noted that "McCain has not shown up for eight Senate votes last year and this year to extend [renewable energy] tax credits, which expire at the end of this year. The last such vote was July 30." Yet at an Aspen Institute meeting in August, when McCain was asked about those missed votes, he simply lied to the audience.

"I have a long record of that support of alternate energy," McCain said. "I come from a state where we have sunshine 360 days a year ... I've always been for all of those and I have not missed any crucial vote."

In fact, on Dec. 13, 2007, the Senate was considering a bill to spend $13 billion on renewable power over five years. The cloture vote to allow the amendment to be brought to the Senate floor required 60 votes; it received 59 for, 40 against, and one senator absent. Yes, you guessed it: No McCain. A spokesman later said he would have voted to block the bill.

Again, in February, the Senate tried to include in a stimulus package an extension of the renewable tax credit, plus nearly $3 billion more for alternate energy. The cloture vote again failed 59-40-1. And again, McCain's absence didn't kill an unpopular alternative energy bill -- it stopped a popular bill from even coming to a vote.

Yet McCain continues to insist: "I have not missed any crucial vote." He would seem to be either a practiced liar who can fake sincerity, a pathological liar who believes his lies, or a man with simply no memory of key events several months earlier.

As for McCain's "long record of that support of alternate energy," consider the votes on renewable energy funding and a federal "renewable portfolio standard" (RPS) that he did show up for this decade:

Tax credits for clean energy R&D (2001)
Require a 20 percent RPS where utilities buy 20 percent clean energy ('02)
Reduce 20 percent RPS requirement ('02)
Waive 20 percent RPS if utilities balk ('02)
Increase clean energy R&D funding ('05)
Clean energy incentives ('05)
An RPS to require utilities [to] buy some clean energy ('05)
Tax oil companies windfall profits to fund clean energy ('05)
In every case, McCain voted against renewables, as did Sen. "Global warming is 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people'" Inhofe. On the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the biggest congressional effort to push alternative energy in more than a decade, McCain voted against it along with just 11 other senators. Even Inhofe voted for it.

Why does McCain consistently vote against renewable energy, even though he comes from a state that has enough solar energy to power the entire country, a state rich in renewable-power entrepreneurs? Other than the fact that conservatives have a long track record of opposing renewable energy, McCain is technologically out of touch.

When few in the media were paying attention to his campaign last December, McCain said that "the truly clean technologies don't work." He claimed that "most every expert that I know says that if you maximize [renewables] in every possible way," the contribution they would make is "very small."

This quote reveals what a narrow circle of experts McCain relies on. Just what we need, another president in a bubble. And one that is unable to hear the truth, even when it is presented to him by another hardcore conservative. After T. Boone Pickens explained to McCain in person this summer that we could get 20 percent of our electricity from wind in one decade, McCain said he disagreed with Pickens, and that renewable energy can't meet much of the demand required over the next 20 years. Even the Bush administration's own Energy Department said we could get most of our electricity growth over the next two decades from wind power alone.

OK, McCain thinks renewables "don't work." What about fuel-efficient vehicles? McCain responded to a Science Debate 2008 question on global warming: "I have long supported CAFE standards -- the mileage requirements that automobile manufacturers' cars must meet."

That statement is somewhere between a lie and self-deception. The standards were in place before he got to the Senate, so his "support" was meaningless. In his entire 24 years in Congress, McCain had precisely one opportunity to vote for a serious bipartisan compromise on a major increase in CAFE standards. That was the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which required a 40 percent increase in fuel economy standards by 2020. This was the first time fuel economy standards were substantially changed since the 1970s. McCain didn't bother to show up. Back in 2003, a measure was introduced to improve the government system for testing fuel economy, which was notoriously unreliable and well known to overstate the actual fuel economy of cars. McCain and Inhofe voted against it.

What about energy efficiency and conservation? In 2002, the Senate voted to drop a measure encouraging the efficient generation of electricity. McCain and Inhofe were among those who voted to drop it. Another 2002 vote on weakening appliance-efficiency requirements passed by a mere 52-47. McCain and Inhofe both voted to weaken the requirements. This summer, McCain had the audacity to mock Barack Obama for talking about energy efficiency measures, like inflating one's tires, even though those measures would save more than 10 times as much oil as ending the moratorium on coastal drilling would.

What about McCain's support for the environment in general? Back in 1996, McCain wrote a New York Times Op-Ed titled "Nature Is Not a Liberal Plot" that laid out his vision of a green(washed) Republican Party. It touted his work with Morris Udall, the former Democratic congressman from Arizona, to safeguard Arizona wild lands, including the Grand Canyon. But the Op-Ed also explained the importance of maintaining and improving the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. McCain wrote, "Our nation's continued prosperity hinges on our ability to solve environmental problems and sustain the natural resources on which we all depend."

And yet in 1994, McCain had voted to let coal states bypass the Clean Water Act. In 1996, he voted against increased EPA funding to clean up Superfund toxic-waste sites, where he was joined by Inhofe but opposed by most of his fellow Republicans. Again, in 1996, he voted with Inhofe to gut nuclear waste disposal laws. In 2003, he voted with Inhofe against requiring polluters to pay for cleanup of Superfund waste sites.

When you add in McCain's legislative efforts to cut funding for the most energy-efficient form of national travel -- passenger rail -- you find that McCain has voted against clean energy and the environment -- or said he would have done so -- more than 50 times since the early 1990s. And McCain has voted with the Oklahoma oilman and global-warming denier a remarkable 42 out of 44 times.

But what about McCain's support for action on global warming? True, he and Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a global warming bill several years ago that would have put in place a mandatory cap on emissions and then set up a trading system to establish a price for carbon. But even those bills contained not a single substantive policy to promote energy efficiency and conservation. And since beginning his recent run for office, McCain has moved farther away from a serious position on the issue.

He now says his carbon emissions cap is not "mandatory." He never even mentioned global warming or climate change once in his big convention speech, laying out his top priorities for the nation, and he chose a running mate who questions whether global warming is the result of human action. How committed to the environment does that sound?

The fact that McCain endorsed a gas tax holiday, a rollback of the small federal gas tax this summer, when gasoline prices exceeded $4, suggests that if energy prices rise in the future, as they inevitably will, he will roll back any significant carbon price too. And that would gut the whole effort to reduce emissions.

At this point, it is impossible to believe anything that John McCain says. The only thing dirtier than his lies is his environmental record.

-- By Joseph Romm


Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.


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This is Your Nation on White Privilege

September, 14 2008By Tim Wise
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For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull. For review copies or interview requests, please reply to publicity@softskull.com

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Mean girl

Sarah Palin has a way of using "old boys" -- then dumping them when they become inconvenient.
By David Talbot

Sep. 23, 2008 | Before Sarah Palin decided to run for the Wasilla mayor's office in 1996 against incumbent John Stein, the Palins and Steins were friends. John Stein had helped launch Palin's political career, mentoring the hockey mom during her 1994 run for City Council, along with veteran council member Nick Carney. Stein's wife, Karen Marie, went to aerobics classes with Palin.

But when she announced her candidacy for Stein's seat, vowing to overturn the city's "old boy" establishment, a different Sarah Palin emerged. "Things got very ugly," recalled Naomi Tigner, a friend of the Steins. "Sarah became very mean-spirited."

The Wasilla mayor's seat is nonpartisan, and Mayor Stein, a former city planner who had held the post for nine years, ran a businesslike campaign that stressed his experience and competency. But Palin ignited the traditionally low-key race with scorching social issues, injecting "God, guns and abortion into the race -- things that had nothing to do with being mayor of a small town," according to Tigner.

Palin's mayoral campaign rode the wave of conservative, evangelical fervor that was sweeping Alaska in the '90s. Suddenly candidates' social values, not their ability to manage the roads and sewer systems, were dominating the debate. "Sarah and I were both Republicans, but this was an entirely new slant to local politics -- much more aggressive than anything I'd ever seen," said Stein, looking back at the election that put Palin on the political map.

There was a knife-sharp, personal edge to Palin's campaign that many locals found disturbing, particularly because of the warm relationship between Palin and Stein before the race.

"I called Sarah's campaign for mayor the end of the age of innocence in Wasilla," said Carney.

Even though Palin knew that Stein is a Protestant Christian, from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, her campaign began circulating the word that she would be "Wasilla's first Christian mayor." Some of Stein's supporters interpreted this as an attempt to portray Stein as Jewish in the heavily evangelical community. Stein himself, an eminently reasonable and reflective man, thinks "they were redefining Christianity to mean born-agains."

The Palin campaign also started another vicious whisper campaign, spreading the word that Stein and his wife -- who had chosen to keep her own last name when they were married -- were not legally wed. Again, Palin knew the truth, Stein said, but chose to muddy the waters. "We actually had to produce our marriage certificate," recalled Stein, whose wife died of breast cancer in 2005 without ever reconciling with Palin.

"I had a hand in creating Sarah, but in the end she blew me out of the water," Stein said, sounding more wearily ironic than bitter. "Sarah's on a mission, she's an opportunist."

According to some political observers in Alaska, this pattern -- exploiting "old-boy" mentors and then turning against them for her own advantage -- defines Sarah Palin's rise to power. Again and again, Palin has charmed powerful political patrons, and then rejected them when it suited her purposes. She has crafted a public image as a clean politics reformer, but in truth, she has only blown the whistle on political corruption when it was expedient for her to do so. Above all, Palin is a dynamo of ambition, shrewdly maneuvering her way through the notoriously compromised world of Alaska politics, making and breaking alliances along the way.

"When Palin takes credit for knocking off the old-boy network in Alaska, it drives me crazy," said Andrew Halcro, an Anchorage businessman and radio talk show host who ran against her in the 2006 GOP primary race for governor. "Sarah certainly availed herself of that network whenever it was expedient."

With its frontier political infrastructure and its geyser of oil money, Alaska has become as notorious as a third-world petro-kingdom. In recent years, scandal has seeped throughout the state's political circles -- and at the center of this widening spill is Alaska's powerful patronage king, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, and wealthy oil contractor Bill Allen.

Despite Palin's reform reputation, she has maintained a delicate relationship with Stevens over the years -- courting his endorsement for governor, then distancing herself after his 2007 federal indictment on corruption charges, and then cozying up again when it appeared he might survive politically. As for Allen -- the former oil roughneck whose North Slope wealth has greased many a palm in Alaska -- Palin found nothing wrong with his money when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002.

But once a powerful patron becomes a major liability, Palin is quick to jettison him. Alaska state Rep. Victor Kohring, another key Palin supporter during her political rise in Mat-Su Valley, found this out after he became a victim of the FBI's oil corruption sting operation. Kohring, who used to accompany Palin on her campaign jaunts, angrily points out that he was abandoned by his fellow Christian conservative before he even went to trial. The former Alaska legislator, who now resides in the Taft minimum security prison outside Bakersfield, Calif., communicated his views of Palin through his friend, Fred James. Kohring, said James, feels "betrayed" by Palin.

"After Vic's indictment, she didn't give him the time of day," said James. "She never went to him personally and asked if the charges were true. This is a man who helped her get started in government. She turned her back on him well before he even went on trial. Vic resents the hell out of that. He thinks she's an opportunist, pure and simple. She saw how the press were moving on Vic, and even before he had his day in court, she called on him to resign his office. He regarded that as a great insult, a personal betrayal."

Palin's reputation as a reformer stems primarily from her headline-grabbing ouster of state GOP chairman Randy Ruedrich from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flagrant conflict-of-interest abuses. At the time, Palin was heralded in the press as a whistle-blower, but it was later revealed that she was guilty of the same charge that she had brought against Ruedrich -- using state office equipment for partisan political business. (While still mayor of Wasilla, she sent out campaign fundraising appeals from her office during her race for lieutenant governor.)

Others suspect that Palin had self-serving reasons for taking on Ruedrich and resigning her seat on the commission. The state energy panel had ignited a public firestorm in Palin's home base, Mat-Su Valley, by secretly leasing sub-surface drilling rights on thousands of residential lots to a Colorado-based gas producer. Outraged farmers and homeowners, who woke up one morning to find drilling equipment being hauled onto their land, were in open revolt against the commission. While Palin initially supported the leasing plan, she was shrewd enough to realize it was political suicide to alienate conservative property owners in her own district. According to some accounts, she was also growing tired of commuting to state offices in Anchorage and poring over dry, tedious technical manuals for her job. All in all, it seemed like the right move to jump ship -- and going out a hero was an added plus.

"Sarah quit the commission to make political hay," Halcro asserted.

In the end, Ruedrich admitted wrongdoing and settled the ethics case by paying $12,000 in civil fines. But Palin did not drive the well-connected Republican operative into exile. In fact, he remains the party's state chairman and he could be seen on the floor of the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., hugging the newly crowned vice-presidential candidate and cheering her feisty speech against greedy old boys like, well, him.

"The idea that Sarah shook up the state's old-boy network is one big fantasy, it's complete bullshit," Halcro said. "She got all this public acclaim for throwing people who backed her under the bus -- but she only did it after they became expendable, when she no longer needed them.

"The good old boys in Alaska are still the good old boys -- they're alive and kicking. Randy is still running the Republican Party -- he wasn't happy about being turned into a national poster boy for corruption, but he went along with the program. Ted Stevens is still running for reelection. And [scandal-tainted Alaska Rep.] Don Young is, too. So where's the new era of change that Palin supposedly brought to Alaska?"

-- By David Talbot

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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Per Karren, this 5 min. film is one of the most thought provoking, and frightening, things I’ve seen or heard about the possible outcome of a McCain presidency. K



http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=PdJUCU1UH2w&rel=0&eurl=http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/9/55118/43459/1023/591906&iurl=http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/PdJUCU1UH2w/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskII4NUg-YFAZ-LARZrzvpes&use_get_video_info=1&load_modules=1&fs=1&hl=en&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1


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The Huffington Post
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Nico Pitney
McCain Wants A Time Out -- But Why?
September 24, 2008 03:30 PM

Why does John McCain suddenly want to suspend his presidential campaign and postpone Friday's debate? His campaign surrogates are saying it's a typical "maverick" move, that McCain is simply "putting country first." Let's look at the evidence:

1) As Ben Smith notes, McCain's move "is a mark, most of all, that he doesn't like the way this campaign is going. ... The only thing that's changed in the last 48 hours is the public polling."

2) The idea of uniting the campaigns to find a bipartisan solution to the Wall Street crisis wasn't even McCain's idea. A few minutes ago, Obama spokesman Bill Burton emailed to reporters:

"At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama's call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details."
3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn't cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so he can return to Washington?

4) A reminder: President Bush was able to debate John Kerry while he was president. For all of his sudden urgency, McCain acknowledged just yesterday that he had not even read the administration's three-page bailout proposal.

5) It's not at all clear that having McCain and Obama back in DC will actually help. "What does seem apparent, though, is that putting the two candidates in the negotiating room is far more likely to distract--and derail--negotiations than having them out on the hustings," Jonathan Cohn writes at the New Republic.

It's impossible to know why McCain chose this course, but it sure seems like more of a political stunt than a maverick moment.


Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. | Archive | User Agreement | Privacy | Comment Policy | About Us | Powered by Movable Type

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Don't forget to look at the two youtubes at the end! K


The economic crisis we are witnessing is a game strategy.

Zugzwang (German for compulsion to move) occurs when a player is forced to make an undesirable move. The player is put at a disadvantage because he would prefer to pass and make no move, but a move has to be made, all of which weaken his position. Situations involving zugzwang occur uncommonly, but when they do occur, it is almost always in the endgame, where there are fewer choices of available moves.

It's now being reported that the Paulson Plan is several months old. The plan was intentionally withheld from Congress until exactly one week before the election recess. It was held back to force the Democrats to make a move under intense time pressure. Think about it! Bush has used disaster after disaster to force concessions and grab power. This is a classic Bush/Cheney tactic and political extortion of the highest order.

When you are in zugzwang, any move you make is bad.

If the Democrats support the plan and win the election, they are left with no money for any social programs and effectively have their hands tied for four years. If they don't support the plan and allow more failures, they risk losing the election.

Marcy Kaptur's two minute speech before Congress needs to be seen by every American voter. Please send this to your friends. Get this out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S27yitK32ds&eurl=http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/09/23/sheehan/index.html


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD62gNi9WE
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Where were the cops?

By Garrison Keillor
Published: September 25, 2008

It's just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don't. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash - oh God, that is way too real - everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.

On the other hand, the America's federal bailout of the financial market (yawn) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph.

The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop."

Where is the outrage?

Poor Senator Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men's john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401(k) go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it's business as usual.

John McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please - remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators in behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things?

McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn't their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that's why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand Americans trust them because they're packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?

It wasn't their money they were playing with. It was yours. Where were the cops?

What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful.

First, there was McCain's exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn't funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.

McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in a department store window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for a while and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here?

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty." Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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by Sam Harris:

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who, being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy, could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story, but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with millions of Americans, but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country, even the welfare of our species, as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down's syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents, and her supporters celebrate, the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex, and dangerous, with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
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This is a free, downloadable movie. Check it out. K


Thanks for signing up to download Slacker Uprising. It is available for free as a gift from me to all of you. And you have my permission to share it or show it in any way you see fit.
Watch it all: http://slackeruprising.com/download/location.php?utm_medium=download&utm_source=31903287

At that link, there are five ways you can watch it free and without advertising:

blip.tv is providing streaming right from slackeruprising.com, free of commercials and advertising.
Amazon Video on Demand is providing a higher resolution version of the above stream for people with lots of bandwidth.
iTunes makes it easy for you to download "Slacker Uprising" on your iTunes, iPod, or Apple TV, and view it there or transmit it to your television. This way, the film can be portable as well as for home viewing.
Hypernia is providing bandwidth and servers to host MPEG4 and DivX versions of "Slacker Uprising" online, so you can burn a DVD or download the film to watch on your computer, XBOX, or PS3.
Lycos is providing free streaming of the film and an on-demand version.
Stream it, download it, burn it now. It's the first time a major feature-length film is being released for free on the internet. You can be part of this historic moment by logging on now!

Enjoy!!

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
SlackerUprising.com

P.S. Remember, we're doing something that's never been done, so I have no idea how it will all go! Don't give up if it seems to go slow (like with any streaming, give the downloading a head start before you hit play), and don't forget there are two places where you can actually download it to your hard drive and three ways to stream it. You can get to all of them at the link above.

P.P.S. If you're not yet registered to vote, here's a good link: https://www.voteforchange.com/.
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McCain's looming debate debacle

Leading Republicans say that, short of total gridlock on the economic bailout, a McCain no-show on Friday would be "a huge political mistake."
By Walter Shapiro

Sep. 26, 2008 | As John McCain and Barack Obama met with George W. Bush at the White House Thursday afternoon on the economic rescue plan, the Republican co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates exuded optimism that the two candidates would debate Friday night in Mississippi as planned. Frank Fahrenkopf said in a telephone interview, "If they all come out and say there is an agreement, it would be very hard for John McCain not to go to Oxford."

Instead the initial impression after the White House meeting was that congressional gridlock trumped any effort to save greed-locked Wall Street. Even a glimmer of a deal on a bailout would probably bail McCain out of a tight spot. The Arizona senator threw the political world into a tizzy Wednesday when he suddenly announced that he believed it would be inappropriate to debate with Obama until the financial crisis was resolved. But 24 hours later, this hard-line position was facing GOP ridicule, at least in not-for-attribution conversations.

"Unless the negotiators are sitting in the Oval Office with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi at 8:59 p.m. on Friday night, it would be a huge political mistake for McCain not to debate," said a prominent Republican with longtime ties to McCain. It would be difficult politically to explain a no-show McCain if the lights were dim at the White House and Congress, if still in session, is just continuing to go through the motions.

A common misconception is that the 90-minute debate would feature Obama, moderator Jim Lehrer and an empty chair if McCain clung to his resolve to stay in Washington. But such a scene -- frequently invoked by talk-radio hosts and bloggers -- is about the only thing guaranteed not to happen on Friday night. "The law requires that there must be two candidates for a debate," said Fahrenkopf, a former GOP national chairman, who helped establish the bipartisan debate commission in 1986. "If we did anything else, we would be making an in-kind contribution to the Obama campaign."

Amid the market mayhem and economic anxiety, it had seemed odd that the first debate -- at the insistence of both candidates -- would revolve around foreign policy and national security. But assuming that the Friday night fight in Oxford actually comes off, the candidates will not have to go into contortions to turn every Iraq question into a Lehman Brothers answer.

"Long ago it was decided that this would be a debate on global affairs, and I can't think of a better opportunity to talk about a global financial crisis," Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, said at a breakfast with reporters Thursday morning. Gibbs went on to reveal -- and Fahrenkopf later confirmed -- that the debate producers had informed both campaigns that there would indeed be questions about the financial meltdown.

Even though McCain has gambled that the voting public's clamor for debates can be delayed at least through the weekend, Obama has the most to gain or lose when the candidates finally stand behind their dueling lecterns. As a freshman senator, who was in the Illinois Legislature just four years ago, Obama must in the first 30 minutes or so of the debate establish himself as a credible 44th president. During the first presidential debate 48 years ago, this was the major hurdle that John Kennedy surmounted, putting to rest his image as a callow, playboy senator.

In the immediate aftermath, debates are rated by their gotcha moments and zinger one-liners. But what may linger in the minds of the 20 percent or so of the electorate who are still up for grabs are deeper perceptions about the candidates. Does Obama, for instance, come across as strong enough to survive GOP attacks claiming that he (like most Democrats) is weak on national security? McCain's burden is apt to be a certain president named Bush. Can the hawkish Arizona senator talk about Iraq or Iran without scaring persuadable voters that this is a movie they have already seen -- an administration that would be at war without end, amen?

But even if the debate rehearsals have been curtailed by the bailout bargaining in Washington, both Obama and McCain have a pretty good idea what will be coming their way on Friday night -- or whenever they finally face off. As Gibbs said candidly at the Thursday breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, "I think everyone has a pretty good sense of what the topics will be. We've been through a number of these debates and obviously a lot of what I think will be asked Friday night is what you read about in the papers. I don't think there are going to be a lot of surprises."

Of course, those words were uttered before the congressional negotiations started to resemble chaos theory. So even as debate preparations go forward in Oxford, the biggest surprise Friday night may be if John McCain actually shows up.

-- By Walter Shapiro

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About John McCain

Sen. John McCain is not just the Republican candidate for president, he is also frighteningly out of touch on issues crucial to the women of the United States. By now, many people have heard about the wildly popular condoms the Planned Parenthood Action Fund passed out at the Democratic National Convention. On them, we pulled together the top 10 things every voter needs to know about John McCain before this Election Day. Check them out:

1. John McCain opposes equal pay legislation, saying it wouldn’t do "anything to help the rights of women."
2. John McCain opposes requiring health care plans to cover birth control.
3. John McCain opposes comprehensive, medically accurate sex education.
4. John McCain opposes funding to prevent unintended and teen pregnancies.
5. John McCain opposes funding for public education about emergency contraception.
6. John McCain opposes restoring family planning services for low-income women.
7. John McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and says it should be overturned.
8. John McCain wants to nominate Supreme Court justices who are "clones" of conservative Justices Alito and Roberts.
9. John McCain said he was "stumped" when asked whether contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV.
10. In his 25 years in Washington, DC, John McCain has voted anti-choice125 times!

Get the Facts on Governor Sarah Palin

Alaska Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the wrong choice for women.

Choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate makes clear that Senator John McCain is completely out of touch on the issues that matter to American women.

Here are the facts:

· CNN reported that women were required to pay for their own rape examinations in the town of Wasilla, Alaska, while Palin was mayor.
. board saying she was as "pro-life as any candidate can be."
· pregnancy continued. I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending an innocent’s life.” RHRealtyCheck.com writes: "This means that the health of the mother would never be a consideration, only if her life was actually threatened. She does not support abortion rights for victims of rape or incest either.”
· Gov. Palin backed abstinence-only programs during her 2006 race for the governor of Alaska.
· measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation — 'SP' — Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.”
· extreme restrictions aren’t as extreme as Palin’s personal views. She is on the record as opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
· continued, saying, "the State Supreme Court has failed Alaska by separating parents from their children during such a critical decision, moving in the exact opposite direction from the law's intent." She also directed the attorney general to file for a rehearing.

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Subject: like rats leaving a sinking ship ...

September 26, 2008
Palin should step down, conservative commentator says
Posted: 02:27 PM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

Palin was in New York City Thursday.

(CNN) – Prominent conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, an early supporter of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, said Friday recent interviews have shown the Alaska governor is "out of her league" and should leave the GOP presidential ticket for the good of the party.

The criticism in Parker's Friday column is the latest in a recent string of negative assessments toward the McCain-Palin candidacy from prominent conservatives.

It was fun while it lasted," Parker writes. "Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who is clearly out of her league."

Palin's interview with Couric drew criticism when the Alaska governor was unable to provide an example of when John McCain had pushed for more regulation of Wall Street during his Senate career. Palin also took heat for defending her foreign policy credentials by suggesting Russian leaders enter Alaska airspace when they come to America. Palin was also criticized last week for appearing not to know what the Bush Doctrine is during an interview with Charlie Gibson.

“If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself," Parker also writes. "If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true."

Parker, who praised McCain's "keen judgment" for picking Palin earlier this month and wrote the Alaska governor is a "perfect storm of God, Mom and apple pie," now says Palin should step down from the ticket.

“Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves," Parker writes. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country."

Parker's comments follow those by prominent conservatives David Brooks, George Will, and David Frum who have all publicly questioned Palin's readiness to be vice president.

"Sarah Palin has many virtues," Brooks wrote in a recent column. "If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."
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Must see video. K


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc

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The Huffington Post
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008
Carl Bernstein
Posted September 25, 2008 | 03:53 PM (EST)

The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com

In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."

I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and - for a Vanity Fair cover profile -- filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.

"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated -- whatever his words -- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.

Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest" -- an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."

McCain, I wrote for Vanity Fair, "often speaks of the duty to follow his conscience in politics, rather than polls or party discipline. This, he says, comes from having escaped death and becoming 'more aware of the transience of everything we do.'"

"I've always had a pretty good idea about how to define something as to whether it's right or wrong," he told me. "I don't mean that I'm better or worse than anybody else. I just mean that when I see an issue and think about it and talk to people, I do generally have the ability to know what's the right course of action, even if it may not be what the majority wants. So I have a certain amount of confidence that I don't have to have a majority opinion on my side."

It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."

--------

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was -- he said -- convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.

The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."

Meanwhile, McCain's frequent invocations of the need for bi-partisan statesmanship are interspersed with the angry themes of cultural warfare and of the Republican convention orchestrated by his handlers, the most dominant of them practitioners from the campaigns of George W. Bush: attacks on "tax-and-spend Democrats," on the dependable liberal bogeyman, on "the angry Left," on Constitution-rewriting federal judges (including, incongruously, three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold McCain's singular legislative achievement: the campaign-finance act he authored with Democrat Russ Feingold).

"If hypocrisy were gold, the Capitol would be Fort Knox," McCain once famously said. "Some of those guys," he said, referring to his fellow senators, "have they even had lives? What have they done?" He added, "Aw, jeez, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets me into trouble." Indeed.

McCain's first choices to be his running mate were former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut, and former vice presidential nominee of his former party. Neither passed the ideological litmus test of the Republican-Right -- "The Base" -- because each holds pro-choice views. Certainly both are qualified to step into the presidency in terms of national security credentials -- regardless of whether one agrees with their particular politics -- in the event of the death of the president. McCain's "Hail Mary" pick -- Palin -- was hastily decided on the next-to-last day of the Democratic convention, by which time it was evident that Obama's convention was winning over independent voters; all that remained was the final night and the opportunity for Obama to deliver a speech that would further work to his advantage, and debilitate the McCain campaign. Only by exciting "The Base" could McCain remain competitive and win, it was calculated.

The distance from McCain's ads and assertions about his presidential opponent and Democrats generally, and his decision to run a "persona-based" campaign, as opposed to being specific on the issues, is of a piece with his choice of Palin to be his running mate. As another conservative commentator sometimes critical of McCain -- Peggy Noonan -- has noted, the "narrative" of a life [McCain's, Palin's], takes over from existential political fact in the type of campaign run by McCain and his handlers. We have heard an awful lot in the past few weeks, especially from Sarah Palin, about John McCain "The Maverick," just as we did in the convention narrative. But what McCain has actually been doing in this campaign, rather than actually being The Maverick, is conveying the appearance of iconoclasm, and playing to the crowd. (Hence, perhaps, "suspending" his campaign -- and trying to postpone the first presidential debate while his poll numbers are sinking -- to deal with the financial crisis?) At this point, the maverick claim seems no more genuine than Sarah Palin's charade foreign-policy tour of Manhattan with no witnesses -- reporters -- permitted to observe the proceedings.

The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attendant arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be. It goes to the core of who the John McCain of this campaign is.

Another conservative commentator, David Brooks, wrote last week: "Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

The more we learn, the more we realize the vetting process was -- given the rush of the circumstances -- hopelessly inadequate: McCain didn't know many aspects of Palin's record or her reputation (none of which is to say she wouldn't be a congenial fit as, say, Secretary of Interior in a McCain administration). McCain's first choices for a running mate -- Ridge and Lieberman -- were light years ahead of Palin in the vice presidential-qualification department. But they didn't meet the ideological test, exactly the ideological litmus test that McCain has attacked his whole political career and told us he would never succumb to.

John McCain is a serious man, as anyone who has spent time with him knows. But he has not run the kind of serious campaign he once promised.

Not for the first time, as many of his fellow Republicans (as opposed to friendly reporters and sympathetic Democrats) had long maintained, McCain's more reckless inclinations and lesser impulses prevailed. A great political movement that would transcend rabid partisanship and hard ideology does not seem in the cards.

And if he wins the election, Sarah Palin -- who in her first post-convention discussion of foreign policy indicated a willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia -- stands a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.


"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." -Sinclair Lewis

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Who is the real John McCain?

From David Foster Wallace to Paul Begala, four authors trace the politician's journey from the liberal's conservative to flip-flopping hack.
By Edward McClelland

Sep. 29, 2008 | Twenty or 30 years from now, John McCain will occupy the same historical niche as John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Wendell Willkie, in my opinion: a decent guy who never made it to the White House.

McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars. McCain has never seemed comfortable with that style of politics. Despite his identification as a conservative, he's been willing to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats who shared his concept of reform. In 2000, McCain tried to be a liberal's conservative, holding stream-of-consciousness press conferences on his bus, bashing right-wing preachers as "agents of intolerance" and opposing repeal of Roe v. Wade. Republicans were unimpressed, so when McCain finally won their nomination, he picked as his running mate a woman who had less than two years' experience as a governor -- a woman young enough to be his daughter, or his third wife, even -- but who belongs to a Pentecostal church, baits the Washington media and wouldn't allow any woman to have an abortion.

McCain, who built his image on bipartisanship, is now finding he can only rally Republicans by campaigning as a Deep Red partisan. That conflict -- between his sense of self and the role he's playing to win the election -- may account for the fact that he's been melting down like HAL 9000 lately. The old McCain would never have threatened to cancel a debate, or run an ad comparing his opponent to Britney Spears. But the old McCain never won the Republican nomination.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question "Who Was John McCain?" -- or, more pointedly, "Who Were the Two John McCains?" -- they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it's been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he's a flip-flopping hack.

Consider "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope," by David Foster Wallace -- effectively the last book Wallace published, though it's actually the unedited version of an article that appeared in Rolling Stone. During the 2000 Republican primaries, Wallace spent a week aboard McCain's campaign bus, which was nicknamed the "Straight Talk Express" because the candidate loved to hold bull sessions with reporters in an on-board press lounge.

Wallace didn't get much straight talk -- as a writer for a magazine with an un-Republican readership, he was exiled to a trailing vehicle known as "Bullshit #1," where he spent most of his time hanging out with the TV cameramen. A McCain staffer nearly faked a seizure to avoid giving him an interview. Still, his book is worth reading because it provides context for the press's eventual disenchantment with McCain.

In 2000, McCain was, as Wallace points out, an "anticandidate" whose campaign seemed like an ironic riff on politics. Used to stuffy, humorless politicians, reporters were thrilled to hang out with a guy who campaigned with an edge of self-mockery. A hotshot Navy pilot, no less. "He's witty, and smart, and he'll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he'll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don't ever mind because it's the sort of shit that makes you feel that here's this very cool, important guy who's noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit," Wallace wrote.

McCain and his journalistic entourage also had a common enemy: the Republican Establishment, personified by George W. Bush. It felt ennobling to travel with a candidate who whaled on Jerry Falwell, and whose underfunded campaign checked in every night at the Marriott. A lot has changed in eight years: By 2008, McCain had given a speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, had promised not to repeal Bush's tax cuts, had declared his opposition to Roe v. Wade, and was staunchly defending the war in Iraq. The anti-politician had learned that stiffing the Republican base was no way to win the party's nomination.

In his first run, McCain campaigned as a reformer who could win over independents. That was before anyone had heard the terms "red state" and "blue state." In 2008, there is no middle ground. There is a liberal America and a conservative America, each unable to acknowledge that the other side is intelligent, honorable or possessed of a reasonable opinion. To win his party's nomination, McCain had to campaign under the team colors. The man who had sworn he would never compromise his principles to win an election, had become ... a politician. That transformation helped McCain with Republican voters, but not reporters. Wait a minute, they seemed to say, we thought you were one of us. But you're nothing more than a, a ... conservative!

To sell books to this polarized public, McCain's critics must be equally partisan. It's not enough for them to disagree with his politics. Since he's on the other side of the divide, they have to attack his character as well. And they do, as eagerly as David Freddoso bit into Obama in "The Case Against Barack Obama."

Liberal journalist Cliff Schecter donated $20 to McCain in 2000 because "I thought he held informed, principled positions high above the fray of partisan politics." This year, Schecter published a broadside titled "The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him -- and Why Independents Shouldn't." Schecter divides McCain's career into three phases: McCain 1.0 was a Reaganite conservative. McCain 2.0 was the man known as Maverick. McCain 3.0 sucked up to Bush. To Schecter, Version 2 was the phony. McCain, he argued, adopted the maverick persona to beat a primary field full of conservative candidates, and to win over gullible journalists, like Schecter.

With his eyes now opened, Schecter saw the similarities between McCain 1.0, who jetted to the Bahamas at Savings & Loan fraudster Charles Keating's expense, and McCain 3.0, who hired lobbyists to run his 2008 presidential campaign.

"Another issue where one McCain has run up against another is taxes," Schecter writes. "When running for president in 2000, McCain claimed that candidate Bush's plan was skewed toward the wealthy. After the campaign, he and Lincoln Chafee were the only Republican senators to oppose President Bush's signature tax package in 2001." But when McCain began planning another White House run, "he jumped enthusiastically on the tax-cut bandwagon, voting in 2006 to extend portions of the Bush tax cut. If those tax cuts aren't made permanent, he said, it would be the equivalent of a tax increase, and 'I've never voted for a tax increase in 24 years' ... Granted, he's no Mike Huckabee, who would abolish the IRS altogether. But he's not the John McCain we knew in 2001." Campaign books have a short shelf life, but I hope Schecter gets his $20 donation back in royalties.

Something else has changed over the last eight years: A lot of Americans really, really, really hate George W. Bush. When Bush's head pops up on the TV screen, Democrats shout and swear and froth as though they're taking part in the Two-Minute Hate from "1984." Paul Begala has made a career out of hating Bush, and he isn't ready to let it go just because his nemesis is leaving office. Begala, a former aide to President Clinton, co-hosted CNN's "Crossfire," on which he played a cross between a debate team captain and a wrestler, defending, at high volume, everything on the Democratic platform. "Crossfire" was canceled in 2005, and the Bush administration is scheduled to be canceled in early 2009, but Begala has continued the crusade with a book titled "Third Term: Why George W. Bush (Hearts) John McCain," which presented McCain as the political reincarnation of Bush.

If you want to steep yourself in the bitterness and shallowness of political discourse circa 2008, "Third Term" is your book. Begala sees everything in red and blue. Except for a few lines praising McCain's service in the Vietnam War (while comparing it unfavorably to Bush's draft dodging), Begala depicts the senator as a corrupt, ill-tempered saber-rattler, determined to continue Bush's policies. The book is full of poorly photoshopped movie stills, pasting Bush's and McCain's faces onto the cowboys from "Brokeback Mountain," and the spaghetti-slurping dogs in "Lady and the Tramp." Scholars say newspapers are written on a sixth-grade level. "Third Term" certainly is, because its taunting message is that Bush and McCain love each other so much, they should be boyfriends. A McCain administration would be so gay! It's almost not worth mentioning any facts from the book, because Begala obviously cut-and-pasted it on his computer while toggling back and forth between Microsoft Word and a Google search page titled "Bush + McCain." But here's an example: "Under the Bush-McCain economic policies, the American economy has created a little over five million jobs. By contrast, the Clinton-Democratic policies brought twenty-three million new jobs." Ergo, not only will McCain continue Bush's policies, he shares responsibility for all those policies' failures over the last eight years.

Matt Welch's recent book "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" is better-researched, and more evenhanded. It is particularly strong on how McCain's military background made him a rebel. In that regimented society, breaking petty rules and challenging superiors is a sign of esprit. There's also a fascinating discussion of McCain's favorite book, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." McCain discovered Hemingway in his father's library when he was a 12-year-old, looking for a heavy volume to press a four-leaf clover. Instead, he found a literary hero: Robert Jordan, who defies the orders of a cautious commander by blowing up a bridge, at the risk of his own life. But Welch, too, attacks McCain's personality. He devotes an entire chapter to calling McCain an elitist who prefers big-money fundraisers to mingling with little people who have nothing to offer but votes. He's a politician, man! When was the last time Barack Obama flew coach?

John McCain has never been as good as the media portrayed him in 2000, or as bad as he's being portrayed in 2008. One thing he is bad at: keeping in step with the nation's mood. On his first try at the presidency, McCain ran as a moderate, when Republicans wanted a conservative. Had he been nominated, he probably would have fulfilled his promise to beat Al Gore "like a drum." That would have spared the country the Florida recount and the Bush presidency. On his second try, he's running as a conservative, when the country is sick of that philosophy.

So what will be the answer to "Who was John McCain?" That more than once, he was the right man at the wrong time.

-- By Edward McClelland

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Warning, Warning. Check this out. K


If you're like tens of millions of others, you've gotten an email with a subject line like that. A forward of an email with a catchy, titillating subject.

Only they are never about John McCain. They're about Barack Obama. And they are almost always filled with distortions, misstatements, and outright lies.

We started TruthFightsBack.com to deal with smears, and those types emails were a big motivator for us. And, thanks to all of you, TruthFightsBack has been a great success.

But we can do better. We know that when you get a smear email, you want to get the truth fast, and you want it laid out in a way that can convince the undecided, swing voters. So we began a new project of TruthFightsBack.com called the Center for Political Accuracy focused specifically on this aspect of fighting anonymous smear emails in real-time, and we've got an exciting new tool to use in this battle.

You can email me at brian@politicalaccuracy.com with your smear and our system can read your smear and get me our researched response immediately, and I'll email back a reply debunking the original email. This can all happen in 10 minutes or less, so you can be armed with the truth and reply to everyone who got the original smear.

Just copy this email address into your address book, and make sure to email me right away next time you get a smear.

brian@politicalaccuracy.com

Thank you so much for joining the fight against smears.

Brian Young

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LOCAL



This is an incredible opportunity to meet Michele Obama, the next First Lady of the United States, and you can make it happen with your donation, and your volunteer efforts to get people to attend.... and get out the vote! This is the most important election in our history, and we have to make sure this time...we are the WINNERS. The Repulican National Committee is now raising millions of dollars and we have to stay even and have enough to finish the Victory Line..so please spread the word and give as much as you can.....

Save the Date!
Michelle Obama Fundraiser in Kansas City
Wednesday, 10/1/08!

Please join Michelle Obama and Governor Kathleen Sebelius for a very special fundraiser in Kansas City, MO on Wednesday, October 1st at 6:30 PM [before theTina Turner concert] close to downtown. We will have more details including a location shortly but it’s critical that we begin to spread the word and secure commitments. We have 42 days left and WE NEED EVERYONE to call and email as many people as they can and ask them to attend and contribute. If you can commit to raising $20,000, please let me know and you will be listed as the event committee on the invitation.

WHEN: October 1st at 6:30 PM

WHERE: Kansas City, MO – One Park Place

CONTRIBUTION LEVELS: General Reception - $1,000, or $2300 includes 'special pin and bumper sticker'
Host Reception - $5,000 per person includes a photo with Michelle!
Event Chair - $20,000-$28,500 includes a small group meeting with Michele
***NOTE: individuals who have contributed $4,600 to the obama Campaign can still contribute to the ‘Obama Victory Fund’ which has an individual limit of $28,500 per person. The Obama Victory Fund is a joint fundraising agreement between the Obama campaign and the DNC.

Please contact Ari Koban with questions, RSVP at akoban@barackobama.com (312) 819-2789,

or Sharon Hoffman skhoffman@kc.rr.com 816 309 8158

Thanks for your continued support!

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VOLUNTEERS -
For those of you who want to work on election day, MO is in desperate need for election judges and other workers. Please fax them this sheet and reference Yolanda Wheat. They told me that would be helpful. Keep in mind the lines that will most assuredly be there on 11/04 in combination with the average age of the current poll worker, 72. That is a recipe for a very long wait. Anything we can do to make sure our voters are not disenfranchised.


http://www.kceb.org/pdf/other_worker.pdf

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The effort to promote and protect the vote has begun -- and it needs volunteers.

Earlier than ever before, in a more comprehensive fashion than ever before, building on three years of base work and an extensive primary season, we're making sure that every eligible citizen who wants to vote can cast a ballot, and have it counted. To do that, we need you to volunteer to help us out on election day. You can do that here: my.barackobama.com/counselforchange.

If you're a lawyer, or law student, or just want to help protect the vote this year, we want to know.

We'll connect you to trouble spots, making sure that you're equipped and able to resolve problems before they happen. On Election Day, we'll have broader coverage than ever, using your talent and energy across the country to safeguard every vote that's cast.

Please sign up, at my.barackobama.com/counselforchange. The information on that form will feed directly into our voter protection efforts here in Missouri.

We look forward to engaging your talents in the months ahead. You are what makes the voter protection program possible.

Thank you.
Rebecca Ewing
Voter Protection Coordinator
Missouri Campaign for Change
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Please Join
Hon. Claire McCaskill and Hon. Emanuel Cleaver, II
along with



Stephen and Andrea Bough
Mark Bryant
Jennifer Dameron
Grant and Amy Davis
Tim Dollar
Charles and Patricia Garney
David Johnson
Herb Kohn
Scott Lakin
Teresa Loar
Richard and Alison Martin
Dutch Newman
James and Annabel Nutter
James and Sonya Nutter, Jr
Gary and Anita Robb
Robert Rousey
Beth K. Smith
Guy and Liza Townsend
Dr. Kelvin Walls
Alan and Yolanda Wheat
David Welte
Dempsey & Kingsland, PC



for an evening supporting the re-election of
Robin Carnahan
Missouri Secretary of State

Tuesday, October 7th
5:30 – 7:30 pm
At Baja 600
The Plaza, 600 Ward Parkway
Kansas City, MO

Sponsor: $1500 Host: $1000
Supporter: $500 Friend: $250

For more information or to R.S.V.P contact Nicole Woodie at 866.567.2004 Nicole@RobinCarnahan.com

Senator McCaskill and Congressman Cleaver are not soliciting any donations from corporations, labor funds, or any other federally prohibited contribution sources.
Paid for by Robin Carnahan for Missouri, Tom Carnahan, Treasurer