W E B T R A I L: Election Edition

palinaspresident.com - (pill box hat tip to Sister Wolfe)

Count The Lies

Political Cartoons

The Real McCain

"I voted for Bush, father and son, but this time
I'll vote for Obama...I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."
-- Dennis Hopper, traitor and backstabber. link | via

Tell McCain to End the Politics of Hate

Don't let McCain and Palin undo the decades spent fighting for civil rights and equality in our country.

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Carter County man surprises wife, names baby Sarah McCain Palin

from the page:
People can be passionate about their politics. Consider, for example, the name given to a baby girl born last weekend to a Carter County (Tennessee) couple: Sarah McCain Palin Ciptak.

While that’s the name father Mark Ciptak of Elizabethton put on documents for his baby girl’s birth certificate, it isn’t the name he and his wife originally agreed on. And it isn’t the name his wife, Layla, thought the baby was given.

When you're a progressive and you're from the south amongst the many Redneckersons, it's a lifetime embarrassment of "riches" like this you have to try and overcome.

link | via | dickheads

The Moment
Senator McCain. Was this the moment? The epiphany? The realization that stoking the flames of bigotry and fear had come home to roost?

As I watched your town hall gathering, I wondered what was going through your mind when you came face to face with the incendiary results of your campaign tactics. What did you see and feel when that elderly woman said Obama was an Arab? Or the man who said he feared an Obama presidency? And all the others?

I saw your face. I watched your body language as you took the microphone and quickly distanced yourself from that one.

At that moment, did you see your reflection in the mirror of her eyes? A reflection, not of a maverick, but a pariah? Did you see the decades of American scar tissue? Birmingham? Burning crosses? The noose? Did you see that awful year in American history when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, cut down in the prime of their dreams for a better America?

Did you hear the echo of Dr. King's words about being "judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character," and suddenly realize that it was not your opponent's character in question - but yours?

... No doubt, the media will genuflect before your image and be pushed by your campaign spinners to reanoint you as a maverick and honorable man in rising to the defense of your opponent. But your ads still sully the airwaves. Your surrogates still spew their venom. After all, this is just politics. People need to understand that. Nothing personal - it is just politics.

But here was this moment. And you know it, regardless of whether or not you were reading from cue cards or just looking down to avoid having to face the ugliness before you - you know.

[Continued »]

How did that make you feel, my friends? Extraordinary piece. The comment section is enlightening as well.

Author John Cory, is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970.

After Palin Bombs Debating Biden, & Withdraws from the Campaign, Who Will McCain Pick?

Sarah Palin bombed in her interview with Katie Couric and she's going to hit bottom and break into 700 billion ugly pieces when she debates with Joe Biden.

Who Will McCain choose to replace her when Palin withdraws to "take care of her family?"

-Carly Fiorina
-Condi Rice
-Frances Rice, Chair Natl Black Repub Assoc.
-Gov Jeb Bush
-Gov Mitt Romney
-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman
-Gov. Mike Huckabee
-Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison

Go Vote

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It DEPENDS

from Jimmy Kimmel:

"And how are you going to be the vice president of the United States with five kids to take care of?

She's got a four-month-old of her own, she's about to become a grandmother, and she's partnered with John McCain. How many diapers can one woman possibly change?" via

The following is from Patricia Morrison's Old Man and the Flea, which is delightful and spot on reading for your Sunday morning shot of truth.

The Old Man and The Flea

Ah yes, the experienced John McCain. Sooooo much more experienced than Obama/Biden. How, pray, is he more experienced? Well, let us just count the goddamn ways…

He’s more experienced in voting against raising the minimum wage. More experienced in denying decent benefits for our heroic military veterans whom he has more experience in sending over there to uselessly die and be needlessly maimed in the first place. More experienced in voting against the G.I. Bill (the one he lyingly claims he really supported). More experienced in voting against any kind of bill that would benefit the reeling middle classes. More experienced in voting for any kind of bill that sends more money to his dark masters—big oil, big business and big government.

He's also more experienced in supporting the Iraq war. Gotta take out those weapons of mass... oops, sorry, never mind. He's more experienced in handing multinational corporations big fat tax breaks while the middle class struggles desperately to keep a roof over its head and food on the table and a job in its future. He’s more experienced in hiring greedy corporate lobbyists to run his campaign. He's more experienced in having advisors who call us a "nation of whiners" and more experienced in savagely dissing anyone who doesn’t agree with the reactionary Repug policies.

He’s more experienced in demeaning women. He dumped his first wife, Carol, after a horrific car crash in which she was badly disfigured, crippled and put on weight as a result; he called his rodeo-beauty-queen second wife, Cindy, a cunt in public, and only the other day he suggested that she should compete in a topless beauty contest.

He’s more experienced in being a pig. Ross Perot, who paid Carol McCain’s huge medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both she and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics. “McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,” Perot says. “After he came home [from North Vietnam] Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.” [Read More »]

John McCain as he introduces Palin:
"The person I'm about to introduce to you ... And, I am especially proud to say in the week we celebrate the anniversary of women's suffrage, a devoted wife and a mother of five..." via

John, you ignorant doofus. Women's suffrage and devoted wife and mother certainly aren't synonymous with one another. On that long road to suffrage, many good women marched and suffered in jail to get the right to vote, not for the right to lift someone else up. Women's Suffrage was about the Women's Right to Vote, damnit.

And on that long road, when one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

She wasn't enduring this in hopes of becoming a devoted wife and mother. McCain was off on this and he's off on thinking he'll garner the women's vote simply because he chose a woman to run with him. Woman all over should be insulted. link

He will make Cheney look like Gandhi.

Some opinions of McCain from his own party and military "commrades".

Political Compass

Today Obama is at the Tiergarten in Berlin, amid a sea of people. McCain is at "Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant" in German Village, an enclave of Columbus, Ohio.

I think that pretty much says it all.

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Doddering old McSame is headed for the "button" while wife Cindy stands by her man as Ho Chi Min's portrait hangs on the wall.

dr monkerstein snagged it and I snagged it from him.

John Cusak in McCain Ad

Why has John Cusack jumped into the political arena with a pair of videos saying John McCain is a war-profiteering clone of President George W. Bush?

"I know my opinion doesn't matter more than anyone else's and I just make films," he told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. "But I do feel you have to speak out, and that's what I'm doing." [via] | youtube

The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

"My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does."

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

[Read More »]

McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare
link | The Real McCain

Is Huckabee just so damn stupid that he can no longer keep his narrow views hidden when speaking in front of a televised audience?

It's beyond offensive that these vulgar slights roll off his tongue so effortlessly.

It's usually not so 'in your face' from a skilled politician. Is this his way of trying to be likable and funny to the other squares?

"During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain — joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman," CNN Associate Political Editor Rebecca Sinderbrand reports at the cable network's Political Ticker.

"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. "Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."

via | video

Some good quips from Stewart (which we paraphrase, since we don't have a transcript).

On Ann Coulter:

I actually feel sorry for her. Once your career is based on denigrating 9/11 widows, what's your second act? Unless you dig up Mother Teresa and stick a dildo in her eye, nothing could be more offensive.

On the Mark Foley scandal:

We do have pages on The Daily Show. I just want to make one thing clear to their parents, and to everyone else: We WILL sodomize them.

On John McCain, and the media's general adoration for him:

You know, he has the Straight Talk Express. And he's driving it to Bullshittown.

via

JACK ABRAMOFF TALKS ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIPS WITH JOHN MCCAIN, TOM DELAY, AND OTHERS

"You're really no one in this town unless you haven't met me," Jack Abramoff tells contributing editor David Margolick in the April issue of Vanity Fair (on sale now in New York and Los Angeles, and March 14 nationally). Such lies are not just lies, but dumb to boot—"This is not an age when you can run away from facts. I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs."

An insider tells Margolick that Abramoff blames competing Republican lobbyists and Arizona Senator John McCain—with whom Abramoff says he's had a contentious relationship—for his downfall. Abramoff tells Margolick that McCain staffers deliberately humiliated him, doling out embarrassing e-mails to the press.

"Mr. Abramoff flatters himself," Mark Salter, McCain's administrative assistant, tells Margolick. "Senator McCain was unaware of his existence until he read initial press accounts of Abramoff's abuses, and had never laid eyes on him until he appeared before the committee."

Abramoff says, "As best I can remember, when I met with him, he didn't have his eyes shut. I'm surprised that Senator McCain has joined the chorus of amnesiacs."

Abramoff is well aware of his peril: "In a different era I'd be killed on the street or have poison poured into my coffee," he tells Margolick.

Abramoff admits to gaining 50 pounds due to stress and tells Margolick that sending him to prison is "stupid," saying, "Let me teach English, history, music. Or let me sweep floors at the reservation. Instead you'll be paying to feed me to sit in a jail."

"I was a killer. I killed for my clients, and it eventually killed me," Abramoff tells Margolick. "Or I eventually killed me. And there were a lot of other hands on the knife."

"My so-called relationship with Bush, Rove, and everyone else at the White House has only become important because, instead of just releasing details about the very few times I was there, they created a feeding frenzy by their deafening silence. The Democrats are going overboard, virtually insisting I was there to plan the invasion of Iraq. This is why this non-story grabbed headlines for weeks."

Abramoff discusses his relationship with:

President Bush, who claims not to remember having his picture taken with Abramoff. According to Abramoff, at one time, the president joked with Abramoff about his weight-lifting past: "What are you benching, buff guy?"

Tom DeLay, who once referred to Abramoff as one of his closest friends. Abramoff explains his working relationship with DeLay, saying, "I didn't spend a lot of time lobbying Tom for things, because the things I worked on were usually consistent with the conservative philosophy." Abramoff has "admired Tom DeLay and his family from the first meeting with him," he tells Margolick. "We would sit and talk about the Bible. We would sit and talk about opera. We would sit and talk about golf," Abramoff recalls. "I mean, we talked about philosophy and politics."

Ken Mehlman, who recently claimed he didn't really know Abramoff. According to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, Mehlman exchanged e-mail with Abramoff, and did him political favors (such as preventing Clinton administration alumnus Allen Stayman from keeping a State Department job), had Sabbath dinner at Abramoff's house, and offered to pick up Abramoff's tab at Signatures, Abramoff's own restaurant.

Newt Gingrich, whose spokesman Rick Tyler tells Margolick that "Before [Abramoff's] picture appeared on TV and in the newspapers, Newt wouldn't have known him if he fell across him. He hadn't seen him in 10 years." A rankled Abramoff says "I have more pictures of [Newt] than I have of my wife." Abramoff shows Margolick numerous photographs: "Here's Newt. Newt. Newt. Newt. More Newt. Newt with Grover [Norquist, the Washington conservative Republican Über-strategist and longtime Abramoff friend] this time. But Newt never met me. Ollie North. Newt. Can't be Newt … he never met me. Oh, Newt! What's he doing there? Must be a Newt look-alike.… Newt again! It's sick! I thought he never met me!"

The April issue of Vanity Fair is on sale now in New York and Los Angeles, and March 14 nationally.

Link

It's John Edwards!
And the Republicans couldn't be more scared. Already screaming Edwards to add "charm factor", 2nd choice (referring to Kerry wanting to choose McCain first), ad nauseum. They're gearing up their ads, emailing the press in a frenzy. It's a treat to watch them scury & scramble.

Be afraid, Bush. Be very afraid.