Voter suppression is no accident

The delusional McCain?

Apparently, Cindy McCain has forgotten the way the Bushists' allies slimed her daughter and her family in South Carolina in 2000. As a parent, I would find that unforgivable even with the White House at stake. (Another reason I'll never be President!) There is no way I could ever greet warmly the man who permitted my daughter to be used against me the way Bushists used Bridget against John McCain.

Still, according to Cindy, what Obama is saying about her husband is worse. Bullshit. There are a large number of what Karl Rove would call character issues that Obama has left alone against John McCain:

• Cindy's drug addiction (without legal consequence)
  
• John's infidelity
• John's temper
• John's gambling
• John's rambling
• John's dismal flying record
• John's dearth of academic achievement
• John's willingness to exploit the protection of his admiral father
  

Yet Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in American history." I suppose it's only natural for people who believe in Republican economics - we earned our inherited wealth - to believe that they are entitled to their own facts.

But Cindy's lack of perspective could only come from someone who has always had the field tilted in her favor and who can't remember as far back as 2000 - or chooses not to.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do. Get them anti-macaca voters to the polls. Too bad McCain has a black baby, but Obama has two. Feh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Projection

The RNC knows that if they could find this much money, they'd be cheating.

Update (10/6): Since Obama has contributions from millions of Americans, that's going to be some serious labor-intensive auditing. Could be a stimulus program using government jobs all by itself!

Coming to a gutter near you

More Republican bullshit, the smearing ugly kind! Let's see, Obama runs into radical Bill Ayers by accident on the street. Sarah Palin does the nasty with an Alaska secessionist, her husband.

This is only going to get worse as the election nears. McCain and Palin can't win on the merits, but by damn they'll try mud-slinging. Even worse, they'll be proud of it.

Tucker Bounds, unrepentant liar

Tucky Bounds is in love with his $42,000 lie on behalf of John McCain. So in love that he repeats it in all sorts of contexts, including accusing Joe Biden of an "outright lie." If you're going to be a Republican spokesman, you need the satanic ability out of "The Exorcist" to induce head-swivelling like this. Imputing your sins to everyone else is their standard method of making me projectile vomit.

The truth, which big media mostly refuses to tell us, is here (in the economy tab), reported for children, who actually need facts, unlike adults, whom we allow to make up their own out of their impressions. Here's the Washington Post's table:

Change in Yearly Taxes
1) 0 to $18,981	-$21	-$567
2) $18,982 to $37,595	-$118	-$892
3) $37,596 to $66,354	-$325	-$1,118
4) $66,355 to $111,645	-$994	-$1,264
5) $111,646 to $2.87 million plus	-$6,498	+$3,017
$111,646 to $160,972	-$2,584	-$2,135
$160,973 to $226,918	-$4,437	-$2,796
$226,919 to $603,402	-$8,159	+$121
$603,403 to $2.87 million	-$48,862	+$93,709
More than $2.87 million	-$290,708	+$542,882

Yeah, that's Obama's tax plan on the right. Hmm, which one helps the middle class?

(h/t MediaMatters, via Atrios)

Reasons to be cheerful

"New polls show Obama breaking away in key states" --CNN

FiveThirtyEight.com shows Obama with 336 electoral votes after today's polls and projects Obama winning in 85% of scenarios. A different type of projection gives Obama 51% of the eventual vote, and that's a hard number to beat for McCain.

Update (10/2): Essentially a repeat of the CNN story above, with a little commentary added. Bill Schneider chalks Florida up to storm surge from recent candidate visits. He seems to think this couldn't possibly be a trend away from his pal, John McCain.

Me, too

McCain says, "Me, too," about Obama's FDIC insurance increase. McCNN leads with McCain.

Incredible.

So, why is $250,000 of FDIC deposit insurance an obvious idea? CNN doesn't bother to say, but the goal is to prevent a bank run. We're already in a deeply dry credit market. A run could not only kill banks that are basically healthy, it could also tighten credit even further as more and more people and institutions flee risk into cash or T-bills, where they are no longer loanable to stimulate business activity.

Triangulation

I'm hesitant, too, hesitant to call Bill Clinton a great man. In fact, I'd go one step further and say that he is not a great man. That's just not a status I give automatically to Presidents. I don't even think Clinton was a great President, just a good one.

Look at the men who have held that office during my lifetime, and there's really only one great man - Eisenhower, and I wasn't yet three when his Presidency ended. Besides that, Ike's greatness was made in the ETO, not in Washington. JFK might have been great, too, but we have to dream of Camelot instead of remembering it.

This means I superficially agree with Bill that Obama is not a great man. Not yet. I think he could be, though I think he more likely will be successful President without attaining greatness.

I think Obama is a good man, and I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that he's a smart man. I suspect that he has far more self-possession and self-control than Clinton, despite some similarities in their backgrounds (single mother, absent father, life on the margins of poverty), and maybe that's part of what galls Clinton. If Clinton had had what Obama has, maybe he could have been a great man.

McCain is not a great man, either. He was heroic thirty-five years ago, though I'm always wary when a pall of myth is cast over human frailty. After all, he did break under torture, too (as all eventually do). He is a human, not some demigod of resistance. For another, people who are willing to torture you are clearly willing to lie to you. There's no reason to credit the North Vietnamese offer of early release to McCain. More likely, they were trying a softer psy-op to divide him from his fellow POWs. He and his buddies would have seen this before, they would have been trained about it, and they would have been obliged to resist it.

But really, it's transparently obvious that Clinton would rather be passive-aggressive like this to try to get Hillary another shot in 2012 before she ages out of eligibility. He's back to triangulation, and it's pretty ugly.

C-SPAN blues

My DVR recording of the debate carried the helpful crawl to tell me now that C-SPAN's coverage had been moved to C-SPAN2, so I guess I'm SOL. No, I didn't feel like listening to throwaway speeches from the House of Representatives. There's only so much praise across the aisle for retiring long-time Republicans that I can stand, and that's measured in nanoseconds.

Ah, hell, probably all the insight into the performance has already been said somewhere. But I've been holding off reading from the great soup of punditry so that I could write something fresh for me and uncolored by all the other commentary.

So, on this rainy Sunday when the Pats have a bye and the Red Sox are locked in a scoreless and meaningless duel with the Yankees, when my tennis club is booked solid, when the dog didn't even want a walk, I'm listening to a little John Mayall. (Yeah, the laws must change one day, but not that CD.)

I'm not a big fan of debates anyway. They're not aimed at me; they're aimed at the muddled and unanalytical middle, at people who don't know enough or think hard enough to need anything approaching information or argument that would be useful to a political junkie like me.

Usually a general election Presidential debate has me cringing at both contestants. The Republican spews a fog of atomized bullshit in a spray so fine you'd think it came out of a snow-making machine, and I guess that's not far off the truth. The Democrat tries to reduce his positions to the sort of Splenda-sweetened sound bites that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Since I fancy 75% cacao dark chocolate, treacly sweetness makes me say, "Yuck!"

Much of the trouble in our politics stems from the need of both sides to appeal to the worst, dumbest voters of all, the ones who start as clean slates for the debates. The bases on both ends are locked up, and the left and right are fighting over voters who are marginal in several senses. They only vote in Presidential elections, they get their news if any from the most pandering TV outlets, they can't remember who did what last year, much less ten years ago (unless it involved a soap opera), and they believe all sorts of myths that would be demonstrably untrue if you could actually demonstrate anything to them that differed from the opinions they have been filled with by rote repetition, starting with their parents but culminating in their becoming perfect foils for advertising of every kind.

This marginal middle won't notice if their decision process, such as it is, results yet again in the choice of yet another image-driven establishment bullshitter. Rational actors would re-examine how they decided and think about changing. These people are more likely to "remember" that they voted for the guy they actually voted against.

So, debates often devolve into pandering contests. I don't mean that the politicians can pander to small audiences. What they can to, though, is pander to the short attention span and lack of depth of citizens who meet the very minimum standard of social engagement and vote once every four years.

But you go to the election with the citizens you have, not the ones you wish you had.

And, hey, I'm actually guardedly optimistic about November 2008. Given the McCain-Palin ticket's dismal and transparently manipulative performance over the past two weeks, even voters who choose based on tie color are noticing that the Republicans are full of bullshit. Still, while that's better, it's not even up to half a loaf.

Obama and Biden really should be twenty points ahead.

Reporters notice

What's this? The truth? Where did that come from?

CNN has a couple of people who don't simply plug in to the McCain campaign spin. Rebecca Sinderbrand is one of them, and she shows how McCain's non-suspension suspension is obvious bullshit.

It's amazing how beneficial it is to actually keep your eyes open. Hell, even Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller manage, after a fashion, to notice that McCain is posturing, even if they have to throw in a couple of darts at Obama in the name of false equivalence.

Lowering expectations

Any two-year-old who has learned to poop in a toilet can tell that McCain's suspension is not only bullshit but is pure political calculation.

McCain will show up to the debate, but his spinners will plead that the dog ate his homework if he's not ready for anything but the typical stock bumpersticker phrases. He'll say he's been spending all his time on the economy.

Barack should be ready to retort that he knows this debate was meant to be about foreign policy but that he's willing to talk about the economy off the cuff and without preparation (heh heh). And then he should smoke McCain's ignoramus ass about the credit meltdown and everything else.

That could close the deal.

I also found this pretty funny in a laugh or cry kind of way.

But Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, called McCain's decision to suspend his campaign the "greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a [Republican] presidential candidate."

There. Fixed. Trust Newtie to be clueless and over the top about responsibility.

Indelibly stained

McCNN reports this story in the passive voice to avoid saying that McCain pulled a bait and switch on Obama. But at least they reported the story.

McCain's clear motive was to gain political advantage, not to put country first. More and more, it's clear that McCain wants to be the Thane of Cawdor by any means necessary.

That stain will never come out.

Desperate times

McCain's suspension of his campaign is insincere bullshit. Its sole intent is to benefit him politically by:

• Freezing the status quo to stop Obama's rise in the polls
• Seizing the news cycle for photo ops (and they're all free!)
• Giving him the chance to pretend to ride to the rescue as if a Wall St. bailout were San Juan Hill
• Evading a debate for which he could never be sufficiently prepared (though in the mean time he'll try)

I'm sure as I can be that the last is what provoked him to do something. If the fumbling, bumbling, stumbling McCain is seen on a platform next to the brilliant, knowledgeable, and often eloquent Obama, the stark contrast will be undeniable. Since even Fox "News" has Obama up six points (warning: link blows up Firefox 2), another five-point shift would be the death of McCain's campaign anyway.

Obama should say, "McCain is welcome to suspend his campaign if he can't manage to advance more than one effort concurrently, but is that really what we need in a President?"

Or maybe Harry Reid has already done better:

"If there were ever a time for both candidates to hold a debate before the American people about this serious challenge, it is now," he added.

Update: Obama takes the best of both (at the same CNN link)!

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person [who] will be the next president," Obama said. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."

Update: I really should have been much snarkier about this, now that I think about it. Here are some possibilities:

• McCain: I haven't finished my homework, so I'd better pull the fire alarm.
• Granddad needs his nap.

Please feel free to compete in comments for best McCain no-debate snark.

Monkey business

Follow me, said John McCain.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

McCain must have forgotten Gary Hart's campaign self-immolation twenty years ago.

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

And:

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections.

Exactly the kind of payday for who you know, not what you know, that looks to normal non-Washington people totally like bribery.

The cherry on top of the bullshit sundae: McCain has been flaying Obama for ties to the river of dirty debt.

When fact-checking is really bullshit

McCNN tries to tell us that Obama is misleading us by holding McCain responsible for his own positions, using his own words. (h/t Paul Krugman)

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

In context, it's clear that McCain is specifically citing the deregulation of banking in one aspect as a good example of how he would deal with the cost of health care, which he identifies as the most important problem to solve. He continues:

You should be able to buy your insurance from any willing provider—the state bureaucracies are no better than national ones.

Yeah, there's a man who thinks a regulated marketplace is best!

This earlier statement is more definitive:

We do not believe in ... the use of state power to mandate care, coverage, or costs.

Uh, sounds like deregulation to me. Sure enough, the rest of McCain's position paper is filled with childlike faith in the market and vague nostrums that maybe, just maybe the tooth fairy will leave under our pillows. Along with a note on good stationery telling us how free and wonderful we are.

And, meanwhile, McCain will cut off at the knees any state experiments that might show a different way, all in obeisance to a free market that by definition leaves people behind.

Lies, damned lies, and claims of lies

When Democrats claim that Republicans lie, they say what the lies are. When Sarah Palin claims the Democrats lie about her, she doesn't think we need any petty details about what they actually said that wasn't true.

This is known in discerning circles as rank composting bullshit.

But McCNN pretends that Obama's putting Bristol Palin's inconvenient troth off limits is relevant to the story, when in fact it's a non sequitur.

Weathering the storm

Obama may have weathered the storm. But it's not yet clear that America has.

At least the people are right about who can better handle the economy, and that's a glimmer of hope in a dim and cloudy time.

Ducks come home to roost

Obama nails McCain:

"If my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week. Millions would've watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes," he said.

"I know Sen. McCain is talking about a 'casino culture' on Wall Street -- but the fact is, he's the one who wants to gamble with your life savings and that is not going to happen when I'm president. When I'm president, we're not going to gamble with Social Security."

Please, Barack, don't let him get up off the canvas.

Quis custodiet

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? O.K., I'll do it.

McCNN asks whether Obama is correct to say two things about McCain's position on abortion:

• McCain says Roe v. Wade was a "flawed decision."
• McCain is running on a platform with no exception for even rape or incest.

McCNN can't possibly deny the first. It's on McCain's web site. But McCNN says that the second is misleading because McCain doesn't agree with the Republican platform, the one he's running on. Of course, despite that, he picked Sarah Palin, who does agree with every jot and tittle of the platform's statements on abortion.

McCNN temporizes about what the platform actually says, calling Obama's claim an "extreme interpretation." Here is what the Republican platform actually says (on p. 52, the 59th page of the PDF):

[W]e assert the inherent dignity and sanctity of all human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

If a fetus is a person entitled to all the protections of the person, the manner of conception is irrelevant. It's not Obama's interpretation that's extreme. It's the Republican platform's position - passed by the entire convention - that's extreme. (Consistent, but out there.)

Since McCain thinks Roe was badly decided, he pretty much has to think that Griswold v. Connecticut was also badly decided. That's the Supreme Court decision that recognized the right of married adults to contraceptives. Griswold was a critical citation of Roe.

Hmm, what does the Republican platform say about contraception?

• Parents have rights over their children's access to contraceptives. Get those condoms back behind the pharmacist's counter! No mention of the age of consent (p. 38).
• All abstinence all the time (p. 45) because it's 100% effective. Ha!
  
• No school-based contraceptives or referrals to contraceptives (p. 45). Because their kids are not having sex. Yeah, sure.
  

Any guarantee of access to contraceptives? Uh, no.