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all amerikan psychos .....

all amerikan psychos .....

It does not diminish Freddoso’s accomplishment to say that The Case Against Barack Obama is a perfect companion to Reason editor Matt Welch’s anti-McCain book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.  

While Freddoso’s book contains more original research, both volumes make good use of material that has been previously reported but frequently ignored and never compiled.  

Together, they take Obama and McCain down from their media-built pedestals and prove that for all their rhetoric of “change” and “reform,” and “outsider” status, both candidates are in fact unusually skilled practitioners of politics as usual.  

Both books also make clear that the two overexposed candidates have underexposed records—Welch dubs McCain “the unexamined candidate” and Freddoso’s subtitle stresses Obama’s “unexamined agenda.” 

According to the conventional wisdom, McCain is a selfless crusader against special interests—defined as any cause that does not interest McCain—while Obama is a healer who will unite blacks and whites, rich and poor, red states and blue states. The truth, our authors argue, is more complicated. In Freddoso’s telling, Obama is a doctrinaire liberal and deeply partisan Democrat who was able to get along smoothly in Chicago machine politics and with the racialist paranoia of Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church—marking himself, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass says, as the kind of politician who “won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.” 

from the The American Conservative

butter everywhere...

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL
Published: September 13, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

female demographic

Palin uses Hillary to taunt Obama

Democrats take the offensive after McCain's deputy praises 'gritty' Clinton on TV show

    * Paul Harris in New York
    * The Observer,
    * Sunday September 14 2008

Firing a fresh salvo in a presidential election battle that has turned into a war of the sexes, Sarah Palin has taunted Barack Obama for not picking Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

As John McCain's surprise vice-presidential candidate, Palin has been giving her first major media interview. In the latest instalment released by TV network ABC on Friday, Palin took aim at Obama's decision to pass Clinton over. 'I think he's regretting not picking her now. I do,' the Alaska governor told ABC anchor Charlie Gibson. She went on to praise Clinton's performance in her epic but doomed nomination battle with Obama. 'What determination and grit and even grace, through some tough shots that were fired her way. She handled those well,' Palin said.

Since being launched on the national scene, Palin has rejuvenated McCain's fortunes, spearheaded by a flow of women voters. Palin has publicly praised Clinton as a means of wooing that key female demographic. However, she has also brought a notably more negative tone to the election, marked by a series of ugly rows between the two camps.

Her latest comments about Clinton proved no exception. In a sharp-edged response, Obama-supporting Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said: 'Sarah Palin should spare us the phoney sentiment and respect.' That sort of prompt push back is likely to define the Obama camp as it copes with the way Palin has shaken up the race.

lowering the bar...

Palin Falls Short of VP Standards

Posted on Sep 12, 2008

By John Dean

[Truthdig] Editor’s Note: John W. Dean was counsel to President Richard M. Nixon for 1,000 days and is the author of nine books, including “Conservatives Without Conscience,” “Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush” and “Pure Goldwater,” which Dean co-wrote with Barry M. Goldwater Jr.



In truth, the vice president of the United States is important for only one reason: He or she will become president of the United States upon the death, incapacity or resignation of the president. Nine times in our history, vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency: John Tyler (1841), Millard Fillmore (1850), Andrew Johnson (1865), Chester A. Arthur (1881), Theodore Roosevelt (1901), Calvin Coolidge (1923), Harry Truman (1945), Lyndon Johnson (1963) and Gerald Ford (1974). Of course, the vice president also has a significant secondary role: It is he or she, acting with a majority of the Cabinet, who can declare the president incapable of carrying out the duties of the office, and then take charge—until the action is either ratified or rejected by a majority of the Congress. So far in our history, however, this has never occurred.

Given the fact that the 2008 GOP standard-bearer, John McCain, is 72 years of age, his selection of an inexperienced vice presidential running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has again focused attention on the process and procedures for selecting vice presidents—or, to put it more bluntly, the utter lack of process or procedures in selecting the person who is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

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See toon at top...

backflips to suit...

From Chris Floyd

Surge Protectors: Obama Embraces Bush-McCain Spin on Iraq
Friday, 05 September 2008
Barack Obama has now declared -- on Fox News, no less -- that George W. Bush's escalation of the flagrant war crime in Iraq has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." He also proclaimed his "absolute" belief in the "War on Terror," and pledged, once again, "never to take a military option off the table" (not even the nuclear option) against the "major threat" of Iran.

In short, he continued his relentless campaign to purge himself of any of that weak-sister "anti-war" taint that got attached to him in the early days of his campaign -- which was, of course, responsible for his phenomenal rise in the first place. He rode that wave to national prominence -- trading on the desperate hopes of millions of Americans that the ungodly criminal nightmare in Iraq might finally end -- but it was obvious long ago that he was never going to dance with the ones that brung him. Once it was clear that he might really make it all the way to the top of the greasy pole, he began a dogged campaign to prove to our ruling elite that he would be a "safe pair of hands" for the imperial enterprise.

read more of Chris Floyd and see toon at top...

doing a sarkozy?...

In France, Nicolas Sarkozy won by successfully breaking from - and even, in a sense, running against - a president of his own party, the disgraced and out-of-touch Jacques Chirac.

In a similar way, John McCain is attempting to mount a Sarkozy-style "second-stage" succession to a Republican Party that has also come to be seen as disgraced and out-of-touch.

McCain, with decades of spirited and often lonely opposition to pork, influence and back-scratching of all sorts, is the ideal candidate to pull a Sarkozy...