A special place in Hell...

is reserved for this douchebag Republican apologist. When pressed on Gov. Palin's $150,000 shopping spree in under a month, he decides to mock a man going home to spend what little time is left with his seriously ill grandmother who raised him:



Anytime I feel like reaching across the aisle and feeling all bipartisan-sy, fuckheads like this remind me why I'm a Democrat.

Gimmicks Don't Work

Come to think of it....Tina Fey would have been a better choice

We stand less than two weeks away from the election and the latest poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows Obama opening up a 10-point lead over McCain. What has stalled McCain's traction in the polls? What has been the top reason his campaign has been stymied? What is the main concern voters have about a potential McCain presidency?

• continuing the disastrous Bush economic policies to benefit the upper 1%?
• not doing enough to protect American jobs?
• slashing Medicare and taxing health care benefits (for the first time ever)?
• providing tax breaks to Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc?
• not simply staying in, but escalating the siege in Iraq?
• continuing the obliviousness of the Bush administration towards the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Al Queda network in Pakistan?

Well, all these are notable factors....but the main reason voters are peeling away from McCain is - his own gambit in selecting a "mavericky", yet thoroughly unqualified vice-presidential candidate:

Now, Palin’s qualifications to be president rank as voters’ top concern about McCain’s candidacy - ahead of continuing President Bush’s policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq.

Fifty-five percent of respondents say she’s not qualified to serve as president if the need arises, up five points from the previous poll. In addition, for the first time, more voters have a negative opinion of her than a positive one. In the survey, 47 percent view her negatively, versus 38 percent who see her in a positive light.

That, to me, is a stunning development. The one decision McCain thought would transform his campaign has turned out to be a bigger liability to him than George W. Bush.

(Belated) Friday YouTube Nugget

Sorry for missing Friday, but a weekend mini-vacation at a chalet in beautiful Ellicottville beckoned. To honor a great soul singer and one of the most distinctive voices of Motown, I'm posting the Four Tops' signature tune, "Reach Out (I'll Be There)". RIP, Levi Stubbs

A couple thousand words

I think Senator McCain just saw CNN's instant polling that Independents went for Obama 57-31.

Hip Hip Hooray

Ladies and gentlemen.....your 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Economics is Princeton professor and esteemed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Paul Krugman, the Princeton University scholar and New York Times columnist, won the Nobel economic prize Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.

Krugman has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration and the Republican Party in The New York Times, where he writes a regular column and has a blog called "Conscience of a Liberal."

He has come out forcefully against John McCain during the economic meltdown, saying the Republican candidate is "more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago" and earlier that the GOP has become "the party of stupid."

I'm sure the "party of stupid" will issue a statement criticizing the Nobel panel for their liberal bias and boasting that Sarah Palin was just cited as "Pistol-Packin' Mama Of The Year" by the National Rifle Association.

"On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia"

As predicted....great job McCain campaign. Not even the classless move of putting Gov. Palin's young daughters and Flyer great Brian Propp out there as human shields was going to deny the Philly faithful what they came to the game to do....boo the shit out of a nutjob VP candidate:



The message here seems to be "keep your shitty, losing campaign outta my hockey game"

Friday YouTube Nugget

Happy Friday!

As much as I wanted to post M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" (because The Wannabe Outdoorsman loves it so much), I must pay my respeck to old-school hip-hop with this week's Nugget.

De La Soul's 3 Feet High And Rising was a phenomenon when it debuted in 1989. It was a complete departure from the hardcore, gangsta rap that dominated the genre in the year. The uniquely positive style, sly humor and the coolest samples yet heard made this album a must have. Transitioning from senior year in high school to freshman in college, I listened to this album a thousand times. Although it wasn't the first rap album to make an impression on me (that honor is shared by Run D.M.C.'s Raising Hell and Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back), 3 Feet High and Rising made me appreciate hip-hop and the diversity in contemporary music I was about to explore (after spending my high school years immersed in the Allman Brothers and Santana).

Here's my favorite track from the album - a glorious mash-up of Steely Dan, Otis Redding and Sly & The Family Stone.....straight from the D.A.I.S.Y. Age, y'all, this is "Eye Know"

No on Prop. 8

Proposition 8 is one more in a series of insidious, hateful ballot propositions in the great state of California - coming in direct response to the recent state Supreme Court decision affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry, this proposition would take that right away and write discrimination back into the state constitution.

While my dear readers are from all over this great land, I urge you to do whatever you can to join the fight to defeat this noxious ballot initiative. The recent polling indicates that the "Yes" vote has overtaken the "No" vote and, less than a month until California voters go to the polls, an influx of Mormon money to blanket the state with misleading ads has turned the tide from what it was a scant five months ago.

I gave $100 yesterday....please give whatever you can (or volunteer....or write some e-mails....or put a "No on Prop. 8" sign on yer blog). I have too many friends in California who've waited too long to be recognized equally under the law to be slapped in the face once more.

Thanks.

Link to the No on Prop.8 website: http://www.noonprop8.com/home

This Will End Well...

Gov. Palin - meet the Broad Street Bullies

In the infinite wisdom of the McCain campaign, which has deemed the mainstream media too hostile and sexist to allow their vice-presidential candidate to hold a single press conference as of yet, it appears Governor Palin is headed to the friendliest place on earth. No, not Disneyland - a Flyers home game:

The GOP vice presidential nominee will drop the ceremonial first puck when the Philadelphia Flyers open the regular season against the New York Rangers on Saturday. Palin, the Alaska governor and self-described "hockey mom,” will join the winner of a team promotion for the “Ultimate Hockey Mom” to drop the puck.

OK....so the McCain campaign is telling us that Katie Couric was too tough, but a drunken, obnoxious Philadelphia Flyers crowd will be suitable? These are the same people who booed Santa Claus....who booed Michael Irvin when he lay motionless at Veterans Stadium, fearful of a spinal injury....who mercilessly booed local heroes like Mike Schmidt, Charles Barkley, Richie Ashburn...this is the event for which they choose to let her loose into the wild?

I realize that Pennsylvania is a swing state and the crowds at sporting events tend to skewer more conservative...but this can't have been thought out too clearly by the geniuses in the McCain campaign. I hope the Philly faithful show Gov. Palin all due respect and courtesy...but let's be honest - when they have a prison set up in the bowels of Veterans' Stadium for all the criminals attending Eagles games, I'm not optimistic she'll get a polite welcome.

Victory in the GWOTD (Global War On Talking Dirty)

Dial 1-900-TALK-TO-MY-BUSH

In a development that absolutely no one could have anticipated (sigh), it seems that the seemingly foolproof plan of giving Bush administration toadies access to your phone calls might not have worked out as planned:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

Jeepers! Guess that's the "constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect" bullshit that Our Dear Glorious Leader was babbling about for the past five years.

Shame on all you Democratic House and Senate members that voted to give this buffoon and his criminal lackeys free rein to listen in on private conversations.....rubbing their thighs all the way, I imagine.

One more thing

Sarah Palin talks....




her supporters listen...

info on the bottom photo here

"Sit down, boy"

VP FAIL

With their campaign sinking amid the worst economic crists since the Great Depression that, despite their furious spinning, voters seem to be blaming the Republicans for and no more traction from the Palin selection to be had, the McCain-Palin ticket's strategy for the last month in the campaign seems to be "How Low Can We Go"? No bottom is too low for these two, apparently:

"McCain calls Obama a liar, faults his Chicago ties"

"Palin criticizes Obama's ties to Wright, Ayers"

"Character attacks emerge in McCain-Obama race"

As can be expected, when John "Maverick" McCain and Sarah "No Press Interviews Please" Palin start feeding the dog-whistle racism and ugly rhetoric to their base, who could ever imagine the ignorant racist oafs in their audiences would show their true faces?

"...Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

"Sit down, boy"

There, in a nutshell, is the McCain-Palin strategy from here until Nov. 4.

Let's ease back into this....

A little A.A. Milne, as interpreted by Kermit's nephew Robin, to ease us back into the routine before I go America all over everybody's ass:

Housecleaning.....

My dear loyal readers (all seven of you):

My deepest apologies for my lack of blogging....between travel and the girlfriend, I've been woefully neglectful of my poor abandoned blog. I've missed the big news of the past two weeks (economic meltdown, the campaign hijinks, Bills starting 4-0, Paul Newman's death, season premiere of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, etc.), so I will spend the next few days trying to catch up.

One bit of housecleaning....I wanted to post a tribute to Rick Wright, who passed away in September, because I think this poor guy got one of the all-time shafts in the biz from one of the truly misanthropic characters in rock and roll - Roger Waters. Here's what you must understand about Rick Wright - he was a founding member of Pink Floyd. He and Syd Barrett were the driving forces behind Pink Floyd's early sound...he not only sang lead on many of Syd's compositions, he also wrote a lot of memorable tunes from their first two albums ("Remember A Day" is my favorite from this period). He sang lead on the epic "Echoes" and went on to write "Great Gig in the Sky" and "Us and Them" from Dark Side of the Moon.

Which makes what Roger Waters did to him during the making of The Wall (1979) all the more vile:

"...Battling both personal problems and an increasingly rocky relationship with Roger Waters, he was forced to resign from Pink Floyd during The Wall sessions by Waters, who threatened to pull the plug on the album's tapes if Wright did not leave the band. However, he was retained as a salaried session musician during the subsequent live concerts to promote that album in 1980 and 1981. Ironically, Wright became the only member of Pink Floyd to profit from those hugely spectacular shows, since the net financial loss had to be borne by the three remaining "full-time" members. He was the only member of the band not to attend the 1982 premiere of the film version of The Wall. In 1983, Pink Floyd released the only album on which Wright does not appear with The Final Cut..."

Rumor has long held that Waters had a financial incentive from the record company to finish the Wall early in 1979, which was stymied by Rick Wright's vacation. The man who excoriated the industry so skillfully four years before in "Have A Cigar" decided to fire his friend and bandmate for more than fifteen years so he could collect some more filthy lucre from the record company and then, to add insult, blamed it on Wright's "cocaine problem".

So, Rick Wright turns out to be the only Floyd member to make some scratch on The Wall tour and manages to avoid completely the trainwreck that was The Final Cut. Cheers to him.

Well, here is a clip of the aforementioned "Echoes" from Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. Shine on, you crazy diamond...

The Selling of the Presidency, Vol. 11

Buy my product (i.e. vote for my ticket) and maybe I'll bang ya. Fer shure.....

Friday YouTube Nugget

Sorry y'all for the spare blogging...I've been traveling for work and it's screwed up my posting schedule. Normal blogging to return next week...

I will post a tribute to Rick Wright (see This Week's Rock Death to the right) over the weekend....today, however, is a good day for the Pixies.

The Bushonomics Chickens Come Home To Roost, Part IX

I'll have more to comment on this tomorrow, mostly in response to AR's last post, but Monday will herald yet another historic collapse in three parts - Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch are looking to go belly up while American International Group (AIG) is having a fire sale of its assets.

This ruinous, absentee-owner stewardship of the economy that fiddles while our market burns can be summed up as follows:

I GOT MINE, FUCK YOU

Don't forget....these are the same clowns that the GOP wanted to entrust our Social Security funds to manage. You can thank the Democrats for saving Social Security.

Friday YouTube Nugget

A very happy 56th birthday to Neil Peart from Rush:

Why Intellectual Dishonesty Is Never A Good Idea

Now that we're in the home stretch of this campaign season (56 days and counting), you are undoubtedly being inundated by e-mails, as have I, tearing down one candidate or the other. In my experience, the majority of these mass e-mails are dubiously sourced, at best, or, at worst, a compendium of outright lies designed to smear the candidate and scare voters off from supporting him. The recipients of these e-mails would do well to find out the facts on their own and debunk these false missives wherever possible. It is one thing to forward them to friends and family; it is quite another to post them to one's blog as if they were the author's work, without attribution or explanation.

Such was the case with a recent post on Automatic Rebalancing. You all will remember AR from this charming post in April of this year, which depicted a group of black people running away from Obama after he pledged "to make sure everyone who can work will have a job." How witty...if you're at the local Christian Identity meeting.

Such was the case on Monday when AR posted a lengthy comparison of the tax policies of Obama and McCain. The purpose of the exercise, given the partisan slant of the blog, was to highlight how disastrous Obama's policies would be for the average taxpayer and how beneficent McCain's policies would be. The author introduced this post by stating his bonafides as a "professional in the financial services industry" and claiming that the "following information has been researched and verified..." Seems legit, no? The post goes on to list comparisons in different tax categories (capital gains, dividends, income tax, etc) with comments by the author supporting the "facts" as presented.

Well, I smelled a rat. So, off to teh Yahoo intertubes search engine I ran and, lo and behold, found that most of the content of the post came directly from a rancid piece of anti-Obama astroturf making its way through e-mail inboxes across the land. Both of the popular online urban legend debunking sites, Snopes.com and FactCheck.org, called the information contained in this sleaze false and definitely misleading.

Knowing that AR has the cowardly policy of reviewing comments for moderation (or editing) before they're posted, I sent the following comment:

You're such an "expert" that you cut and pasted a false spam e-mail that's already been debunked by snopes.com? (http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/taxes.asp)

Just of kicks, let's take the income tax claim of this nonsense...as snopes noted, Obama does not favor extending the tax cuts for households with incomes of $250,000 or more per year. None of the brackets you listed apply to that level, so their inclusion is not only irrelevant, it's a flat out lie about Obama's tax policy. In fact, the taxpayers in the brackets you listed would see a greater reduction under Obama's plan than they would under McCain's "let's make the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent"plan.

So much for the information having been "researched and verified". It's full of shit!

I would hope that you don't reproduce this same shoddy, lazy effort for your clients.

P.S. You can either publish this comment as is or it's going up verbatim on my blog

Well, I didn't have to worry about making good on my threat, as AR published a fierce rebuttal to my comment yesterday. Under the heading "Ah, self-righteous indignation...Wonderfully droll, isn't it?"

Well, I do tend to get self-righteous when I'm actually right.

In his defense, AR claims that he omitted the claims he thought were "absurd" and kept the ones he thought were "worthy of query". Well, thank goodness for that. Instead of cut-and-pasting all of the bullshit, AR just gave us a little taste.

The main problem with AR's original post is that it doesn't provide any links to any of Obama's actual proposals, nor does it cite any sources for the claims it makes (and AR expounds upon). AR claims he used other sources (a neo-conservative rag out of NYC and Dick Morris, for Christ's sake), but strangely does not cite them directly.

The post is predicated on a bushel of wild, exaggerated assumptions on Obama's policies...it invents whole claims out of thin air when they are not supported by the facts in evidence (i.e. Obama's own website). Any blather following cannot be taken seriously because the original assertion is either misleading or blatantly false.

Notwithstanding AR's mention of conservative nutjob media to support his case, he states the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute) "didn't have all the hard facts of either plan and had to make assumptions on key elements"....well, no shit, numbnuts. The difference is that the Tax Policy Center discloses this right up front and doesn't pass off wild speculation as fact, as you did.

AR is correct in one area....I am certainly no expert in economic issues. I didn't get my MBA by dazzling professors with my views on relevant economic theory or my vast knowledge of our current tax codes. I can use a fucking search engine, though, and when I spot bullshit, I call it bullshit.

FactCheck.org does a much better job than I possibly could in debunking this nonsense...here's the link again if you want to go through the gory details. I doubt one could call FactCheck.org an illegitmate source, being that it's funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which was founded by the noted leftist commie pinko Walter Annenberg.

Pay special attention to the last line of FactCheck's expose:

The short answer to our reader’s question is, no, this message isn’t real. It’s a pack of lies.

Liberalism......What A Concept!

What Bob Herbert said...

It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of
American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by
people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that
deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.

This is precisely the response to knuckle-dragging opportunists like Mitt Romney who said, with a straight face, at the Republican National Convention - "“We need change, all right...change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.” Where the hell has he been for the last eight years?