Tag: 2008_election

The Hillary Diehards

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News” (Eric Alterman)

Eric Alterman doesn’t think much of the Hillary Diehards, nor much of the media idiots who keep interviewing the pathetically small minority of Hill-Raisers who would even consider voting for John Anti-Choice McCain. Dr. Alterman writes:

Personally, I think that people who are “still angry” about Hillary Clinton and are considering “withholding their support” from Obama are moral and political idiots in exactly the same vein as those people who voted for Ralph Nader in swing states in 2000 were. More so, actually. The Democrats had a primary, and Obama won it fair and square. He didn’t cheat. He didn’t do any of the things that Hillary Clinton diehards are are so angry about. He just won and she lost. That’s how these things are supposed to work.

These Hillary diehards act as if they are making some sort of point, but the only point they are making is that they would prefer to see John McCain be President–and run a government that is opposed to everything they say they favor (here’s where the Nader comparison comes in) because they think politics is a form of therapy rather than a matter of compromise, coalition and, ultimately, victorious combination.

If you talk to one of these people for more than two minutes, they immediately cease to make any sense. But the press doesn’t talk to them for more than two minutes at a time because all they need is that one self-serving, conflict-building quote to give them what they need to support their big–and, right now, virtually only–story line. What’s more, the Obama people are under orders–quite understandably–not to anger these nut cases, because, sad to say, you can’t win an election without stupid people voting for you. So nobody says it aloud, but everyone says it privately. And that, rather than what you hear on your TVs all day, is the real news of this place, so far. And so the charade continues until we have some real news

[Click to read more The Hillary Diehards]

WCIU-TV 26

All I can add is thank pasta for CSPAN, otherwise I couldn’t stand to watch more than 3 minutes of the Democratic National Convention. Those fact-free yammering television commentators are nauseating.

McCain and His Liquored-Up Father-in-Law

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Interesting history of John McCain and his convicted father-in-law, first printed in 2000.

This story examines the roots of the Hensley fortune and John McCain’s implacable bond to the liquor industry — how it has enriched him personally and as a politician, and how those ties have dictated his actions on questions of public policy.

John McCain’s political allegiances to liquor purveyors and his father-in-law’s interests are subtle. That narrative is marked by a pattern of patronage.

The Hensley saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger

[Click to read the rest Mobbed-up Convicted Felon] [H/T: Jonathan Schwarz]

McCain has been corrupted by corporate lobbyist money for quite some time:

An analysis of contributions to John McCain’s ’98 Senate campaign and current presidential campaign, through last December1, reveals he’s taken at least $103,363 from alcohol-related political action committees and employees of the alcohol industry.

(By contrast, he’s taken more than $1 million from the telecommunications industry, $98,000 from maritime interests and $59,000 from trucking interests — other industries with business before his committee. Trucking issues are important to Hensley & Company, which operates a fleet of 300 delivery trucks.)

McCain’s recent alcohol money comes from a variety of sources — hard liquor, wine and beer interests — but from the beginning of his political career, James Hensley and his associates have been very good to John McCain.

Since 1982, McCain has received the following contributions:

• Hensley & Company employees: at least $61,063

• National Beer Wholesalers PAC: $21,000

• Anheuser-Busch employees and PAC: $33,100

George Hacker, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was surprised to hear that McCain accepts beer money.

That raises a question: Why would alcohol interests donate money to McCain if he recuses himself completely from their issue?

Hensley and the National Beer Wholesalers Association did not answer requests for comment. But Anheuser-Busch released this statement, from Stephen Lambright, general counsel:

“Anheuser-Busch has a long tradition of active and responsible corporate citizenship. Like many corporations, we participate in the political process in many ways, including through making contributions. In doing so, we support candidates from both sides of the aisle who best represent the views of our community, our employees, our consumers and our shareholders.”

Hacker has another answer: “My guess is they give money because… he can help by being absent, he can help by passing the buck, he can help by not passing the buck.”

Footnotes:
  1. or slightly over two years worth of data [↩]

Tax This Biatch

Seth Anderson0 comment

Krugman on the tax issue:

Mr. McCain wants to preserve almost all the Bush tax cuts, and add to them by cutting taxes on corporations. Mr. Obama wants to roll back the high-end Bush tax cuts — the cuts in tax rates on the top two income brackets and the cuts in tax rates on income from dividends and capital gains — and use some of that money to reduce taxes lower down the scale.

According to estimates prepared by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, those Obama tax increases would fall overwhelmingly on people with incomes of more than $200,000 a year. Are such people rich? Well, maybe not: some of those Mr. Obama proposes taxing are only denizens of lower Richistan, although the really big tax increases would fall on upper Richistan. But one thing’s for sure: Mr. Obama isn’t planning to raise taxes on the middle class, by any reasonable definition — even that of the Bush administration.

O.K., the Bush administration hasn’t actually offered a definition of “middle class.” But in May, the Treasury Department — which used to do serious tax studies, but these days just churns out Bush administration propaganda — released a report purporting to show, by looking at the tax bills of four hypothetical families, how the middle and working class would be hurt if the Bush tax cuts aren’t made permanent.

And when the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the report, it made an interesting catch. It turns out that Treasury’s hypothetical families got all their gains from the so-called middle-class provisions of the Bush tax cuts: the Child Tax Credit, the reduced tax bracket for lower incomes and marriage penalty relief.

These all happen to be provisions that Mr. Obama proposes leaving in place. In other words, the Bush administration itself implicitly defines the middle class as consisting of people making too little to end up paying additional taxes under the Obama plan.

Of course, all the evidence in the world won’t stop Republicans from claiming, as they always do, that Democrats are going to impose a crippling tax burden on ordinary hard-working Americans. But it just ain’t so.

[From Paul Krugman – Now That’s Rich- NYTimes.com]

Arugula and McCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

John McCain doesn’t think America labor would pick lettuce for $50 and hour, only immigrants would be willing to work for such cheap wages. Classy, McCain, classy indeed1

McCain Kennedy supporter

Sen. John McCain threatened on Tuesday to cut short a speech to union leaders who booed his immigration views and later challenged his statements on organized labor and the Iraq war.

“If you like, I will leave,” McCain told the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, pivoting briefly from the lectern. He returned to the microphone after the crowd quieted.
. . .
Later, the senator outlined his position on the Senate immigration debate, saying tougher border enforcement must be accompanied by guest-worker provisions that give illegal immigrants a legal path toward citizenship.

Murmurs from the crowd turned to booing. “Pay a decent wage!” one audience member shouted.

“I’ve heard that statement before,” McCain said before threatening to leave.
. . .
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.

McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain’s job offer.

“I’ll take it!” one man shouted.

McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”

Some in the crowd said they didn’t appreciate McCain questioning their work ethic.

“I was impressed with his comedy routine and ability to tap dance without music. But I was impressed with nothing else about him,” said John Wasniewski of Milwaukee. “He’s supposed to be Mr. Straight Talk?”

[From This Modern World » Blog Archive » Republican Elitist Watch]

Maybe there’s a typo here, but $50 an hour is pretty damn good wage for an hourly employee. $50 per hour, 40 hours a week would be $2,000 a week, or $8,000 a month. If the work was available all year2, that would be $96,000 a year. Much better than working at Wal-Mart or even as an electrician3.

Footnotes:
  1. in the sense of ignorance of class [↩]
  2. I’m not sure, but say for argument that Southern California’s lettuce plantations grew lettuce every month, which is somewhat plausible [↩]
  3. our guy is charging us $25 an hour, though I assume he isn’t union [↩]

Austin Anyone?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Everyone loves Austin, sometimes. For your fluff news of the day…

Senator Barack Obama marveled at the view here in Big Sky Country. He discovered that the gumbo in New Orleans was far tastier than in Chicago. And he was pleasantly surprised that he loved Austin, Tex., and its music — but who doesn’t?

…

“A place that I’ve come to love, which I did not expect until this campaign, is Texas,” he said in an interview the other day aboard his campaign plane, a patchwork of the countryside passing below him. “I ended up loving Texas! I’ve been struck by how many beautiful places there are in the country that you don’t necessarily think of as beautiful. Pittsburgh, for example, is a really handsome town with the rivers and the hills.”

[From Obama Is Going Places He Has Never Seen Before – NYTimes.com]

Flavin Disciple
[neon sign at Curra’s, Austin]


“U.F. Orb (Deluxe Remastered Reissue w/Previously Unreleased Tracks) – 2 discs” (Orb)

“U.F. Orb (Deluxe Remastered Reissue w/Previously Unreleased Tracks) – 2 discs” (Orb)

Corporate Media Feeding Frenzy

swanksalot0 comment

Corporate Media, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

The television talking heads should be permanently muted, what is the point of breathless and endless speculation about the damn Vice Presidential candidate? We as voters don’t even have a say…

Who *is* going to be the Vice President?

The McCain We Still Don’t Know

Seth Anderson0 comment

Frank Rich marvels at the wholly, demonstrably false portrait of John McCain that so many moderately informed people still have.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

[From Frank Rich – The Candidate We Still Don’t Know – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

and there is this:

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.

One of the most telling metrics is that there are Republicans who know McCain well, and they are campaigning for Obama:

Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

Bill Casey and Abortion

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I didn’t realize this myself. I had read so many times that Bill Casey was refused a speaking platform at the 1992 Democratic Convention for his anti-abortion views that I assumed this was not in dispute. I was wrong.

For the past 16 years, news organizations have been repeating an obvious falsehood about the 1992 Democratic convention. According to countless news reports — in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, ABC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and on and on and on — then-Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey was denied a speaking role at the convention because he opposed abortion rights.

That’s false. And it’s obviously false.

Here’s all you need to know in order to know with absolute certainty that Casey’s views on abortion were not the reason he was not given a speaking role: that very same Democratic convention featured speeches by at least eight people who shared Casey’s anti-choice position, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr., Sens. John Breaux and Howell Heflin, and five governors.

[From Media Matters – “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser]

The reason Casey was not afforded a prime time speaking position was that he refused to endorse Bill Clinton, and wanted to do a Zell Miller spew-fest, trashing the Democratic Party for various reasons, mostly having to do with abortion. Strange how that got twisted.

People involved in planning the 1992 Democratic convention have long maintained that Casey was not given an opportunity to speak because he refused to endorse Bill Clinton, who was to be nominated at the convention. That’s what they said at the time, too. The Washington Post’s first report on Casey’s request for speaking time included a quote from the Democratic National Committee’s press secretary: “anyone who is speaking at the convention will have endorsed Governor Clinton by the time of the convention and Governor Casey has not.”

It should be noted that it wasn’t merely that Casey hadn’t gotten around to endorsing Clinton. He was arguing that Clinton had only a “flyspeck” of support and that the party should consider nominating someone else at the convention.

Of course, only those involved in the decisions about who would speak at the convention know for certain if Casey’s refusal to endorse Clinton was the reason he wasn’t given a speaking role. But we do know that as soon as Casey asked for one, the Democratic Party publicly indicated that his failure to endorse Clinton would prevent him from speaking. If the convention organizers were making a bluff, Casey could have called it by simply endorsing Clinton. He chose not to. Instead, he began denouncing the party for having a “radical, extreme position” in favor of abortion rights and claiming it was bowing to “the radical far left.” Members of his own delegation were quoted saying he was “being a jerk” and said they were considering removing him as head of the delegation.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Casey didn’t merely want to speak at the convention. He wanted to devote his entire speech to opposing the Democratic Party on a single issue. After the convention ended, Casey released the text of the speech he would have delivered had he been given the chance. The speech ran more than 1,000 words — and not one of those words was “Clinton.” Nor was the word “Gore” mentioned. Casey’s speech did not include a single word of praise or support for the ticket being nominated at the convention he wanted to address. Instead, it accused the party of being “far out of the mainstream and on the extreme fringe” on abortion. That’s what the entire speech was about: disagreeing with, and insulting, the Democratic Party on abortion.

Barack Obama had better vet Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton’s speeches pretty carefully. Pretty damn carefully.
Jamison Foser continues

John McCain Running on Empty

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Running on Empty” (Jackson Browne)

Continuing on a theme, yet another musician is pissed off at the John McCain campaign for appropriating a song without permission. You’d think such copyright stalwarts would have learned to ask first. Silly kids, laws are for Republicans to break.

Jackson Browne sued Sen. John McCain on Thursday for unauthorized use of one of his songs in a television commercial.

Browne, one of rock music’s most famous activists for liberal causes, is “incensed” that the presumptive Republican nominee for president has been using Browne’s signature 1977 song “Running on Empty,” said Lawrence Y. Iser, the singer-songwriter’s attorney.

Browne filed a copy- right infringement lawsuit against McCain and the Republican National Committee in U.S. District Court in L.A., seeking damages and a permanent injunction prohibiting the use of the forlorn arena anthem or any other Browne composition.

…

Browne’s attorney said that he is “informed and believes” that McCain approved the ad.

[From Jackson Browne sues Sen. John McCain for unauthorized use of ‘Running on Empty’ — chicagotribune.com]

Luckily, I was able to write this entire post without using a pun based on Jackson Browne’s song, Lawyers in Love.

The True Cost of McCain’s Oil Industry Subsidies for Every State

Seth Anderson0 comment

McCain likes giving his starving oil buddies federal tax dollars: Republican corporate welfare helps keep McCain in office.

Oil and gasoline prices are setting all-time records, helping the five biggest publicly traded oil companies in the world earn a staggering $148 billion in profits over the past year. At the same time, the U.S. government continues to provide massive subsidies to oil companies.

These subsidies for some of the most profitable companies in the world, given directly and through the tax breaks, are a waste of taxpayer dollars and continue tax dollar investments in oil instead of shifting incentives to clean energy alternatives. Subsidies for the oil industry preserve our dependence on oil, which leaves our economy vulnerable to price surges, our security vulnerable to hostile oil-rich nations, and our climate vulnerable to greenhouse gas pollution.

If elected president, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) would provide $39 billion in federal help for oil and gas companies over the next five years. Some of these subsidies already exist: McCain supports the continuation of many of the current subsidies, which will total $33 billion over the next five years according to a study by Friends of the Earth, “Big Oil, Bigger Giveaways.” While McCain would repeal some of these subsidies, he would also pass a corporate tax cut that would be worth more than $22 billion to America’s five largest oil companies over the next five years.

[From The True Cost of McCain’s Oil Industry Subsidies for Every State]

It isn’t as if the federal government needs money, no not at all.

Insomniac Voters Unite!

Seth Anderson0 comment

When I’m up in the wee hours1, I tend not to watch television, but that’s just me.

Lonely Zenith

The Obama campaign is the first to use a long-form infomercial during the 2008 presidential campaign. If you hadn’t noticed, that may have been because the nearly 30-minute program aired at 1:30 a.m. Sunday on ION Television.

“This was one more effective way for us to communicate with folks who may not normally see other communications we have with voters who are paying closer attention to the race.,” the campaign said in a statement.

The mostly biographical 28-minute, 30-second program included scenes of the Illinois senator’s keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention as well as scenes from other campaign appearances along with background about Mr. Obama and frequent call-in numbers.

…

“It is a first. I guess they are going after the insomniac vote,” said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. He said the unusual airing time in fact appears to allow the campaign to test the effectiveness of the infomercial format without spending much.

[From Chicago Business News, Analysis & Articles | Obama courts insomniac vote | Crain’s ]

Political advertising seeks viewership, and especially viewership that isn’t competed over by political rivals.

Footnotes:
  1. which unfortunately happens more than it should [↩]

Obama sets out his Israel vision

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post has met three major American politicians in the last two months: President Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama. Horovitz was much more impressed with Obama than the other two dim bulbs.

Two months ago in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush, coming to the end of a two-term presidency and presumably as expert on Israeli-Palestinian policy as he is ever going to be, was accompanied by a team of no fewer than five advisers and spokespeople during a 40-minute interview with this writer and three other Israeli journalists.

In March, on his whirlwind visit to Israel, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, one of whose primary strengths is said to be his intimate grasp of foreign affairs, chose to bring along Sen. Joe Lieberman to the interview our diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon and I conducted with him, looked to Lieberman several times for reassurance on his answers and seemed a little flummoxed by a question relating to the nuances of settlement construction.

On Wednesday evening, toward the end of his packed one-day visit here, Barack Obama, the Democratic senator who is leading the race for the White House and who lacks long years of foreign policy involvement, spoke to The Jerusalem Post with only a single aide in his King David Hotel room, and that aide’s sole contribution to the conversation was to suggest that the candidate and I switch seats so that our photographer would get better lighting for his pictures.

Several of Obama’s Middle East advisers – including former Clinton special envoy Dennis Ross and ex-ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer – were hovering in the vicinity. But Obama, who was making only his second visit to Israel, knew precisely what he wanted to say about the most intricate issues confronting and concerning Israel, and expressed himself clearly, even stridently on key subjects.

There is a limit to what can be gauged of a politician’s views as expressed in a relatively short interview at the height of an election campaign. But Obama, who chose to give the Post one of the only two formal sit-down interviews he conducted during his visit, was clearly conveying a carefully formulated message – and it was striking in several areas.

[Click to read more David Horovitz Exclusive: Obama sets out his Israel vision | Jerusalem Post ]

Experience is a false metric for political success, in my estimation. More important is cleverness, and a willingness to be educated on issues. Our current half-assed President has never been interested in learning anything new, nor in parsing the complicated nuances of international diplomacy, and based on all evidence I’ve seen, neither is John McCain. Barack Obama, for all his other faults, is the sort of intelligent human who should be running the Executive Branch of the US.

Palast on McCain and Nukes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Greg Palast discusses John McCain’s love for all things nuclear, a part of McCain’s goofy energy plan.

I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants – that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren’t –period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I’m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion – or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say “supposed to,” it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We’re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, “This time it will be different.” Sure. And McCain believes them.

[From Greg Palast » The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut ]

and the nuclear plant waste issue is still unresolved, as we’ve mentioned previously

While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about “inexpensive” nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion – nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste’s cost. “Can we deal with the expense?” he said on Meet the Press.

McCain’s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. D’oh! I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

Read the whole article here

Obama The Antichrist

swanksalot2 Comments

Way to stay classy, John McCain. Get out the evangelicals’ vote any way possible, even by duplicitous means.

An Internet ad launched last week by the McCain presidential campaign has attracted more than one million hits by appearing to mock Barack Obama for presenting himself as a kind of prophetic figure.

The ad has also generated criticism from Democrats and religious scholars who see a hidden message linking Sen. Obama to the apocalyptic Biblical figure of the antichrist.

[From McCain Web Ad Is Accused Of Linking Obama to Antichrist – WSJ.com]

Snake

The End Times, a New Testament reference to the period surrounding the return of Christ, were popularized in recent years by the “Left Behind” series of books that sold more than 63 million copies. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of the series, said in an interview that he recognized allusions to his work in the ad but comparisons between Sen. Obama and the antichrist are incorrect.

“The antichrist isn’t going to be an American, so it can’t possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania,” the 82-year-old author said.

or like the Panama Canal…

The ad has provoked a growing debate on the Internet over whether it is playing with apocalyptic themes. Those ideas are chiefly shared by fundamentalist Protestants and some other evangelical Christians. Among their expectations: the ascension of a false prophet, a one-world government and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Critiques of the ad started surfacing earlier this week when Eric Sapp, a Democratic operative, circulated the first of two memos pointing out images that he believed linked Sen. Obama to the antichrist.

“Short of 666, they used every single symbol of the antichrist in this ad,” said Mr. Sapp, who advises Democrats on reaching out to faith communities. “There are way too many things to just be coincidence.”

Dog whistle politics, in other words. Though, I doubt very much if conservative evangelicals were ever going to vote for Obama, no matter what.

In some swing states with concentrated pockets of fundamentalists and evangelical Christians, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Virginia, the ads could have particular impact. Suggestions that Sen. Obama is the antichrist have been circulating for months in Bible-study meetings in towns like Chillicothe, Ohio, where congregants compare his remarks and his biography with verses from the Bible.

Stewart Hoover, director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the references to the antichrist in the McCain ad were “not all that subtle” for anyone familiar with “apocalyptic popular culture.” Some images in the ad very closely resemble the cover art and type font used in the latest “Left Behind” novel. The title of the ad, “The One,” also echoes the series; the antichrist figure in the books, Nicolae Carpathia, sets up “the One World Religion.”

Fake memes and Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jamison Foser dissects some recent anti-Obama press, including a reporter named Amy Chozick’s ridiculous Wall Street Journal article about Obama being too skinny for anyone to vote for.

Chozick apparently had some trouble finding people to support the crackpot premise that Obama’s physical fitness might cause voters to question his fitness for office, so she turned to trolling Internet message boards in desperate search of someone — anyone — she could quote. As the blog Sadly, No! revealed, Chozick posted a Yahoo! Message Board thread on July 15, asking, “Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his ‘no excess body fat’? Please let me know. Thanks!”

About three-and-a-half hours later, Chozick got her first response — a post ridiculing her for her focus on “totally meaningless drivel.” Nearly an hour after that, Chozick finally got the response she was looking for. A user posting under the name “onlinebeerbellygirl” wrote, “Yes I think He [sic] is to [sic] skinny to be President. … I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Chozick quoted the post in her article — one of only two quotes agreeing with the premise of the article. She did not, however, disclose that the quote had come only after she started a thread encouraging people to make such comments. After she got caught, the Journal acknowledged: “The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment.”

There may be more to it than that. A post in a subsequent Yahoo! Message Board discussion thread devoted to Chozick’s article noted that “[n]either Chozick nor ‘onlinebeerbellygirl’ has made any other posts on Yahoo before or since, and both profiles appear to have been created on 7/15, the day Chozick started the topics. It certainly looks like Amy Chozick constructed the whole thing.”

Another post wondered: “Do WSJ reporters make up fake IDs and make up fake quotes?”

Chozick’s original thread has been deleted (a cached copy is available here). Even more curiously, a search of the Yahoo! message boards for “onlinebeerbellygirl” comes up empty. Whether “onlinebeerbellygirl” ever really existed at all or was a Chozick invention, running a 1,300-word article suggesting Obama is too skinny to be president, based upon a random Internet message board post, is insane. As Slate.com’s Tim Noah noted, “In the vastness of cyberspace, you can always find somebody who will say whatever you want.”

[From Media Matters – “Obama coverage finds dark lining around silver clouds”; by Jamison Foser]

Obama is Plugged In to the Nation

No wonder newspaper circulation keeps dropping. Mr. Foser continues on to more serious, but equally insane fake memes, like that Obama is “too Presidential” to be President, or too well-educated. Ummm, yeah.