Tag: 2008_election

Trolls For McCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

Quite amusing, really.

You knew somehow it would come to this. John McCain’s campaign is offering their supporters redeemable points to troll websites and write pro-McCain comments. It’s the professionalization of astroturfing. Because it’s a conservative effort, they give them the exact words and invite them to cut and paste them onto the sites.

[From Hullabaloo -Trolling For Fun And Profit]

Apparently, the McCain campaign was finding it difficult to generate much enthusiasm without paying for it.

Wrong Bus

[Wrong Bus McCain]

The Washington Post adds:

Spread John McCain’s official talking points around the Web — and you could win valuable prizes!

That, in essence, is the McCain campaign’s pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of “AstroTurf” campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.

On McCain’s Web site, visitors are invited to “Spread the Word” about the presumptive Republican nominee by sending campaign-supplied comments to blogs and Web sites under the visitor’s screen name. The site offers sample comments (“John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan . . .”) and a list of dozens of suggested destinations, conveniently broken down into “conservative,” “liberal,” “moderate” and “other” categories. Just cut and paste.

Paucity of ideas, indeed.

McCain and His Fake Energy Plan

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Never Fear
[Never Fear! Fuelman is Here!]

Buried in an article about Obama’s call for releasing oil from the Strategic Oil Reserves is a succinct summary of McCain’s nonsensical energy plan.

Obama emphasized on Monday that using reserves is a temporary fix and that drilling is not “a particularly meaningful short-term or long-term solution.” McCain has said that drilling would have a “psychological” benefit for consumers; his proposal to suspend the 18-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax was ignored by lawmakers on Capitol Hill and criticized by economists, who said it would not lead to a noticeable change in prices.

On the stump, McCain talks frequently about electric power, a subject that energy experts say will do little to affect gas prices. His plan to build 45 nuclear power plants, which he will highlight with a visit to a Michigan plant Tuesday, would take decades.

[From Obama Urges Opening Up Oil Reserves – washingtonpost.com]

Gas costs update

gas price breakdown

Psychological benefit? Really? I’m not sure consumers would worry less about high gasoline prices knowing that oil corporations have the ability to drill for oil sometime in the future. And nuclear plants to be completed long after Senator McCain is deceased will help lower gas prices how exactly? Any specifics about where these plants are going to be located? In a convenient location that nobody would complain about, I’m sure. Show me these 45 new locations on a map, please.

(H/T a letter in Altercation by Ben Miller)
Gas At Last
[Gas At Last – Alaskan Service Station]

Corruption, a Chevy and McCain

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Yes, a champion of campaign finance reform, indeed.

Alice Rocchio is an office manager at the New York headquarters of the Hess Corp., drives a 1993 Chevy Cavalier and lives in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., with her husband, Pasquale, an Amtrak foreman.

Despite what appears to be a middle-class lifestyle, the couple has written $61,600 in checks to John McCain’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, most of it within days of McCain’s decision to endorse offshore oil drilling.

At a June fundraiser, the Rocchios joined top executives at Hess Corp. — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hess, his wife, Susan, his mother, Norma Hess, and six other officials in giving a total of $313,500 to a joint McCain-RNC fundraising committee, Federal Election Commission records show.

The donations, first traced by Campaign Money Watch last week, were part of $1.2 million in oil industry contributions to McCain’s Victory ’08 Committee, 73 percent coming after McCain reversed his long-held opposition to offshore oil drilling.

[From McClatchy Washington Bureau | 08/06/2008 | Did New York couple give $61,600 to McCain, GOP?]

Even though this couple just bought (in Feb, 2008) a 1993 Chevy (estimated to be around $3,000, if in good shape), they could afford to donate $61,600 to McCain and the RNC. Hmmmm, smells a little fishy to me.

Of the $57,000 the Rocchios donated in June, $4,600 went to McCain’s general election “compliance committee,” to pay for campaign lawyers and auditors, and $52,400 went to the RNC, which devotes nearly all of its money to supporting McCain’s presidential bid

The Washington Post has more on the same topic:

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.

[From Bundler Collects From Unlikely Donors – washingtonpost.com]

The bundler in this territory is Harry Sargeant III, owner of an oil-trading corporation that recently procured a $1,000,000,000 Defense Department contract. Unrelated, I am sure.

Some of the most prolific givers in Sargeant’s network live in modest homes in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Most had never given a political contribution before being contacted by Sargeant or his associates. Most said they have never voiced much interest in politics. And in several instances, they had never registered to vote. And yet, records show, some families have ponied up as much as $18,400 for various candidates between December and March.

Both Sargeant and the donors were vague when asked to explain how Sargeant persuaded them to give away so much money.

“I have a lot of Arab business partners. I do a lot of business in the Middle East. I’ve got a lot of friends,” Sargeant said in a telephone interview yesterday. “I ask my friends to support candidates that I think are worthy of supporting. They usually come through for me.”

Sargeant’s business relationships, and the work they perform together, occur away from the public eye. His firm, International Oil Trading Co. (IOTC), holds several lucrative contracts with the Defense Department to carry fuel to the U.S. military in Iraq.

Not everyone is a fan:

The work has not been without controversy. Last month, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) initiated a review of IOTC’s contract to determine whether it was overcharging the military for jet fuel, and to learn how the company, which did not submit the lowest bid, landed the contract to supply the fuel. The Pentagon has said that IOTC won the contract because it was the only company with a “letter of authorization” from the Jordanian government to move the fuel across its territory to Iraq.

and the folks who contributed seem a little removed from the political process. For instance:

Ibrahim Marabeh, who is listed in public records as a Rite Aid manager, at first denied that he wrote any political checks. He then said he was asked by “a local person. But I would like not to talk about it anymore.” Neither he nor his wife is registered to vote

or

At the Twilight Hookah Lounge, owned by Nadia and Shawn Abdalla, patrons smoke tobacco flavored with honey and fruit from a menu that includes the strawberry-flavored Sex on the Beach and the strong, orange-flavored Fuzzy Navel.

The Abdallas, who are not registered to vote, said in an interview that they recalled writing a check to an organization in Miami, because a person with that organization was a friend of their mother’s. They said they could not remember his name.

or a Taco Bell supervisor:

Nader, 39, and Sahar Alhawash, 28, of Colton, Calif, who at one point ran the Avon Village Liquor store, donated a total of $18,400 to Giuliani, Clinton and McCain between December and March. About 80 people in the country made such large contributions to all three, and most were wealthy business executives, such as Donald Trump. The Alhawashes declined to comment about the donations. Abdullah Abdullah, a supervisor at several Taco Bell restaurants in the Riverside area, and his wife have donated $9,200 to McCain.

Reached at work, Abdullah said he knows little about the campaign. “I have no idea. I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’m involved in the restaurant business. My brother Faisal recommended John McCain. Whenever he makes a recommendation, we do it.”

Faisal Abdullah, 49, said he helped organize all of the contributions from members of his family. When he was asked who solicited the contributions from him, he said: “Why does it matter who? I’m telling you we made the contribution. We funneled it through the channel in Florida because that’s the contact we had. I was responsible for collecting it.”

Right, these people have so much extra cash laying around that they can afford to contribute the maximum amount to political candidates whose name they barely can remember. I’d speculate there is some money laundering going on. How much does the contributor keep? Ten percent? Twenty percent?

Vote for Fear

Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking of Terrorism Theatre1, PSoTD catches a bit of fear mongering soft-shoe, Republican style. Vote for Fear, vote Republican!

I think it was CNN was showing a bit of a McCain fundraising/publicity stop. McCain was taking questions from the audience, and some 18 year old woman grabbed and microphone, and one of the first things she said was something like this:

I hope you win this. Obama, whew, he terrifies me! Whew!
and she kind of paused, and then…

the crowd applauded.

And I thought, there it is, in a nutshell. Republicans. Cheering for fear. Are you afraid? Yes? Hooray!!!!! Vote for Republicans then.

[From PSoTD Wuss Nation]

Whenever I think of Fear, I think of beer. Or more beer.


“More Beer” (Fear)

Footnotes:
  1. with my Canadian schooling, I am never sure how theater is spelled [↩]

McCain: The Most Reprehensible Of The Keating Five

Seth Anderson0 comment

John McCain was the subject of this article written by Tom Fitzpatrick, published in 1989 in the Phoenix New Times.

You’re John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker.

Obviously, Keating thought you could make it to the White House, too.

…

They say that if you put five lobsters into a pot and give them a chance to escape, none will be able to do so before you light the fire. Each time a lobster tries to climb over the top, his fellow lobsters will pull him back down. It is the way of lobsters and threatened United States senators.

And, of course, that’s the way it is with the Keating Five. You are all battling to save your own hides. So you, McCain, leak to reporters about who did Keating’s bidding in pressuring federal regulators to change the rules for Lincoln Savings and Loan.

When the reporters fail to print your tips quickly enough–as in the case of your tip on Michigan Senator Donald Riegle–you call them back and remind them how important it is to get that information in the newspapers.

The story of “the Keating Five” has become a scandal rivaling Teapot Dome and Watergate. The outcome will be decided, not in a courtroom, but probably on national television.

Those who survive will be the sociopaths who can tell a lie with the most sincere, straight face. You are especially adept at this.

[From McCain: The Most Reprehensible Of The Keating Five, page 1 – News – Phoenix New Times – Phoenix New Times]

No kidding, John McCain hasn’t needed to improve his liar’s face in many years, as it was quite polished already. Unfortunately for him, being a media celebrity for all these years has dulled his edge a bit.

Running While Black

swanksalot0 comment

Welcome to the Dark Side

Welcome to the Dark Side


Bob Herbert is wise to the John McCain strategy – campaign not on ideas, but on insinuations and falsehoods. A typical Karl Rove disciple, in other words.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.

Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown

[From Bob Herbert- Running While Black – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

and

John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

…

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.

Of course, political campaigns are blood sports, nonetheless McCain is just slime of the worst Republican variety.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHXYsw_ZDXg

McCain and his day job

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sometimes known as being a member of The Senate. John McCain is too busy losing a campaign to bother showing up in Washington to vote or otherwise participate in the nations business. And as was pointed out elsewhere on the internet tubes, McCain has collected $51,345 in salary since last voting.

Any way you measure it, McCain’s performance in the Senate during the last year has been abysmal. He has missed 400 votes, far more than any other Senator (including Tim Johnson, who’s recuperating from a brain hemorrhage). In May Ronald Hansen of the Arizona Republic referred to “his chronic absence in the Senate” as if the problem is well known in McCain’s home state. Earlier this month he was the only Senator to skip the vote on the Medicare bill. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly criticized McCain for his regular absences.

Here are some numbers:

63% – How many votes in the Senate McCain has skipped during the 110th Congress (since January 2007).
96 – The number of Senate votes McCain has missed since his last recorded vote on April 8.
111 – The number of days since McCain last attended a committee hearing (of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on April 9).
25% – How many full SASC hearings McCain has attended during the 110th Congress.
89% – How many full SASC hearings McCain has skipped since April 2007 (32 out of the last 36 hearings).
2007 – The last year in which McCain attended any Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee hearings or subcommittee hearings.
The League of Conservation Voters noted in February that McCain has skipped every one of the 15 Senate votes on environmental issues that it deemed critical during this Congress.

McCain has so far abandoned his duties in the Senate that when he traveled to Colombia and Mexico 4 weeks ago to discuss trade and commerce, he felt obliged to treat it as a campaign rather than a congressional trip. Did I mention that he serves on the Senate Commerce Committee?

It’s normal for Senators campaigning for president to spend a lot of time away from the Senate, of course. Barack Obama has been on the road too and missed 20 votes in the Senate since July 9 (many related to a single bill, S. 2731). Yet throughout the campaign Obama generally has not been absent from the Senate for any more than a couple weeks at a time.

Quite extraordinarily, however, McCain has all but checked out of his Senate job for all of 2008 and indeed for most of 2007 as well. This comes at a time when the country is facing both domestic and foreign crises that two of McCain’s committees have needed to act on.

[From Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

McCain is following in the footsteps of George Bush a little too closely, methinks. Noted also, McCain isn’t polling so well in his own state, Arizona. Wonder why?

Lobbyist Love McCain to the Tune of $181,000, so far

Seth Anderson2 Comments

More to come of course. Much, much more to come.

Loneliness is an ATM

Registered lobbyists have donated large amounts of money to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, even as he denounces their profession.

[From Lobbyist Reports Show $181,000 for McCain – NYTimes.com]

Saint McCain loves the lobbyists right back, of course.

So far, Mr. McCain, who has locked up the Republican presidential nomination, has received more than $181,600 from lobbyists and trade groups, while Mr. Obama has received just over $6,000. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who ended her bid for the presidency in June, got more than $87,000.

The gifts are disclosed in “lobbying contribution reports” filed with Congress under the ethics law, which was adopted last year in response to scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Under the law, lobbyists must itemize their contributions to political candidates and committees, presidential libraries and events honoring members of Congress. Lobbyists face criminal penalties for failure to comply with the disclosure requirements.

Employees at Republican lobbying firms like Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock have made many contributions to Mr. McCain and other Republican lawmakers, including the Senate and House minority leaders and the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Some lobbyists chafe at being asked for money by the McCain campaign while he disparages lobbyists as agents of “big-moneyed special interests.” But they know that such criticism is a staple of politics.

Implication being, all the fulminations are just for show, and Saint McCain really loves lobbyists underneath it all. A big fat hypocrite, to be blunt.

McCain: Lobbyist’s Bitch

Seth Anderson1 Comment

John McCain never met a lobbyist he didn’t like, especially ones who are affiliated with the International Republican Institute.

Beer Money at the MCA

Over the years, Mr. McCain has nurtured a reputation1 for bucking the Republican establishment and criticizing the influence of special interests in politics. But an examination of his leadership of the Republican institute — one of the least-chronicled aspects of his political life — reveals an organization in many ways at odds with the political outsider image that has become a touchstone of the McCain campaign for president.

Certainly the institute’s mission is in keeping with Mr. McCain’s full-throated support for exporting American democratic values. Yet the institute is also something of a revolving door for lobbyists and out-of-power Republicans that offers big donors a way of helping both the party and the institute’s chairman, who is the only sitting member of Congress — and now candidate for president — ever to head one of the democracy groups.

Operating without the sort of limits placed on campaign fund-raising, the institute under Mr. McCain has solicited millions of dollars for its operations from some 560 defense contractors, lobbying firms, oil companies and other corporations, many with issues before Senate committees Mr. McCain was on.

[From McCain’s Lobbyst-Laden Group – International Republican Institute Gives Donors Access – NYTimes.com]

A few of the more prominent friends of Saint McCain:

First up that night in September 2006 was the institute’s vice chairman, Peter T. Madigan, a McCain campaign fund-raiser and lobbyist whose clients span the globe, from Dubai to Colombia. He thanked Timothy P. McKone, an AT&T lobbyist and McCain fund-raiser, for helping with the dinner arrangements and then introduced the chairman of AT&T, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., whose company had donated $200,000 for the event.

AT&T at the time was seeking political support for an $80 billion merger with BellSouth — another Madigan client — and Mr. Whitacre lavished praise on Mr. McCain, a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee. When Mr. McCain finally took the podium, he expressed “profound thanks” to AT&T before presenting the institute’s Freedom Award to the president of Liberia, a lobbying client ofCharlie Black, an institute donor and McCain campaign adviser.

The parade of lobbyists and fund-raisers at the dinner is emblematic of Mr. McCain’s tenure at the institute, one of a pair of nonprofit groups — taxpayer-financed and each allied with one of the two major political parties

…

If anything, the overlaps seem more pronounced in his latest quest for the presidency, and they involve institute board members associated with his campaign and donors with interests before the Senate. Mr. Madigan, the institute’s vice chairman and a McCain fund-raiser, represented the government of El Salvador in 2004, when the institute was monitoring presidential elections there. Mr. Madigan’s firm has represented six foreign governments and sometimes lobbied Mr. McCain’s Senate office.

Among those clients is the government of Colombia, which has paid the firm at least $590,000 over the last 18 months. One issue Mr. Madigan has been pushing on behalf of the Colombians is a pending free trade agreement with the United States. Several weeks ago, Mr. McCain traveled to Colombia and, in keeping with his views on trade, spoke about the need for the accord.

Another board member is the McCain campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Until March, he was registered as a lobbyist for several foreign governments, and he represented the government of Georgia last January when the institute sent election monitors there. Since joining the institute in 2004, Mr. Scheunemann has spoken with Mr. McCain or his Senate aides at least 42 times on behalf of his foreign lobbying clients

–

Update – a brief history of the International Republican Institute

Presidential hopeful John McCain is hiding a skeleton in his closet. Not your typical political scandal, Senator McCain’s dirty little secret is his longtime involvement with the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization that operates in 60 countries and is budgeted by millions of US taxpayer dollars each year. The IRI is “officially” a politically independent entity, though in reality it is aligned in most respects with the Republican Party and its ideals. Senator McCain has been chairman of the IRI since 1993 and Lorne Craner, president of the organization, is one of the presumptive Republican candidate’s informal foreign policy advisors. If McCain’s involvement with the IRI does not worry Latin America yet, it certainly will if the policies that have had such a destructive influence in the past are backed by the power of the presidency. His connection to the IRI could endanger already stressed US-Latin American relations in the event of a McCain victory.

[From A Hidden Agenda: John McCain and the IRI by Sarah Hamburger]

More on that topic later

Footnotes:
  1. for some reason, even though McCain’s love for lobbyist cash has never been hidden, nor his love for Republican talking points [↩]

John McCain hates birth control

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Katha Pollitt wonders1 why John McCain’s strong anti-contraceptive views are not fodder for the 24 hour news to chew endlessly on.

But can’t the commentariat take a break from itself and let the world know how much John McCain opposes birth control? Vastly more people rely on contraception than read The New Yorker or know who Bernie Mac is from mac ‘n’ cheese.

In fact, vastly more people use birth control than believe Obama is a secret Muslim. They might like to know that when it comes to contraception, McCain is no maverick.

Here’s the story. Last week, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who has been helping McCain look bright-eyed and estrogen-friendly, told reporters that women wanted more choice in their health-care plans. For example, it bothered women when plans covered Viagra but not contraception.

Big mistake! McCain had voted against a bill that would have required plans to cover birth control if they covered prescription meds at all, like, um, Viagra. McCain’s non-response when queried about this by a reporter was astonishing. As you can still see on YouTube, he squirms and grins and smirks (Viagra! embarrassing!) and fumfers about evasively.

“I don’t know enough about it to give you an informed answer,” he manages to splutter, “because I don’t recall the vote. I’ve cast thousands of votes. . . . It’s something I’ve not thought much about.”

So, John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so indifferent to women’s health and rights or just so out of it he doesn’t even remember how he voted. That’s the way to show American women you really care.

[From McCain’s take on birth control — chicagotribune.com]

The YouTubery of the question:

Pollitt searched Nexis for discussion of this McCain position and found only 61 mentions in print and on TV, and most of those were indirect references, at best. I guess the fact that John McCain has a 20 year record of voting against contraception yet voting for insurance coverage of Viagra isn’t as important as fist bumping or magazine-cover satire.

Footnotes:
  1. rhetorically, for sure, since McCain’s gaffes are off the record by media dictate [↩]

Barack Obama’s super marketing machine

swanksalot0 comment

No wonder Obama decided to ultimately support FISA and illegal surveillance of US citizens. You never know where database marketing will lead.

You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you’re registered to vote — including whether that’s a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He’s got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you’re likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you’re more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

The 5 million people on Obama’s e-mail list are just the start of what political strategists say is one of the most sophisticated voter databases ever built. Using a combination of the information that supporters are volunteering, data the campaign is digging up on its own and powerful market research tools first developed for corporations, Obama’s staff has combined new online organizing with old-school methods of voter outreach to assemble a central database for hitting people with messages tailored as closely as possible to what they’re likely to want to hear. It’s an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall.

[From Salon.com News | Barack Obama’s super marketing machine]

It isn’t groundbreaking to compile such a database, but it is new in the political arena. Credit card companies, automobile manufacturers, and other corporations have been doing this sort of data mining for several years now, with the statistical models becoming increasingly sophisticated.1

Neither the campaign or its consultants would offer up many details about the operation; what they have is most likely a mix of hard data and predictions based on statistical models. Some very specific tidbits are available from consumer marketing firms; if you’ve ever registered a product — a TV, a computer or a microwave, for example — chances are the campaign knows you own it. Likewise, they know if you’ve signed up for the frequent customer club at your local Whole Foods, or if you’ve joined the American Civil Liberties Union. (Yes, those last two probably make you an Obama supporter). Or whether you own a gun and have a current hunting license. (An indicator you’re less likely to pull the lever for him in November.)

They can add that to what they know about the neighborhood in which you live — even about your specific block — then run all the information through a computer, and voilà: Obama aides can pull up a list of, say, married white men over 30 from an area where people buy a lot of gourmet potato chips and Miller High Life sells well.

For the most part, no one particular piece of information has an overwhelming Democratic or Republican tilt, though there are a few exceptions. For instance, people who live in “multi-unit dwellings” — apartment buildings — tend to be overwhelmingly Democrats, possibly because that one indicator tends to bring others along, like income, neighborhood density and living in a city

Footnotes:
  1. which is why I always give a few false answers to corporate seekers of data [↩]

Cellphone Nation Ruining Polling Data

swanksalot0 comment

Polling data is goofy anyway, there is only so much one can really learn from them. Still, this undercount seems to me worthy of note.

Cell phone-iphile

Say you want to reach a representative sample of the U.S. electorate for a presidential poll. The Obama-McCain race is relatively close these days, with the Democrat’s lead hovering around 5 to 6 points in most surveys. Someone tells you that he’s selected a sample that’s predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) — and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.

At this point you throw up your hands and exclaim: “Why are we concentrating on such a pro-Obama universe? He could be leading by 20 points or more among those people!”

He could. He probably is. But in actuality, the sample I’ve described is either not being included at all in many national polls or is being undercounted. Why? Because I’m talking about the growing number of American cellphone users who have no other type of phone or who choose to go wireless for the vast majority of their interactive needs. And this election cycle — for the first, and perhaps only, time — this group has the chance to render presidential polls “wrong from the start”: potentially disguising at least 2 to 3 percentage points of Obama support and maybe more.

Heretofore my industry has dismissed the cellphone-only population with a troika of “yes, buts.” Yes, they’re undercounted, but 1) they don’t vote anyway; 2) their numbers are still small; and 3) we can find acceptable substitutes in the land-line population.

And to be honest, there is a fourth, still more powerful rationale that remains unstated: “Yes, they’re undercounted, but it’s too damn difficult and expensive to reach them.”

[Click to read the rest of Cellphone users missing from election surveys | Salon ]

Hanging Out

Natural Born

Seth Anderson3 Comments

We’ve joked about this before, but apparently, John McCain is barred from actually becoming President by virtue of being born outside of the borders of the United States, like your humble narrator.

In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

[Click to read more details of A Citizen, but ‘Natural Born’? McCain’s Eligibility to Be President Is Disputed by Professor – NYTimes.com]

Naturally, our media guides will ridicule and ignore this minor detail, instead focusing on whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not.

A lawsuit challenging Mr. McCain’s qualifications is pending in the Federal District Court in Concord, N.H.

There are, Professor Chin argued in his analysis, only two ways to become a natural-born citizen. One, specified in the Constitution, is to be born in the United States. The other way is to be covered by a law enacted by Congress at the time of one’s birth.

Professor Chin wrote that simply being born in the Canal Zone did not satisfy the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

A series of early-20th-century decisions known as the Insular Cases, he wrote, ruled that unincorporated territories acquired by the United States were not part of the nation for constitutional purposes. The Insular Cases did not directly address the Canal Zone. But the zone was generally considered an unincorporated territory before it was returned to Panama in 1999, and some people born in the Canal Zone when it was under American jurisdiction have been deported from the United States or convicted of being here illegally.

The second way Mr. McCain could have, and ultimately did, become a citizen was by statute, Professor Chin wrote. In Rogers v. Bellei in 1971, the Supreme Court said Congress had broad authority to decide whether and when children born to American citizens abroad are citizens.

At the time of Mr. McCain’s birth, the relevant law granted citizenship to any child born to an American parent “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” Professor Chin said the term “limits and jurisdiction” left a crucial gap. The Canal Zone was beyond the limits of the United States but not beyond its jurisdiction, and thus the law did not apply to Mr. McCain.

In 1937, Congress addressed the problem, enacting a law that granted citizenship to people born in the Canal Zone after 1904. That made Mr. McCain a citizen, but not one who was naturally born, Professor Chin said, because the citizenship was conferred after his birth.

McCain Ignorant Re Social Security

swanksalot0 comment

Hilzoy catches a wee bit of obtuseness, or ignorance, dropping from John McCain’s mouth. McCain wants to gut Social Security, and doesn’t care too much about details, or facts.

McCain said:

“I’d like to start out by giving you a little straight talk. Under the present set-up, because we’ve mortgaged our children’s futures, you will not have Social Security benefits that present-day retirees have unless we fix it. And Americans have got to understand that.

Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.

(From CQTranscriptions, “SEN. JOHN MCCAIN HOLDS A QUESTION-AND-ANSWER AT A TOWNHALL MEETING”, July 7, 2008. Accessed via Lexis/Nexis.)

20 dollar bill

Hilzoy responds:

The fact that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by workers, young or otherwise, is not a disgrace, or a scandal, or a new development. Social Security has been funded this way since its inception. The first person to receive monthly benefits, one Ida Mae Fuller, had worked for three years, and contributed all of $24.75 to the Social Security Trust Fund. She lived to be 100, and collected $22,888.92 in benefits. Did the Social Security Trust Fund found that money under its pillow? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Younger workers paid Ida Mae Fuller’s pension. Workers who were younger still paid those workers when they retired. And even younger workers, like me, are paying for their Social Security benefits. This is not a disgrace; it’s the way the system operates. And it’s certainly not a sign that we’ve mortgaged our children’s futures, or that something has to be fixed.

One interpretation of this statement would be that McCain is being deceptive: trying to make a straightforward feature of Social Security seem like a scary new problem, in order to gin up support for his nonexistent plans to fix it. I tend to think that he just doesn’t know how Social Security works. (This would explain why he doesn’t see the problem with privatizing the system: the need to pay a generation’s worth of transition costs.) However, it doesn’t really matter which explanation is right: either one ought to be close to disqualifying.

John McCain: deceptive or stone cold ignorant? We report; you decide.

[From McCain: Deceptive Or Stone Cold Ignorant]

All John McCain knows is that some of his long-term lobbyist buddies want to privative Social Security so they can plunder the government coffers. He’ll do anything he can to help them, because without his lobbyist buddies (and his media buddies), McCain wouldn’t be where he is in politics now (losing a presidential election).

McCain and his Budget Whopper

Seth Anderson0 comment

John McCain wants desperately to preside over George Bush’s third term. And Hillraisers consider supporting this schmuck? That’s nothing but a spit in the eye to one of Bill Clinton’s undeniably positive legacies – balanced budgets and budget surpluses. Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, writes:

George W. Bush took the largest budget surplus in history and transformed it into a giant deficit. McCain’s economic plan, announced today, will to even worse. McCain says he’s going to balance the budget by the end of his first term (actually, he didn’t literally say that – he just “demanded” it – implying that a Democratically-controlled Congress would be ultimately responsible if it didn’t happen). And then McCain came up with numbers that will blow the deficit into the stratosphere.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the budget deficit will be $443 billion in 2013, the end of the next president’s first term, if Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent (which McCain pledges to do). So start with this $443 billion hole. Now add in McCain’s promise to cut corporate taxes by a hundred billion a year ($4 billion of this for American oil companies, more than a billion for Exxon-Mobile alone). Then add in McCain’s promise to get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, designed to ensure that the very rich pay at least a minimum percent of their income in tax. Obama would properly index it to inflation but McCain will let the rich pay as little as they can get away with. Non-partisan tax experts put the ten year cost of this at $1 trillion. All told, McCain promises more than $650 billion of new tax cuts per year. (That doesn’t even include McCain’s promise to allow corporations to immediately expense all their investments – which, he asserts, would add nothing to the budget deficit at all!)

Who gets all these cuts? Mostly, the very rich and big corporations. The non- partisan Tax Policy Center estimates that 25 percent of McCain’s cuts would go to people earning over $2.8 million a year (the top one-tenth of one percent). Each would get an average tax cut of $269,000, over and above what George Bush gave them.

[Click to read the rest of Robert Reich’s Blog: McCain’s Budget Whopper]

John McCain’s base (the national media) wring their hands re: Obama and tax increases, but John McSame is proudly an economic idiot, willing to destroy the American government any way possible, taking the rest of us with him.