Barack Obama Elected President!

[Greg's GL]

So, this is just freaking me out this morning. Wasn't the bailout supposed to help? It seems as though it's making it worse!

Wall Street Sinks More Than 500 Points

$700B Bailout Fails To Ease Worries As Dow Jones Drops Below 10,000 For First Time In 4 Years

[Wales2004]

Just be careful down there in Florida because if the seniors start duking it out it could get ugly.

But on a more serious note, I guess it's okay for Fox News not to do the whole balanced thing but if CNN or MSNBC were to profile or dig into the past of one candidate over the other then the accusations would be flying.

I don't think KO needs to even do a special. As far as I can see, he basically refutes every bit of dirt McCain and the Republicans throw out on his show every day. And if the dirt is real then he clarifies it. The problem with the reach back of the Republicans is that they don't really do math. If they want to go after Obama for things that happened when he was in elementary school then they really just risk annoying people with young children to some extent.....unless they're Republicans with young children since the expectation level for children of Republicans must be unbelievably high.

[MoTheGreat]

To me the Bailout isn't going to work because Mainstreet needs money to flow through it's pockets. & we know how Mainstreet is doing? With all the lost jobs & I'm sure more to come.

Did anybody hear the interview a while back where somebody ask McCain what he going to do about jobs. & McCain response was don't worry about Jobs. There will be more wars to fight.

My thing is now that we know wars cost money & we don't have any how will McCain fund his choice wars. I just don't see other nations joining McCain choice wars. Even 3rd world countries knows what wars they can't fight. & we becoming a 3rd world couintry really fast. But we still going to act like we're big shots with no money.

[Wales2004]

Things are probably going to get worse before there is any visible improvement. The global market is in bad shape and since the euro has fallen off so sharply tourism will probably be down as well.

[Roman]

Watch four shows tonight:

Coutdown W/Keith Olbermann

The Rachel Maddow Show.

The Colbert Report (W/Stephen Colbert)

The Daily Show

I bet you they all will have something to push back on this McCain campaign shift.

And it's already started. The Obama campaign ran their first 'Keating 5' commercial this morning.

[Wales2004]

Palin Goes Against McCain In Bringing Up Wright

Seth Colter Walls

[MoTheGreat]

Palin got a lot of nerves. I hope Obama make a ad about Palin talking about Wright. She act like there no tape of her of her preacher man talking about witches.

[Wales2004]

Biden Cancels Campaign Stops After Mother-in-Law's Death

[Roman]

I'll say this....

The Dow dropping 10,000 points is taking care of that McPalin bullshit. No one is running WA ads when the stock market is crashing again.

I wish one of them would come out and say something stupid. They should be ate alive for it.

[Roman]

by Frank James

As Sen. John McCain's poll numbers have dropped and Sen. Barack Obama's have risen, the Republican nominee's campaign team have indicated they plan to relentlessly focus on Obama's character. This means we'll likely see more negative ads from McCain and from Obama as he responds.

The Democratic National Committee has a new ad of its own in which it uses McCain's own criticism of negative advertising, uttered during the 2000 presidential campaign, against him.

Here's the ad's transcript:

CHYRON: "John McCain... readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character." [Washington Post, 10/04/08]

VIDEO: Montage of McCain attack ads

CHYRON: John McCain is "looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis." [Washington Post, 10/04/08]

VIDEO: Montage of McCain attack ads

CHYRON: McCain Campaign's Ad Spending Now Nearly 100 Percent Devoted to Attack Ads [Talking Points Memo, 10/3/08]

MCAIN: "I'm John McCain and I approved this message."

MCCAIN: "Uh, I, I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it." [The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 2/21/2000]

CHYRON: John McCain: We Can't Afford More of the Same

[ReddFoxx]

Makes you wonder who exactly is in charge of the campaign, McCain or Palin. It seems like she's starting to take over. And she's one to talk about associations, when the Alaskan Independence Party she praised was founded by a man who seemed to hate the United States with a passion.

[Roman]

Focus, Johnny. One PO’d Michigan Republican:

“If you are going to end visits to the state by McCain/ Palin, do it. Just don’t formally announce that you are ‘pulling out’ of Michigan, and then come back two days later asking the base core of support to ‘keep working.’ What a slap in the face to all the thousands of people who have been energized by the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket. I’ve been involved in County Party politics and organization for 40 years, and this is the biggest dumbass stunt I have ever seen…

He has given up on our State? What a total and complete crock of crap. Again, I think McCain owes the Republicans and the People of Michigan a HUGE APOLOGY. SOON!” - Jack Waldvogel, Chairman of the Emmet County GOP.

October 6th, 2008 at 10:41 am

[Ryan]

This is supposed to run in an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone. Note, it's a pretty long read, but a damn good one. And btw, good morning to everyone in this thread. I'm home sick today (again).

I would c/p it all, but it's REALLY long and the board won't let me. I'll post an excerpt then link to the rest. Again, I advise ya'll to read it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/233..._maverick/print

------

Make-Believe Maverick

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

TIM DICKINSON

Posted Oct 16, 2008 7:00 PM

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In Mc- Cain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put "country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer" and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."

It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."

We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics." After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.

In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."

The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed." (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)

Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.

"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.

"On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."

[Darcy]

I wonder how long it will take for the GOP to claim that Obama's campaign was funded by Osama bin Laden and Al Quaeda.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/us/polit...agewanted=print

New York Times

October 6, 2008

G.O.P. to File Complaint Over Donations

By MICHAEL LUO

The Republican National Committee plans to file a complaint on Monday against Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign raising questions about the legitimacy of its small contributions and donations from overseas.

Republican officials are demanding the Federal Election Commission conduct a full audit of the Obama campaign’s donations, although it appears that no action would be taken, even if the commission found merit in the complaint, until after the November election.

The Obama campaign has been powered in large part by small-dollar contributions, with donations of $200 or less accounting for more than $220 million of the record-breaking $450 million it has collected so far.

But such donations do not have to be itemized in reporting to the election commission unless the donor’s total contributions exceed $200. The lack of information on such donors has been highlighted by watchdog groups as potentially troublesome. The groups have also praised the campaign of Senator John McCain for offering on its Web site a tool that allows a search of all of its donors, including those who gave less than $200.

The issue is being seized upon by the Republicans against the Obama campaign after an article this month on the conservative Web site Newsmax.com highlighted some obviously questionable contributions Mr. Obama had received that far exceeded the $4,600 an individual can contribute to a candidate’s primary and general election campaigns.

The donations included thousands of dollars in excess donations, made in increments of $25, from someone named Good Will in Austin, Tex., who listed his employer as “Loving” and his occupation as “You.” It also cited another donor named Doodad Pro, from “Nunda, N.Y.,” with the same employer and occupation.

Both donors were flagged by the commission in warning letters sent to the Obama campaign by August. The campaign was supposed to have responded within 30 days. But its campaign finance filing in September showed it had failed to refund more than $10,000 in donations from each, although Obama officials say all of the money has now been returned. A campaign has 60 days from when it receives an excess contribution to address it.

Republican officials asserted that if the Obama campaign had missed such obviously questionable itemized contributions, there could be much more in the form of fraudulent donations in the amounts below $200 that do not have to be reported.

“We believe there is evidence here demonstrating substantial noncompliance,” said Sean Cairncross, a lawyer for the Republican committee in a conference call with reporters on Sunday.

The committee is also raising questions about potential contributions flowing to the Obama campaign from foreign nationals, although Republican officials were hard pressed to provide much by way of definitive proof of this.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, however, actually raised the issue during the Democratic primary. The Obama campaign only recently began requiring donors from overseas to provide a valid United States passport number. Previously, it only required them to check a box confirming they were citizens.

“We constantly review our donors for any issues,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, “and while no organization is completely protected from Internet fraud, we will continue to review our fund-raising procedures to ensure that we are taking every available step to root out improper contributions.”

Griff Palmer contributed reporting.

[Greg's GL]

Roman...I've never watched her show, but I did catch some of her after the VP debates on MSNBC. My first impression: I like her! Does she follow KO on MSNBC? I think I have to start checking out her show.

Ugh. Alrighty then. Let's bring up her unorthodox church. For the reasons Redd states below and for the fact she belongs to a church that believes in "conversion" for gays and lesbians (even though she's supposed to be "tolerant" of them, whatever that means). And start showing clips of her crazy ass going through a ceremony for "protection" against witchcraft. Granted, the latter 2 issues will probably appeal to some dumb ass redneck, but the majority of America won't like it very much.

Yup.

Good Morning, Ryan. Hope you feel better!