This is why my eyes cross during election years

Okay, so, the McCain camp has thrown out yet another absolutely idiotic attack ad on Obama. This one, no joke, goes after Obama for being… popular. So they’re comparing him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Obvious questions aside (“Does that mean McCain admits that he’s unpopular?”), the fact is that this is where we’re headed with this election. John McCain has decided that he is going to drop his pants and take a nice piss on ethical and responsible campaigning in favor of picking up a slew of Bush’s old coordinators and hope to turn the election into less of a battle of ideals and more a battle of “I’m patriotic and strong, the other guy’s a faggoty traitor.”

By the way, you can read a rather nice AmericaBlog post on just how they indeed are pinning Obama as a gay guy. Fun stuff.

Anyway, I’ve seen the Paris Hilton ad. It’s been running here in PA fairly regularly. The gist of the ad is that Obama is really popular, but what does he really stand for? According to the ad, he stands for raising taxes and no offshore drilling. That’s right, he’s gone back to the offshore drilling issue and energy taxes, revisiting the same issues from an earlier ad. No new ground, just packed in an even more brainless attack.

It’s the same portrait, the exact same damn one, that got tossed at us in 2004. I’m a war president and a man of God, the other guy goes skiing and drinks lattes while talking to the French and not saying the pledge of allegiance. Character ads, attacks on integrity and patriotism, not anything relating to issues.

It probably has something to do with the fact that most Americans want a timetable out of Iraq, they’d like universal health care, etc. Down the line, Americans favor Democratic ideals, and moreover they trust Democrats on major issues. The only issue, the only one, that McCain has is the 2/3 of Americans who support offshore drilling, which is probably because 64% think it will lower gas prices. So he clings to that single issue and adds bread crumbs to his metaphorical meat loaf by going on the attack against Obama’s character.

These are the politics of desperation, what a man does when he realizes his campaign is in trouble and he’s losing in almost every single poll (save, for example, a poorly executed USA Today poll that gives McCain a 3 point lead). McCain’s supposed to be the superpatriot maverick who stood up to the president and never betrays his conscience. Turns out the people aren’t buying the phony baloney image and now McCain’s in damage control mode, hoping to cover Obama in enough sludge before November.

Someone on MSNBC said it well: McCain can’t win this election, but he just might be able to make Obama lose.

Prop 8 wording infuriates the bigoted

After California let gays get married, the conservative wingnuts went crazy trying to find a way to overturn the ruling, going back to the old claim that when judges uphold a liberal ideal it’s legislation from the bench, but when they do it on, say, gun rights in DC it’s just protecting the Constitution.

Anyway, Proposition 8, as the proposed ban is known, has been worded so that it is said to “eliminate the rights of same-sex couples to marry”. Supporters, of course, are furious, claiming that they aren’t “trying to eliminate anyone’s rights.” But Attorney General Jerry Brown nails it:

“What has happened is the Supreme Court found that the right to marriage includes same-sex couples,” the attorney general said in an interview. “This happened after the original title was approved. … Now same-sex couples have a right that’s recognized and supporters of the proposition want to eliminate that right.”

Prop. 8 supporters, Brown said, “can’t say with a straight face that this isn’t about eliminating the right to gay marriage, so what’s their problem with this? This is a political lawsuit, not one about serious legal issues.”

This vote is intended solely to stop gays from marrying. It has no other purpose, and there is no way to justify it being on the ballot without confirming it. Any claims that they just want to “protect the institution of marriage” are just dishonest. Unless they feel that it needs protected from something, it doesn’t need protected. Ask ‘em about it sometime.

Some are making the analogy to abortion, that liberals would be equally angry if there was an anti-abortion proposition that said “protect the lives of unborn babies”. That’s not a fair comparison at all, in fact. That doescreate a false dichotomy, because even the most staunchly pro-choice liberals don’t want abortions to happen, but rather strongly want women to have the ability to have them when the circumstances are dire.

Prop-8 supporters, meanwhile, aren’t about choice or anything. They unequivocally want to stop gays from being allowed to marry. There is no wiggle room here. Pro-choice folks don’t revel in the idea of women having abortions, we’d rather none happen. Anti-gay-marriage folks absolutely revel in the idea of gays never ever ever being allowed to call themselves married.

The irony of right-wing bigots wanting a more “politically correct” treatment of their intolerance is so delicious I wish I could make a syrup out of it and pour it over ice cream.

Once again, McCain v Obama on taxes.

Okay, I’m going to make this one nice ‘n’ simple. The Washington Post popped out a study about who benefits from the tax plans of Obama and McCain, complete with handy-dandy graphic:

Now, I want you to notice something VERY important there. Actually, three things.

1. No one, NO ONE, has a tax increase under Obama until they hit over $603,000 in household income, whereas everyone gets a cut under McCain.
2. Obama’s cuts are bigger for all income levels under ~$111,000, and up to about $160,000 they’re not that far off.
3. McCain’s cuts increase with income, Obama’s go in reverse. McCain gives greater proportional cuts to the rich, not just more money.

The first question that anyone looking at these figures should have is “what proportion of the population falls into these categories?” I’ve done this before, but we’ll do it again with the new numbers. According to the ol’ US Census Bureau (PDF), 85% of the population is under $100,000. According to the Wikipedia article I sneetched that link from, once you hit $154,000 you’re in the 95th percentile. Imagine just how small of a percentage represents the over-$600,000 crowd.

This is fairly significant since the tax cut percentage doubles when you go from the $66k-111k bracket up to the $680k-2mil bracket. John McCain can only claim he is a better candidate for, at best around 85-90%, and that Obama’s plan is only bad for the top less-than-one percent. Meanwhile, Obama has tax cuts for at least 99% of the country, the majority of whom will see greater cuts under him.

So the next time you hear the line that Democrats just want to take your money and Republicans are looking out for the regular old blue-collar Joes, hopefully you’ll be of the mind to smack ‘em upside the head.

HJC votes to hold Rove in contempt of Congress

This is one of those magical stories that puts a big ol’ goofy grin on my face. I’ve been wondering why, for a while, Karl Rove was allowed to just leave the country and defy a Congressional subpoena without anyone caring. As it turns out, the House Judiciary Committee cares, and they just voted to hold Rove in contempt of Congress.

The House Judiciary Committee’s 20-14 vote along party lines escalated the dispute between the Bush administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress over lawmakers’ demand for testimony by presidential aides.

This vote, by the way, perfectly encapsulates what is focking wrong with the Republican party. There is absolutely no reason objectively to vote this way unless it was simply party defiance. Rove flagrantly broke the law, and whether you think having him testify is a political stunt is irrelevant, the point is he was subpoenaed. You don’t get to pick and choose when the laws apply based on if you’re happy with it.

Could you imagine if this had happened with a Democrat? Picture that in the middle of the Clinton scandals, if Clinton had just decided he doesn’t need to testify? We’d be buried in an avalanche of “Democrats don’t care about the rule of law!!” and calls for public hangings.

Republicans put party above all else. Their decisions and opinions aren’t based on objective application of the laws, but from what benefits Republicans. This vote makes that inarguable.

Obama “death list” email flying around.

I am a sad, sad panda right now, kids. I had really hoped that the stupid-ass smears we saw in 1996 about Clinton murdering a few dozen people had faded away and we could collectively grow up, but I was wrong. I’d even been naive enough to think the swiftboat-style politics from 2004 would be done.

As the site’s title says, Sadly no!

This isn’t one of those snarky jokes we’re so often accused of making. It’s real, and it’s likely coming soon to an inbox near you (replete with nine-hundred AOL and Hotmail addresses in the ‘cc’ column).

You’ve heard of the Clinton Body Count, and now it’s time for…

The Obama Death List

The following is a partial list of deaths of persons connected to Barack HUSSEIN Obama during his time inside the United States. Read the list and judge for yourself…

SARAH BERKLEY – Author of “The Jihad at the Ballot Box” – a book examining Obama’s relationship with radical Islam. Died in a mysterious car crash in 2003.

RUSSELL MCDOUGAL – Former FBI operative, January 23rd, 2007. McDougal was known to hold sensitive information about meetings Barack Obama had with arms smugglers. His wife was murdered March 2006 after he went public with his initial reports. His father died July 8, 2006 four hours after McDougal presented his findings on the Savage Nation. Suffered administrative retaliation after reporting discussions by jihadist groups concerning Obama to his superiors.

The funny thing is, the most venemous attack that ever got shot at John McCain was, yup, from his own side. The worst the liberals can be accused of is saying McCain is old or that his POW status has been overrated as a qualification to be president. It was Republicans who said things like “John McCain has an illegitimate black child” or “John McCain is gay” (yep, both from the 2000 primaries, orchestrated by his now-campaign-advisor, Karl Rove).

Actually, no wait. The REALLY funny thing is that there is no record of any of these people, OR the book Sarah Berkley supposedly wrote. Google “Jihad at the Ballot Box”. What do you notice? Ah yes, a complete lack of information on this “book” outside of sites talking about the damn list. The rest of them produce similar results.

Oh, except Reverend David Manning. As it turns out, he’s real, but not dead.

A New York pastor who gained fame with his scathing criticism of Barack Obama has not slowed down a bit. This morning…Reverend David Manning talked with Hallerin Hill …and the Harlem minister had a brand new barrage. Manning claims to have proof that Obama had a homosexual relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, although Manning would not reveal that proof.

The only upside to this litany of complete idiocy is that we can all rest assured that John “it’s a google” McCain isn’t going to figure out how to open his email any time soon.

Vets pull invite to Cheney thanks to his “security demands”

You know if it wasn’t for the fact that he constantly says he supports our troops, there’d really be no reason to think Dick Cheney gives a damn about them at all. He was going to deliver a nice big address to wounded vets, but they pulled the invite. Why? His demands:

His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed.

“Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”

When Cheney spoke to the group in 2004, his handlers imposed the same stringent security lockdown, upsetting members, officials said.

According to the article, Bush imposed no such restrictions on vets, who “freely pass back and forth through Secret Service screening portals,” which makes it all the more puzzling that Cheney would be so strict with them.

A good question might be why Cheney doesn’t trust our troops. These are men who put their lives on the line defending the United States, does he honestly expect that if the doors aren’t bolted shut he’s going to be in danger of attack? And if he does, what does that say about him? Is he afraid that they’re going to unshackle their prosthetic limbs and hurl them at him?

Okay, McCain is just collapsing as a candidate

I apologize, folks. I said I’d avoid “horse race” stories, and while I believe I’ve stuck to articles of substance, I’ve been focusing almost too much on the 2008 election. Still, this is getting too beautiful to ignore.

John McCain isn’t going to last until November. I’m not saying he’ll die or anything, but given how frantic his attacks have been lately it’s hard to imagine him making it through an entire debate without spitting blood and going on a frothing-at-the-mouth tirade. Remember that ad McCain used against Obama and his overseas voyage? Even the GOP is unhappy (thanks AmericaBlog):

One GOP strategist with close ties to McCain’s campaign said the new line of attack reflected the operation’s “schizophrenic” nature. He said that tendency was also on display last week, as McCain spoke at length about media coverage of Obama rather than sticking with his plan to focus on the economy.

“They couldn’t help themselves,” the strategist said, adding that the ad over the hospital visit is “churlish and unlike McCain, and hardly will resonate with the swing voters who are going to decide this election.” The strategist continued: “They’re doing it because the candidate, and the campaign, is not happy with where they are and they’re lashing out.”

Ouch. It gets worse, though. A while ago, McCain started yammering about how Obama didn’t schedule any Senate Armed Services meetings on Afghanistan, as he chairs the committee. Now, the media for a while was just reporting the attack, not its veracity (a particularly disgusting form of unethical journalism). ABC shoots that down by pointing out that not only did Obama go to some of the meetings, McCain didn’t.

It turns out that presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain has attended even fewer Afghanistan-related Senate hearings over the past two years than Obama’s one. Which is a nice way of saying, McCain, R-Ariz., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee, has attended zero of his committee’s six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years.

Meanwhile, Obama attended the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan in March 2007, although he used the opportunity to ask Gen. James L. Jones, then the commander of NATO, about Pakistan.

Jones also came before the Senate Armed Services Committee that week. But McCain was a no-show.

McCain cannot hope to be a contender in this race if things continue as they are. He’s behind in the polls, but the wrong response is to suddenly start spewing bile. The independents aren’t going to enjoy that and more moderate Republicans are going to get disheartened as they watch Obama play elder statesman while McCain throws temper tantrums. Lord help him during the debates.

Media: tougher on Obama.

There’s a big surprise.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

…

The center reviews and “codes” statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama “has problems” with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative.

The positive and negative remarks about each candidate are then totaled to calculate the percentages that cut for and against them.

That’s how you do a study. The exact same thing happened in 2000, with the media being more positive toward Bush than Gore. Not sure about 2004.

Once again, the phrase “liberal media” is a phantom used to get conservatives to play the victim card. It’s funny how they do that. They call liberals playing into a “culture of victimhood”, but they bitch about how white, Christian, male, conservatives are the victims of bias and prejudice constantly.

Man, I love hypocrisy.

Rovian politics in full swing

Folks, I’m having a moral dilemma.

One reason I like Barack Obama is that, as his 2004 keynote speech demonstrated, he has the uncanny ability to avoid partisan attacks without coming across as weak or like he’s censoring himself. It’s hard to listen to him talk without having a feeling that he is the future of American politics: a leader who can lead America, not just his own party.

McCain, however, is the past in so many ways, and his attack on Obama’s big trip is proof positive. In response to Obama’s trip, McCain launched an ad that’s little more than a political temper tantrum, accusing him of playing pure politics, ignoring troops, etc. Aside from the fact that it’s just plain stupid to think Obama would be playing politics by not taking every opportunity to snap photos talking to our soldiers, the fact is that this has nothing to do with policy.

I’m going to go with Chuck Hagel on this one:

The Republican senator from Nebraska agreed, saying on Face The Nation that the GOP’s presumptive nominee is “treading on some very thin ground here when he impugns motives, and when we start to get into ‘You’re less patriotic than me, I’m more patriotic.’

“They’re better off to focus on policy differences,” he said.

“It’s just not responsible to be saying things like that, again, if for no other reason than for the good of this country and the world.

“One of these two men, on January 20th of next year, is going to have to bring this country together, and the world, to deal with huge problems. I think the next president is going to inherit an inventory of challenges as big as Franklin Roosevelt inherited on March 4, 1933.”

This is pure Rovian politics. Do nothing to talk about policy, simply try and shred the other guy’s character with an onslaught of falsehoods, distortions, spin, and irrelevant issues. Cloud everything by talking about issues like “I’m more patriotic”, as though anyone would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be president of a country they disliked.

It’s always full of irony, though. Bush, who dodged the draft and was AWOL in his National Guard service, attacked Kerry’s heroism. McCain goes after a trip of Obama’s accusing him of playing politics, when in fact his transparently dishonest ad is doing exactly that.

There’s only one reason for it. Rove, McCain, the whole team knows that if they had to sit there and outline issues, McCain would get killed. He has no plan for victory in Iraq that goes beyond “stay there!” His economic ideas are almost hilariously dumb. Socially he’s on the opposite side of the vast majority of the country. But if he can just keep bleating “patriotism” and talk about being a POW, maybe then he can pull it off. Maybe.

Pre-election polls are stupid.

You know, there’s been a poll pretty much every week “gauging” the distance between Obama and McCain in the upcoming election. Each time one comes out there’s massive speculation, and for some reason it always turns out it’s bad for Obama.

Remember when Obama was ahead by a huge margin? Yeah, when the polls had him 15 points ahead or so, was the media squealing about how this showed that Obama was going to sweep the election? Nope, the allusion was to Dukakis and his lead in 1988. Only our liberal media could turn a huge lead in the polls into a sign that his campaign could be in trouble.

Then when the polls swung the other way? Well, now Obama’s losing ground and he’s going to have trouble. A huge lead was a weakness, dropping numbers are a weakness. No matter what, it’s a problem for Obama.

I want to take a trip. A little journey back to 2004, both before and after the election. Somehow, “conventional” wisdom had become that Kerry’s inability to completely annihilate Bush was… a sign of Kerry’s weakness. Since the war was unpopular and the economy wasn’t doing fabulously, if Kerry couldn’t beat Bush by a thousand percent, it was evidence that Kerry sucked. Polls were showing the race was close, and that was bad for Kerry because if was any good, he’d have been leading by triple digits.

Even in 2006, after the Democrats took it back, the same happened. The Coultergeist, at that nice little performance I saw, made the claim that Democrats were weak because they couldn’t take more than 60 Congressional seats at a time of Republican weakness like 2006. At every single turn, it doesn’t matter how the polls look, they’ll be spun so it’s good for Republicans, bad for Democrats.

As the election gets nearer, expect polls to pop out showing every possible outcome. Also expect that somehow it’ll be to McCain’s advantage. If anything, polls showing any Obama advantage are pretty damn amazing given how hard the media’s trying to make everything look like it’s bad for Obama.