FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

But I don't go to sites that I KNOW to be dishonestly partisan to find stuff to post about Obama, Biden, or anybody else. I glance in now and then, yes, just to find out what simmering on the burner. If there is something interesting, I go hunting among credible sources to see if there is any collaboration. If there isn't I don't post it. . . or if it some thing sufficiently intriguing and I DO post it, I try to include a disclaimer that it is a highly biased source and I haven't found anything else to back it up.

I am thoroughly disgusted by bloggers et al who are manufacturing the hateful stuff getting passed around on the blogs or sent out in e-mails. I suppose they'll have to have it done to them before they'll realize how childish, hurtful, and potentially dangerous that kind of stuff can be. And people calling themselves journalists who deal in that kind of stuff are even worse because they actually claim to have a personal code of ethics.

If your guy isn't good enough to brag about and you have to drag the other guy down to make yours look good, you are supporting a really pitiful candidate. (Generic 'you' used here.)

If your guy isn't good enough to brag about and you have to drag the other guy down to make yours look good, you are supporting a really pitiful candidate. (Generic 'you' used here.)

If your guy isn't good enough to brag about and you have to drag the other guy down to make yours look good, you are supporting a really pitiful candidate.

Talk about pitiful.

CHARLIE GIBSON: And with apologies for our technical difficulties, we're going to turn back to the difficult economy, and the way the presidential candidates are dealing with it, particularly John McCain. Here's David Wright.

DAVID WRIGHT: John McCain was against the government bailout of AIG, before he was reluctantly for it. Here he was yesterday on "Today."

JOHN MCCAIN: We cannot bail AIG or anybody else. We have to work through it.

WRIGHT: Asked about the same topic today on "Good Morning America" -

MCCAIN: I don't think anybody I know wanted to do that. But there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investments, whose insurance were at risk here. And they were going to have their lives destroyed.

WRIGHT: Senator McCain appears to have changed his tune on regulation in a fundamental way. Today on the stump, he's a champion of reigning in Wall Street with tough regulations.

MCCAIN: We're going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street.

WRIGHT: But for more than 25 years in the Senate, McCain has fashioned himself as a champion of smaller government, less regulation.

MCCAIN: I am less government, less regulation, lower taxes, et cetera.

WRIGHT: In the mid 1990s, he supported a measure to ban all new government regulations. McCain supported legislation a decade ago that broke down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks and insurance companies -- the very rules companies like AIG exploited to get in the current mess. And as recently as March of this year, after the collapse of Bear Stearns, McCain was all for deregulating Wall Street.

MCCAIN: Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.

GEORGE WILL: When the deregulation was the wave through Washington, he surfed that wave. Now it's not, and the populist inside John McCain is out.

WRIGHT: Today, the Wall Street Journal accused McCain of selling out his free market ideals. Said today's top editorial -- "denouncing greed and Wall Street, isn't a growth agenda,"

GEORGE WILL: It's a conversion of convenience, some will say.

WRIGHT: In the mid 1990s, he supported a measure to ban all new government regulations. McCain supported legislation a decade ago that broke down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks and insurance companies -- the very rules companies like AIG exploited to get in the current mess. And as recently as March of this year, after the collapse of Bear Stearns, McCain was all for deregulating Wall Street.

Oh and Nimh, where is your source for McCain saying that he personally uses the internet? His staff and campaign certainly do, but he himself? I don't think so since he, his campaign staff, and his office staffers have said he doesn't use a computer.

what about when McCain said, in July, "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon [..]." Or when his campaign manager said, "[..] he always is grabbing people's Blackberrys on the bus. In fact, no reporter's Blackberry is safe from his prying eyes. He loves to tool around on the internet [..]."?

John McCain is the same John McCain that the media and Democrats loved in the past. Remember, he was the maverick that had principles, that stood up to the nasty little Republicans.

FIRE CHRISTOPHER COX?.... John McCain has apparently decided he has to say something different and/or unique about the crisis on Wall Street, so he's come up with a new line: he wants to see Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox fired.

Quote:

"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were president today, I would fire him," McCain says, according to excerpts for a speech on reforming the ailing U.S. financial markets he will deliver today in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

"The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino," McCain says."They allowed naked short selling -- which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground."

I suppose this shameless grandstanding is preferable, at least politically, to explaining why the fundamentals of the economy are "strong" and why McCain was against the AIG bailout before he was for it, but only marginally.

First, the president cannot fire an SEC chair. It's procedurally impossible. As ABC News reported, "[W]hile the president appoints and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commissions cannot be removed by the president." That seems like the kind of thing McCain ought to know before spouting off on the subject.

Second, the SEC did allow all kinds of short selling, but that's legal under the federal regulatory system that John McCain -- and his advisor, Phil Gramm -- helped put in place. After more than a quarter of a century in Congress, has McCain ever proposed changing these laws and imposing stricter regulations? No. Has he ever, before today, criticized Cox's oversight of existing trading rules? Not as far as I can tell.

Third, I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain short selling is not the underlying cause of the current crisis. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco and over-leveraged banks are. If McCain wants to make a case for firing Cox, he should at least get the cause right.

A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention
Last Updated: Friday, September 5, 2008
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News

I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

So why do it?

It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman. They're unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.

But do they not know that women have been trained to resent other women and that they only learn to suppress this by constantly berating themselves and reading columns like this one? I'm a feminist who understands that women can nurse terrible and delicate woman hatred.

Palin was not a sure choice, not even for the stolidly Republican ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America. No, she isn't even female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too.

John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to come up with it first. It's safer than "white trash" but I'll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something.

Doyle's job includes watching a lot of reality television and he's well-versed in the backstory. White trash " not trailer trash, that's something different " is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the foreign, and a fan of the American cliché of authenticity. The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.

'Turn your guns on Levi, ma'am'

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting.

Ah here's the link with the entire article.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/09/05/f-vp-mallick.html
The next line following the last one I posted:
What normal father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?

Yup. Great journalism all right. If you are so deep in the gutter you'll never crawl out.