Palin for president!

Add comment September 8th, 2008

Uhh…make that former Monty Python member Michael Palin, not former Wasilla, Alaska, Mayor Sarah Palin:

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Obama’s new ad uses the “L” word

18 comments September 8th, 2008

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Why does the McCain campaign keep repeating falsehoods about the Bridge to Nowhere?

22 comments September 8th, 2008

 

Yeah, I know. The question in my headline is naive.

They persist with their FALSEHOODS about the Bridge to Nowhere because lots of people apparently believe them.

Famed investor says Fannie-Freddie bailout makes U.S. “more communist than China”

8 comments September 8th, 2008

 

World-renowned investor and financial commentator James B. Rogers Jr. SAID today that nationalization of mortage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac makes America “more communist than China is right now.”

Rogers called the bailout “socialism for the rich.”

“This is madness,” he said. “This is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this.” 

Rogers said the takeover of Fannie and Freddie is going to make it “harder and harder to get a mortgage.”

McCain’s Palin bounce gets higher

6 comments September 8th, 2008

 

Volatily in the presidential polls continues apace as John McCain, who trailed Barack Obama by as many as 9 percentage points just a week ago, now LEADS by 10 points in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll.

Much of the Republican ticket’s upward momentum is attributed to excitement over vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

POSTSCRIPT: Nate Silver has an INTERESTING ANALYSIS of the so-called internals of this latest poll.

POSTSCRIPT II: We’ll  have another patented Applesauce electoral map analysis later in the week after more state polls emerge. This time, I won’t botch the math, as I did last week.

UPDATE: NBC’s latest electoral map has OBAMA AHEAD 228 to 200.

UPDATE II: The RCP map has Obama LEADING by 43 electoral votes.

UPDATE III: The Diageo/Hotline Daily Tracking Poll has the race TIED at 44 points each.

UPDATE IV: A new CNN poll, conducted entirely after the Republican Convention, has the race DEAD EVEN. That USA Today/Gallup poll to which I referred at the top of this post is beginning to look like an outlier, perhaps because the sample was confined to so-called likely voters, a tricky business in a year when millions of new voters have been registered and turnout is expected to be the highest in decades.

UPDATE V: Two more polls released late this afternoon:

 ABC/Washington Post: Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 46 percent.

CBS: McCain, 46 percent; Obama, 44 percent.

McCain’s 10-point lead is vanishing before our very eyes.

UPDATE: Wolf Blitzer moments ago (5 p.m. CDT) on CNN: McCain’s “hopes for a convention bounce may be falling flat.”

The story of the presidential candidate and the 1970s political radical, a convicted felon

21 comments September 8th, 2008

 

You’re probably at least vaguely familiar with Barack Obama’s acquintanceship with William Ayers, who gained infamy in the early 1970s as a member of the radical Weather Underground, a leftist group blamed for various bombings of public or government facilities.

Ayers was never convicted of any crime, but neither has he been repentant about the Weather Underground’s nefarious doings. He’s now a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a former aide to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Ayers also has been active in various community organizations, including at least one, an anti-poverty group known as the Woods Fund, in which Obama has been involved.

Right-wingers have made much of this relationship between the two men and of the fact that Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama in 1995 and six years later contributed $200 to his campaign for re-election to the Illinois State Senate.

Obama has denounced the actions of the Weather Underground, which occurred before he was even a teenager, but his association with Ayers, however tenuous, has been the subject of relentless attacks during this campaign year.

As I say, you’re probably familiar with much of this. You might also have misgivings or worse about Obama’s presidential candidacy because of it.

But there’s another questionable relationship between a presidential candidate and a political radical with which you may not be at all familiar. Allow me to tell you about it, beginning with a few details about the radical.

This guy, like Bill Ayers, gained his greatest infamy in the early 1970s, but, unlike Ayers, he didn’t avoid prosecution. Rather, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for various felonies. After nearly five years behind bars, he was released when President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence.

The various unfulfilled schemes and actual criminal offenses attributed to this gentleman — all of them politically motivated in one way or another — constitute a shameful career (although he’s never expressed shame). They include murder, kidnapping, the firebombing of a Washington think tank, wiretapping, burglary and conspiracy.

He once publicly urged the shooting of federal agents who try to enforce laws he doesn’t like. “Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests,”  he said. “…Kill the sons of bitches.”

In recent decades, this fellow has become a media star and a popular public speaker. He has a talk-radio show and makes lots of money and is known to spread some of it around among politicians he favors. One such pol  is John McCain, to whom he’s given $5,000 over the years, including $1,000 for this year’s presidential campaign.

McCain’s been a guest on the guy’s show and says he considers him ”an old friend” and admires his “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

The political radical and ex-convict to whom we refer here, the man of such admirable principles and philosophies, is G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate renown.

Try to remember Liddy’s friendship with McCain the next time you hear something about Obama and Ayers.

[NOTE: Sources for the information in this post are HERE, HERE and HERE.]