Reject McCain

From allheadlinenews.com:

Miami, FL (AHN) - At a speaking engagement in Florida, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took issue with Sen. John McCain’s call for a new “League of Democracies” and said any move that undermines the United Nations is a “mistake.”

“Great powers set an example to the world and must give a chance to the United Nations to develop a new global system,” Gorbachev said. “We must not, instead of the United Nations, propose NATO or some kind of a coalition of democratic countries, as suggested by Sen. McCain. I think that to replace the U.N. with that kind of an organization would be wrong.”

“This proposal I regard as a mistake,” he said.

“I think that we must reform the United Nations, we must give new functions and create new committees to properly address the problems we have. We must reform the United Nations, we cannot destroy it,” Gorbachev commented during a speech at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

“Our political leaders and our political elites must get rid of the confrontational attitudes of the past, must get rid of unilateralism and a monopoly of domination,” he said, adding that “had the U.N. been more influential, the United States wouldn’t have been able to start a military action in Iraq. The U.N. Security Council was against it, even many allies of the United States were against it.”

The criticism follows a speech McCain delivered on March 26 to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, CA. The presumptive Republican nominee outlined what he saw as a new international alliance of democratic open-market nations that wouldn’t include Russia or China.

Can McCain still be president if his wife refuses to release her tax records? Imagine if Bill Clinton or Michelle Obama refused to release their financial information. A president’s spouse could hide all sorts of money, and I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to take advantage of such an opportunity.

From huffingtonpost.com:

But John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, also has religious figures associated with his campaign that could pose problems for his electoral hopes. And they extend beyond the two infamous endorsers who have received the most attention: Pastor John Hagee — who once called the Catholic Church the “great whore” — and Reverend Rod Parsley — who accused the government of enabling “black genocide” through legalizing abortion.

McCain’s own “Catholics For McCain National Steering Committee” includes several figures that, while not personally connected to the senator (a la Wright to Obama), nevertheless create thorny issues for his candidacy.

Chief among these individuals is Deal W. Hudson, publisher of the Roman Catholic journal Crisis, and one of the more influential Catholic figures in Republican circles. Hudson rose to political fame during the Bush administration as he worked with Karl Rove to target Catholic votes from a strict anti-abortion and anti-gay posture.

But in August 2004, it was revealed that Hudson had an affair with an 18-year-old Fordham University student while he was a teacher at that institution. The sordid story, reported first by the National Catholic Reporter, involved Hudson joining a group of students at a pre-Lenten “Fat Tuesday” party in Greenwich Village, bringing the drunk student back to his office, and ultimately, exchanging sexual favors. When the affair, which cost Hudson his tenured position, was exposed, he resigned from the Bush reelection team.

Frank Keating, the former Oklahoma governor, serves as one of two Catholics For McCain Co-Chairs. In June 2003, Keating was forced to resign from a Catholic Church review board after he suggested that the bishops were engaging in Mafia-like activities in their efforts to obstruct investigations into the child sexual abuse scandal. “To act like La Cosa Nostra and hide and suppress, I think, is very unhealthy,” he told the Los Angeles Times. The comments earned him some plaudits among critics (and there were many) of the church. But they were also viewed as unnecessarily antagonistic. Keating refused to apologize.

Another member of McCain’s Catholic Steering Committee — Martin Gillespie, formerly the Republican National Committee’s Catholic Outreach director — called the Democrats the party of “drug legalizers.”

And yet another, Robert Destro, built a career battling any and all efforts to legitimize same-sex marriages. A controversial appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration, Destro’s Marriage Law Project has tirelessly pushed an anti-gay-marriage platform in numerous states.

McCain embraces neoconservatives as campaign advisors, and John Hagee and Rod Parsely as spiritual advisors. What sort of advice comes from felon Gordon Liddy?

What McCain didn’t mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers-in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.

How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy’s home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator’s campaigns-including $1,000 this year.

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend,” and McCain sounded like one. “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family,” he gushed. “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn’t disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

More…

The reason McCain’s age is relevant is because most of us will lose a portion of our mental acuity as we age. Some of us will lose a big portion. Some, like Ronald Reagan, will lose it all.

Some people stay sharp into their 90s. Others start to lost it as young as their 60s. I have to wonder where John McCain is on that continuum.

There is no longer any doubt that he is losing his mental edge. He makes gaffes every single day. Keep in mind, this is the number one place he is vulnerable. So you have to assume that his handlers are doing everything in their power to avoid it. But it keeps on happening.

More and more it appears that McMaverick is simply lost. He doesn’t know where he is physically, legislatively, or philosophically. All thats left is McCain repeating Republican talking points.

McCain appeared confused about where he was for a moment Tuesday, saying, “I appreciate the hospitality of the students and faculty of West Virginia,” then correcting himself to say Wake Forest as the audience laughed.

McCain said his role models interpret the law strictly, paying attention to what lawmakers intended, as opposed to “activist” judges who, by striking down statutes or court decisions, make laws rather than interpret them.

“My nominees will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power, and clear limits to the scope of federal power.”

Yet in the private property case McCain mentioned as examples, the Supreme Court decided to defer to local officials rather than impose their own will from afar. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his majority opinion, wrote of the high court’s “longstanding policy of deference to legislative judgments in this field.”

What do you call it when one Bush administration investigator investigates another Bush administration investigator who is investigating the first Bush administration investigator?

A Republican Circle Jerk.

Earlier today, FBI agents raided the home and office of federal Special Counsel Scott Bloch, seizing computers and documents in relation to a corruption investigation.  More than a dozen FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas shortly after 10 a.m., shutting down the agency’s computer network and searching its offices, as well as Mr. Bloch’s home. Employees said the searches appeared focused on alleged obstruction of justice by Mr. Bloch during the course of an 2006 inquiry into his conduct in office.

Bloch was charged with looking into whether Karl Rove used government resources to help elect Republicans in 2006. Yet Bloch has engaged in his own Rove-like behavior and has been under investigation since 2005. A look at some of the charges against Bloch:

– In April 2005, government watchdogs complained that the Bush appointee had allowed his office to “sit on” a complaint that Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser, had “used government funds to travel in support of President Bush’s re-election bid.” By contrast, Bloch had ordered an immediate investigation into whether Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) had “improperly campaigned in a government workplace,” even though the complaints had been filed around the same time.

– The Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general has been “looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees” who disagreed with his policies, such as that “federal employees are not protected from discrimination based on sexual orientation.” He has also reportedly “dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.”

– In 2006, Bloch “erased all the files on his office personal computer,” potentially as part of a cover-up. To do so, Bloch bypassed the Office of Special Counsel’s technicians and phoned Geeks on Call, the mobile PC-help service.

We all know the goopers aren’t in love with McLame. Rush Limbaugh, (R-lyin’ Nazi whore) has been very up front about it. So the $64 is whether they can put aside their hatred for the educated half of the country, hold their nose, and vote for McPain. I change my mind on this question every day. But the one issue that makes their blood boil is immigration. So I thought it was interesting that McSame launched a Spanish language website today. The DNC was all over it:

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2008

New Website, Same Double Talk on Immigration Reform

After announcing the new Spanish-language page of his website during a press conference in Arizona this morning, John McCain once again tried to have it both ways on the immigration reform debate, demonstrating yet again that he’s not able to lead his own Party, much less the country.

McCain said he would pursue comprehensive immigration reform as soon as he takes office. But in the same news conference, McCain also took the opposite position: saying that the borders have to be secured first. McCain touted a virtual fence today and said we could have secured the border if it wasn’t for all the earmarks and pork spending in Washington. But as recently as March, McCain called the virtual fence a “failed effort” and a “disgrace.” Asked whether state and local law enforcement agencies should be enforcing federal immigration laws, McCain said “I support the enforcement of every law that’s on the books in the United States of America.” But moments later McCain took the opposite position, blaming the federal government for having “failed to act” and asserting, “when I’m president, beginning in January 0f 2009 we will have a federal approach to what is a federal problem.”

Today’s news conference was the latest in a string of double talk on immigration reform. Earlier this year, McCain caved in to the right wing of his Party, admitting that he would vote against his own immigration reform bill if it came to the floor of the Senate. And, despite today’s rhetoric about the need for comprehensive immigration reform, McCain’s campaign scuttled a deal on comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. House of Representatives just last month. [CNN debate, 1/30/08]

McCain’s double-talk is indicative of a major problem the GOP nominee faces heading to the general election, trying to both appease the Party’s conservative base while trying to reach out to moderate voters and Hispanics who have been targeted with ugly Republican Party attacks on the immigration issue. A recent survey from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center found that 57% of Hispanic registered voters call themselves or lean Democrat “while just 23% align with the Republican Party — meaning there is now a 34-percentage-point gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos.” [Pew Hispanic Center, 12/06/07]

“It’s hard to know what someone’s real vision for our country is when they consistently take every side of the issues,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Luis Miranda. “John McCain cannot have it both ways. He cannot pander to the right wing of his Party by promising an enforcement-only approach to immigration while telling Hispanics that he supports comprehensive reform. As the saying goes, ‘dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres.’ If John McCain can’t say where he really stands, he’s giving voters one more example of why he is the wrong choice for America’s future.”

MCCAIN TODAY: We Can Secure Border With “Vehicle barriers, Cameras, Sensors.” “All of that can be worked out and adequately so, particularly when you get outside of populated areas where you can use vehicle barriers, cameras, sensors and many other ways. It is an issue that in my view is not only not insurmountable, but it can be worked out in cooperation between state and local and government agencies.” [McCain Media Availability, www.cnn.com/live feed, 5/5/08]

MCCAIN IN MARCH: McCain Called Arizona’s “High-Tech” Virtual Fence a “Failed Effort” and a “Disgrace.” The AP reported McCain “told reporters in Phoenix on Monday that not enough research has been done on the 28-mile array of radars and surveillance cameras. McCain says it is a failed effort.” “It’s a - it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. They spent a huge amount of money on this quote virtual fence and it’s just. I mean. I - It’s so disappointing when the Americans highest, one of their highest priorities is to secure our borders, that we have a major corporation that gets a major contract and it turns into be a failed effort, but, in no way does this diminish my enthusiasm or anybody else’s to get our borders secure.” [CNN Live Feed (Phoenix, AZ), 3/3/08; [AP, 3/3/08]]

MCCAIN TODAY: We Must Secure The Border First. “We must secure the borders and the border state governors will then certify that the borders are secure. Then we have a temporary worker program with tamper-proof biometric documents and we address the issue of people who have come here illegally.” [CNN Live Feed (Phoenix, AZ), 5/5/08]

McCain in February of 2007: McCain Admitted He Was Pandering to Conservatives on Border Enforcement, Saying, “I Think the Fence is Least Effective. But I’ll Build the Goddamned Fence If They Want It.” “A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. ‘In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,’ he said. ‘In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.’ Then he added, unable to help himself, ‘By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.’” [Vanity Fair, February 2007]

The Federal Communications Commission just took one step closer towards complete irrelevancy.

The Federal Communications Commission has ruled as such in the cases of Fox’s “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club,” declaring Friday that each show meets the test for “a bona fide newscast” and therefore would not trigger political equal-time requirements.

I watched an episode of TMZ; it was like getting slapped in the face with a bag of vomit for 30 minutes. And “The 700 Club” is so evil I’d advocate Congress drafting a declaration of war against it.

Between Hagee and McCain, such a verb as “wooed” would cause an imaginative person some psychological damage.

But even some Republicans (not affiliated with the campaign) privately wonder how the pastor’s extreme views slipped through without notice. McCain personally wooed Hagee for more than a year. In early 2007, the Arizona senator traveled to Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, where the two men had breakfast. They bonded over a shared commitment to the protection of Israel, a meeting that McCain later cited as a sign of his outreach to social conservatives.

More…

“I find people who are the wealthiest who are most dismissive of a plan to give low-income Americans a little holiday” so they have “a little more to give to their children and enjoy the summer a little more,” McCain said today. “Thirty dollars means nothing to a lot of economists — I understand that. It means a lot to some low-income Americans.”

More…

What does $30 buy? I’ll make a list:

1. Nothing.

Seriously, this $30 will have zero effect on the economy. As for low-income Americans, they are worried about the billions being robbed from social security, and the endless vortex of disappearing billions in Iraq. Low-income Americans want real economic solutions, and to suggest they support this pitiful waste of government quick-fix theatrics demonstrates how alienated people like McCain are from working citizens.

I have to admit, my partner Wayne was at least three weeks ahead of the corporate press on the significance of Hagee.  But they are finally catching up.  Here is the Philly Daily News:

But at what point will the media start to give similar scrutiny to Sen. John McCain’s association with John Hagee?

Hagee, a Texas pastor and televangelist, endorsed McCain in February. Hagee has called the Catholic Church “the Great Whore of Babylon,” an “apostate church,” “the anti-Christ” and a “false cult system,” and he’s linked the church to Hitler.

He also recently told a radio host that Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for a planned gay-rights parade. McCain actively sought Hagee’s endorsement and has continued to embrace his support.

When McCain accepted Hagee’s endorsement, he said, “I am very honored . . . All I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.”

One morning last week, I typed “Jeremiah Wright” into Google News and came up with 10,315 results. When I typed in “John Hagee,” I got 272.

Thanks to the media’s nonstop coverage of Wright’s association with Obama, Wright has become the centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Hagee and his association with McCain is just a blip on the radar screen. For some reason, the mainstream media have ignored McCain’s association with Hagee.

The only way that Obama’s “Wright problem” will go away is if the media start to give equal time and scrutiny to McCain’s relationship with Hagee and Hagee’s incendiary comments. Besides focusing on Hagee, they should scrutinize other loopy Republican-supporting religious leaders like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell.

It won’t be enough for newspapers and other print media to do this. Wright’s sermons from years ago would have continued to be ignored had they not appeared on YouTube, the nightly newscasts and cable news. Similarly, these visual media should take sound bites and videotape of Hagee’s controversial statements and replay them for the country to see.

Doing so will show how it is unfair to attribute to Obama the radical views of Wright.

McCain has distanced himself from many of Hagee’s controversial comments, yet he still accepts his support. Likewise, Obama has repudiated the incendiary statements of Wright, yet he has praised Wright’s positive traits.

The media created the Wright controversy, and they can end it by giving the controversial views of Hagee equal time. It’s the only way that we can neutralize the issue and stay focused on the real issues and problems that this country faces.

Don’t hold your breath.  The media didn’t create the Wright controversy for nothing.  They don’t want it to go away.

Bush’s Third Term:

Wife Cindy on John:

* Her 71-year-old husband is “not the best of drivers,” so she takes the wheel most times.

Why am I not surprised that McCain can’t drive?  On the one hand, he used to fly jets.  On the other hand, he wrecked 5 of them, which has to be some kind of record.  Seriously, how many guys wreck even 1 jet and walk away?  McCain wrecked 5 of them.  But let’s face it.  Even if he never wrecked a jet, he shouldn’t drive if he is too old to be safe any more.  And judging from the wacky stuff coming out of his mouth this week, he is leaving the right turn signal on a bit too long, if you know what I mean.

* When they met at a party, both lied about their ages, McCain subtracting four years and Cindy adding four. And neither discovered the real 18-year difference until a newspaper published details from their marriage license.

At least that’s what they told the cops who found them parking…

* At that same party, the Navy flier kind of followed her — she used the word “chased” — around the hors d’oeuvres table, and the possible future first lady thought to herself: “This guy’s kind of weird.”

Cindy should’ve gone with that first impression…

McCain is starting to say batshit crazy stuff on a regular basis.  He might actually turn out to be worse on the stump than Dole.

Republican John McCain said Wednesday that the bridge collapse in Minnesota that killed 13 people last year would not have happened if Congress had not wasted so much money on pork-barrel spending.

Huh?  How does spending money cause a bridge to fall down?

Federal investigators cite undersize steel plates as the “critical factor” in the collapse of the bridge. Heavy loads of construction materials on the bridge also contributed to the disaster that injured 145 people on Aug. 1, according to preliminary findings by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Yet McCain, while campaigning in Pennsylvania, told reporters: “The bridge in Minneapolis didn’t collapse because there wasn’t enough money. The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects.”

“I think there is a long, long list of earmarks which went to unnecessary and unwanted projects that I think should have gone to the bridge in Minnesota,” McCain said. “I don’t know whether it would have gone or not, but if you’re spending $223 million on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it …”

Democrats criticized McCain’s comments. “It is reprehensible that John McCain would use a national tragedy to make a political point that isn’t even grounded in facts,” said Damien LaVera, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

Actually, it is useful.  It shows America that McDepends is a cranky old coot who should be spending his time rehashing Limbaugh’s last show in letters to the editor, instead of being put forth by a major political party for consideration as the guy with his finger on the nuclear button.

McCain also criticized earmarks for projects in New Orleans that didn’t help protect the city from Hurricane Katrina, saying a congressional earmark helped to dig a channel outside New Orleans that helped speed the hurricane into the city.

Right.  Because it is a well know fact that a category 5 hurricane will follow the path of a trench.

“It’s the process I object to,” he said. “I’m sure that I can give you a list of projects the Mafia funds, and they would probably be good projects. But I can’t give you a justification for the Mafia. I can’t give you a justification for the corruption that’s been bred which has sent members of Congress to the federal prison,” he said.

Wow.  I would like to see McCain’s list of projects the mafia funds.

“Look, if we reform the process, then the money will take care of itself. It’s a corrupt process,” he said.

He should know.  Cough, cough, Keating 5, cough, cough.

Rule 1 in a campaign is “Stay on Message.”

If the candidate’s crazy uncle shoots off his mouth and drags the campaign off message, it isn’t that campaign’s fault.  Those get filed under “shit happens”.  But if the candidate himself shoots of his mouth and drags the campaign off message, it gets filed under “Amateur Hour.”

PHOENIX (AP) — Republican John McCain was forced to clarify his comments Friday suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.

At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver.

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.

The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said. “But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said.

“If the word `again’ was misconstrued, I want us to remove our dependency on foreign oil for national security reasons, and that’s all I mean,” McCain said.

“The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

It was the second time in as many days that McCain had to clarify his comments. On Thursday, he backed off his assertion that pork-barrel spending led to last year’s deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

McCain has no opponent.  He is still screwing up.  Can we trust this guy to run the free world?

I have to say that I find more stuff for this blog in Arizona than any local papers in the Country.  It isn’t surprising that they give their home town Senator so much ink.  What is surprising is how badly they think of him.  Here is the East Valley Tribune in Phoenix:

No matter how many times McCain says “my friends,” he will have few of them among general election voters when they give unbridled attention to his position on issues they care about.

Soaring gas prices, stagnant wages and the housing collapse have our economy in tatters, and McCain concedes this isn’t his strong suit even though “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.” Our failing economy is one of the casualties of the Iraq War that McCain continues to strongly support. At long last, the media are beginning to ask some hard questions about the cost of the war.

Ron Brownstein of National Journal poses this question for McCain: “If the war really is crucial to America’s security, shouldn’t today’s taxpayers finance it?” As has been pointed out numerous times, Iraq is the first major war that this country has fought by transferring the entire cost to future generations through government debt. President Bush never proposed raising taxes to pay for the war. Worse, in 2003 he substantially cut taxes, unprecedented in war time.

Expect more of the same from a McCain administration. McCain has already endorsed tax cuts that would cost more than $300 billion a year, including reduction of the corporate income tax from 34 percent to 25 percent. And, of course, he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, another $110 billion.

A constant worry to families across America is our deteriorating health care system, where rising costs leave nearly 50 million people with no insurance coverage and millions more underinsured. The current system cherry-picks the healthy and tells those with chronic diseases to get lost. When a journalist asked if the senator’s skin cancer might make him sympathetic to the idea of requiring that insurance companies offer policies to those with such conditions, McCain responded: “That would be mandating what the free enterprise system does.” (He is referring of course to a system that does indeed allow insurance companies to choose the healthiest people and refuse coverage to those who are sick.)

McCain told the Boston Globe he would give people with pre-existing conditions “an extra tax credit” to help pay for insurance funded by savings in the Medicaid program. The Columbia Journalism Review made this observation: Where does McCain think the Medicaid savings will come from? Does he mean cutting benefits to poor people who depend on Medicaid for health care? Or from middle-class families who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing home care?

Real issues like these keep people awake at night, and only the Democrats offer real solutions.

Pretty straightforward indictment.  McCain sucks on the economy, he sucks on National Defense, and he sucks on health care.

But his wife has a nice rack and owns a beer distributorship.

The American Spectator chimes in on McCain’s polling in Florida:

McCain Losing in Florida

TAMPA– A Quinnipiac poll taken April 23-29 shows John McCain losing to  Hillary by 49 to 41 in Florida and trailing Barack Obama by 44 to 43 percent. These results represent a reversal of fortune. Most previous polls have shown McCain ahead of both Democrats in the Sunshine state, which is usually reliably red.

The new poll is disturbing to Florida Republicans, but doubtless encouraging to Democrats and to Republican (sort of) Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who wants to be on the ticket with McCain about as much as any young boy ever wanted a new bicycle for Christmas.

The conventional wisdom is that Crist would help McCain carry Florida, without which state McCain has little chance of winning in November.

They got that right.  If McCain loses Florida, it is over.

But Crist’s political pull elsewhere would be limited, because he’s at least as unappealing to the conservative Republican base McCain needs to win over as McCain himself is, and has far less gravitas. He’s sort of a Dan Quayle without the maturity and seriousness.

Make a note to remember that line if McCain gets desperate and puts Crist on the ticket.

“Crist is a 72 year old heart beat away from the Presidency, and even the arch-Conservative American Spectator said Crist is “sort of a Dan Quayle without the maturity and seriousness.”   McCain/Crist:  Wrong for Ohio, Wrong for America.”

Frank Rich has a flair for stating the obvious:

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

McCain does his best to continue Reagan/Bush-style fear mongering:

“There are those that want a massive government takeover of the health care system in America,” Mr. McCain warned Thursday in Des Moines.

“But before you decide to sign on to that kind of a program, go to Canada, or go to European countries that have government-run health care systems,” he continued. “My friends, they don’t work, they’re inefficient, and they end up in a two-tiered system where the wealthiest can afford to pay for their own health care and those with low income sometimes wait six or eight months for a routine kind of treatment. And that’s what I’m not going to let happen to the United States of America.”

This tragic lie must come straight from the mouth of lobbyists close to McCain’s campaign. And while it’s no surprise the billion-dollar health insurance industry employs lobbyists to protect their corporate interests, I am surprised these primitive “Socialist Medicine” scare tactics are still being floated in 2008, when so much of this BS has been disproved. In Canada, Britain, France, and elsewhere, polls reveal their citizens overwhelmingly prefer government-funded universal health care. Nobody in any other part of the world is saying “European health care is inefficient.” Nobody says “Canada is a two-tiered system whether only the wealthy can afford good health care.” These are outrageously idiotic comments, and will do more damage to our society than any of Bush’s lies. America needs universal health care like it needed the New Deal. On this one issue, the media must be honest, and must stop participating in the ridiculous propaganda circulated by powerful voices within the health care industry.