And Did You Notice He’s Black?

Obama isn’t letting any state go without a fight. This is from his campaigners in West Freekin’ Virginia:

“He is black” was the first thing Kenny Perdue, the state’s AFL-CIO president, said. “The gentleman that’s in the White House and John McCain — they’re white men. And I’m absolutely ashamed of what George W. Bush has done to this country.”

The president of the United Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, spoke after Perdue in a parking lot set in the flat plateau below the remains of a strip-mined mountain.

“I’d rather have a black friend than a white enemy,” he said. State Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey spoke, too. Casey, 57, grew up Irish Catholic in Charleston, and he said the bus was following John F. Kennedy’s bus route in the 1960 Democratic primary.

“There’s a lot of people out there think you’re a bunch of inbred, redneck racists,” he told a couple dozen people wearing union hats and jackets. “They say you won’t vote for a man who’s black.”

“The rest of the country thought when Kennedy ran we were a bunch of ignorant, inbred religious bigots,” he said. “They were wrong, and we made Kennedy president.”

And I’m also ashamed of what Bush & Co. have done to this country. I want Obama to restore the America we remember. I want him to get rid of the banana republic we have now. A reputation is hard to gain and easy to lose. Bush has thrown our national reputation away with both hands.

Signs of the Times

This is what McCain & Palin have wrought:

by way of fivethirtyeight.com

and

by way of Pharyngula

the author of the second sign seems to be an ideal McCain-Palin supporter.

Funny But True

This is funny:

but it’s also true.

Look, Obama isn’t Jesus.

If you go to factcheck.org you’ll see that he can twist, stretch and embroider the truth with the best of them. Let’s get real, he’s a politician. And there’s only so much the president can do anyway.

What I’m hoping to get from Obama is what I hoped to get from Clinton. I’m hoping for a change in the zeitgeist. I didn’t realize at the time that the Clintons are a part of the zeitgeist. Bill, Hillary, McCain, Rove, Bush, Cheney–all of them are talking to fellow Baby Boomers. Obama is talking to the generation that will replace the Baby Boomers.

Obama is–or can be–a turning point. Something that we have been needing for a very long time.

If he is elected, he will be a turning point in history. And that makes me feel like that song.

This is Why Obama

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told that we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.
Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.
Yes we can heal this nation.
Yes we can repair this world.
Yes we can.

Barak Obama, January 2008

It is my belief that we are engaged in a battle for the soul of America. We have a choice between someone who will lift us up and someone who puts us down with the cynical belief that we are too stupid to see through his lies.

We have a choice between facing into the 21st century or being dragged back into the comfortable and familiar Vietnam Era-Cold War-Culture War. Even horribly abused children will cry and grieve when removed from their brutal parents.

We have had an abusive government for eight years, but it’s familiar and Obama is not. Obama is the unknown. He’s a leap of faith. To me it’s a no-brainer. It’s leaping out of a burning building. To others? Yes, the building is burning but it’s familiar. It’s home.

Let’s make history. Let’s leave the old century behind and face into the future. It’s what Americans have always done. It’s what we need to do now.

Comparing the Candidates

This isn’t original with me. I don’t think it’s even original with Blah3.com, but I liked it and I thought I’d reproduce some of it here:

Black teen pregnancies? A ‘crisis’ in black America.
White teen pregnancies? A ‘blessed event.’

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer growing your organization from a staff of 1 to 13 and your budget from $70,000 to $400,000, then become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review,create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new African American voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor,then spend nearly 8 more years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, becoming chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, then spend nearly 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of nearly 13 million people, sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you are woefully inexperienced.
If you spend 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, then spend 20 months as the governor of a state with 650,000 people, you’ve got the most executive experience of anyone on either ticket, are the Commander in Chief of the Alaska military and are well qualified to lead the nation should you be called upon to do so because your state is the closest state to Russia.

If you are a Democratic male candidate who is popular with millions of people you are an ‘arrogant celebrity’.
If you are a popular Republican female candidate you are ‘energizing the base’.

If you are a candidate with a Harvard law degree you are ‘an elitist ‘out of touch’ with the real America.
If you are a legacy (dad and granddad were admirals) graduate of Annapolis, with multiple disciplinary infractions you are a hero.

If you manage a multi-million dollar nationwide campaign, you are an ’empty suit’.
If you are a part time mayor of a town of 7000 people, you are an ‘experienced executive’.

If you go to a south side Chicago church, your beliefs are ‘extremist’.
If you believe in creationism and don’t believe global warming is man made, you are ‘strongly principled’.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years with whom you are raising two beautiful daughters you’re ‘risky’.

If you’re a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton, the right-wing press calls you ‘First dog.’
If you’re a 17-year old pregnant unwed daughter of a Republican, the right-wing press calls you ‘beautiful’ and ‘courageous.’

If you teach abstinence only in sex education, you get teen parents.
If you teach responsible age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

In other news

A friend forwarded this NYT article to me. Some parts of it sound suspiciously familiar:

n 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus, then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

…

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

…

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

So she is secretive, dictatorial and likes to surround herself with cronies regardless of their abilities. It has SUCH a familiar ring! KOFF*(Bush!)*KOFF

The media is doing a fairly good job exposing the lies she and John McCain are telling over and over. I’m hoping that people really are as sick of Bush as they say they are, because if they love being screwed McCain and Palin will be delighted to continue ruling in the grand Bush style.

The Lies of John McCain

Let’s Make History

Look, there’s no real choice in this campaign. We have a brilliant, educated and charismatic man on one hand and we have a pig in lipstick–and like Obama, I mean the McCaign campaign–on the other.

Use the above image as you like. Send it to your friends. I’m sending a copy to the Obama campaign.

Let’s make history!

Ms. Pork in Lipstick

I’m still obsessing about Ms. Porkbarel Palin’s speech. I know the MSM has moved on, more or less, and I’ll move on too, eventually.

But not yet.

I’m sure Anne Coulter didn’t ghost write Palin’s speech, but she could have written written it standing on her head. I’m sure Rush Limbaugh didn’t coach her on delivery, but she was channeling him effortlessly.

Factcheck.org, one of my favorite websites, is utterly non-partisan. A time or two, Obama himself has stretched the truth to the point that it squeeked.

Factcheck.org vetted Palin’s speech (someone ought to vet her!) and found several “pants on fire” moments.

She didn’t sell a jet on Ebay. She was a huge fan of earmarks. She opposed a very corrupt corrupt incumbent and then apparently used the power of her office to get revenge on her asshole ex-brother-in-law. She took a debt-free little town and drove it into the ground. They still owe millions of dollars.

Pitbull in lipstick? Wrong mammal.

She’s not an elitist, though, no-siree-bob! She didn’t earn a scholarship at Harvard, she went to six colleges in five years, graduating with a degree in sports journalism. Not some sleazy elitist degree like constitutional law. She’s a woman of the people! When she was mayor she had responsibilities. She shirked them, but she had them.

She’s funny, though! She can deliver a line! Yay!

Even if she couldn’t run a small town, why couldn’t she run the most powerful country in the world? She’s cute and funny and has the theologically correct opinion on abortion so all the IMPORTANT bases are covered, right?

Lipstick

Palin’s big line of her debut speech: “You know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull — lipstick”

Palin proved last night that she’s a pit bull in lipstick.

Her lip-curling sneer and sleazy one-liners made the crowd go wild. Her message? Fear and hate. To Republicans and right-wingers those two things are otherwise known as bread and butter.

Fearmongering–counting on the cowardice of their target audience–is what the Republicans do best. The communists are going to get you. The jihadists are going to get you. The blacks are rising up and will get you–oh wait, we aren’t racist any more. The elites will rise up and get you. There you go, that’s the ticket. A black kid who worked for every penny he owns and went to freekin’ Harvard on a scholarship is an “elite.” McCain who married wealth isn’t an elite. George Bush who inherited wealth isn’t an elite. The oil millionaires cheering in the audience aren’t elites.

Elites are uppity blacks and journalists who ask too many questions.

Tonight Grandpa will take the stage and drone for 40 minutes about how he was tortured back in the Dark Ages. (Except he won’t use the word “torture” because according to Bush he wasn’t tortured. He was merely interrogated in an “enhanced” way.) McCain may not read the teleprompter like a freshman acting student. He may not grin like a creepy death’s head at random intervals. Heck, he may even get off a joke. The people who wrote Palin’s speech will almost certainly have some input into McCain’s speech. But “be afraid, be very afraid” will be the message.

Why not? He’s afraid and you should be too.

McCain is the bread. Palin is the circus. It’s a technique that’s worked for thousands of years and Republicans are hoping against hope it will work one more time.

Palin is lipstick, all right. She’s the lipstick on the pig of John McCain’s campaign.

Sarah Pallin: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

I don’t care that her daughter is pregnant. It’s a wonderful comment on the power of abstinence-only sex ed but other than that it’s none of our business.

I don’t care whether she’s the mother or grandmother of Trig.

Those issues are meaningless bullshit.

Here is what I care about:
McCain did something so stupid he should be spanked. The conservative pundits don’t think it’s stupid because it just might get him elected. I don’t think they are right, but they could be. The low information voters will love her because she’s cute and perky, they don’t know or care about anything else. The fundies love her because they don’t care about anything but ideology. The ideologues are happy because they have a better chance to continue their rule–they know how to rule, if not how to govern.

The reason it’s stupid is because I sorta-kinda believe John McCain loves his country, but he has set up a situation where, if he is elected and then dies, the most powerful nation on earth will be ruled–not governed–by a vindictive, dictatorial harpy who will make George Bush look like Thomas Jefferson.

The reason it’s stupid is because she simply doesn’t care about how the country runs. She doesn’t care about how Alaska runs or even the tiny town of Wasilla.

It’s stupid because she wasn’t vetted. The National Enquirer knew more about her than John McCain.

It’s stupid because she’s pig-ignorant about so very, very much.

And that’s not even getting started on her hard-core right wing crap.