McCain vs. McCain, Part II

It truly is embarrassing to watch this confused, dishonest man change his mind, in a matter of MINUTES, on some things. WTF?

What kind of a president would HE make? I don't want to even imagine the chaos and confusion he would bring to his administration.

John McCain doesn't know the meaning of STRAIGHT TALK.

Again, in a word: EMBARRASSING.

McCain vs. McCain, Part I

Remember how the Rovian Republicans painted John Kerry as a flip-flopper? Remember?

My friends, this guy makes John Kerry look like a rank amateur. John McCain is an AWESOME flip-flopper.

He doesn't know what he believes in. Or maybe he believes whatever polls well at the time he says it.

Where are the media on this outrageous example of Crooked Talk.

THE GREAT DERANGEMENT

A REVELATORY AND DARKLY COMIC ADVENTURE THROUGH A NATION ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN—FROM THE HALLS OF CONGRESS TO THE BASES OF BAGHDAD TO THE APOCALYPTIC CHURCHES OF THE HEARTLAND

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush’s America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, searching for phantom fighter jets in Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement.Matt discovered in his travels across the country that the resilient blue state/red state narrative of American politics had become irrelevant.

A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off—or radicalized—by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders (“they hate us for our freedom”) that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq; The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress; The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places.Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era.


About the Author
MATT TAIBBI is a roving national reporter for Rolling Stone and a columnist for rollingstone.com. He's the author of Spanking the Donkey, a collection of his writings about the 2004 election. He lives in New York City.

THE FACE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Exhibit A on why the Republican Party is a laughing stock and why people are leaving it in droves. I give you Kevin James, conservative radio talking idiot:


UPDATE: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who is retiring, confessed that if his party "were dog food, they'd take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill."

REMARKABLE. ANOTHER WIN FOR THE DEMOCRATS IN REPUBLICAN TERRITORY!

This is the same district where Dick Cheney campaigned to help boost Greg Davis' chances to win. It didn't help.

That makes three very significant elections where Democrats have won in districts that went heavily in favor of Bush in 2004.


Democrat Wins House Seat in Mississippi

By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: May 14, 2008

COFFEEVILLE, Miss. — Democrats scored a remarkable upset victory on Tuesday in a special Congressional election in this conservative Southern district, sending a clear signal of national problems ahead for Republicans in the fall.


The Democrat, Travis Childers, a local courthouse official, pulled together a coalition of blacks, who turned out heavily, and old-line “yellow dog” Democrats, to beat his Republican opponent, Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, a Memphis suburb. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, the vote was 54 percent for Mr. Childers to 46 percent for Mr. Davis.

The seat had been in Republican hands since 1995, and the district, largely rural and stretching across the northern top of Mississippi, had been considered one of the safest in the country for President Bush’s party, as he won here with 62 percent of the vote in 2004.

********************************

A fairly remarkable statement from the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Tom Cole, about tonight's special election in Mississippi. He's warning his incumbents and challengers: change or die.

“We are disappointed in tonight’s election results. Though the NRCC, RNC
and Mississippi Republicans made a major effort to retain this seat, we came up
short.

“Tonight’s election highlights two significant challenges Republicans must
overcome this November. First, Republicans must be prepared to campaign against
Democrat challengers who are running as conservatives, even as they try to join
a liberal Democrat majority. Though the Democrats’ task will be more difficult
in a November election, the fact is they have pulled off two special election
victories with this strategy, and it should be a concern to all
Republicans.

“Second, the political environment is such that voters remain
pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in
general. Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward
looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.
This is something we can do in cooperation with our Presidential nominee, but
time is short.

“I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers,
to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging
campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks
that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn
out voters this election.”

George W. Bush More Damaging than Jeremiah Wright? YES, SAYS NEW GALLUP POLL

I only have time for a drive-by post.

This is interesting (From Talking Points Memo):

Gallup: Bush More Damaging To McCain Than Wright Is To Obama
By Greg Sargent - May 12, 2008, 10:32AM

New Gallup numbers shed some light on the question of whether Wright is really going to turn out to be a major liability for Obama in the general election.

Amusingly, the poll finds that McCain's association with George W. Bush is more damaging than Obama's association with Wright.

Number of likely voters who say Bush makes them less likely to vote for McCain: Thirty-eight percent.

Number of likely voters who say Wright makes them less likely to vote for Obama: Thirty-three percent.

In other good news for Obama, the poll finds that a very large majority -- 64% -- say it won't impact their vote.

There is one caveat, however: Nearly one-fifth of Dems -- 19% --say Wright makes them less likely to vote for Obama, meaning that Wright could create a bit more of a problem with a small segment of his base than Bush will among McCain's base.

Overall, however, the poll suggests that Wright might not shape up as the general election problem some have predicted he will be.

AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

We couldn't possibly still be a racist nation, could we? Nah. The media and pundits all showed that Rev. Wright is a kook, a sour old black man stuck in an era when racism was rampant in the US. But that's all behind us. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., changed it, and all of us have grown up and accept people, black and white, on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Except. No.

E-Mail Shows Racial Jokes by Secret Service Supervisors

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: May 10, 2008

New York Times

WASHINGTON — Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents.

The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors.

The messages offer a glimpse into the darker recesses of an agency
known for protecting presidents and other dignitaries but whose culture is regarded as one of the most insular in federal law enforcement.

The disclosure of the messages follows an incident last month in which a noose was found in a room used by a black instructor at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md. Agency officials said that episode was under internal investigation.Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said he would not comment directly on the e-mail but said the agency deplored racially insensitive jokes.

“We are deeply disappointed by any communication or action on the part of our employees that exhibits racial or other insensitivity,” Mr. Zahren said. Mr. Zahren said the messages were the result of a search of 20 million electronic documents over 16 years. He said that an internal inquiry had been opened and that the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, had been alerted.

In some of the court documents, the senders of the e-mail messages are identified only by the jobs they currently occupy and the rank they held when the messages were sent. For example, an Oct. 9, 2003, message referring to a “Harlem Spelling Bee,” ridiculing black slang, was sent by Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations, who, according to the filing, now heads the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs.

A March 3, 2003, message describing Mr. Jackson as the “Righteous
Reverend” was passed among several Secret Service supervisors. The message, about a missile striking an airplane in which Mr. Jackson and his wife were traveling, concludes, it “certainly wouldn’t be a great loss and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”

Another message contains what one Secret Service official said was a joke referring to interracial sex. The joke circulated in February and March 2003. It was sent, according to the lawsuit, by Donald White, who heads the Presidential Protective Detail, to Kurt Douglass, an agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Cincinnati.

The legal skirmishing in the discrimination suit has heated up in
recent months, with Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson rebuking the Secret Service for failing to produce documents and for destroying relevant records and e-mail.

Judge Robinson had ordered the agency to turn over the documents by late March, but the e-mail disclosed in the court filing on Friday was not turned over to lawyers for the agents until late April.
E. Desmond Hogan, a lawyer for the black agents, said the agents were “shocked but not surprised by the late production of significant evidence of racism at high levels in the Secret Service.”

“The government’s delay,” Mr. Hogan said, “follows a pattern of the
Secret Service stonewalling plaintiffs and ignoring court orders, depriving African-American agents of the fundamental evidence of race discrimination that is key to their claims.”

The lawsuit, which has dragged on through years of litigation, was filed in 2000 by 10 black agents who charged that they were unfairly denied promotions. The agency employs about 3,200 agents, about 10 percent of whom are
black.