Tag: McCain

Jukebox John can’t pick a favorite pander

Seth Anderson0 comment

So he keeps letting his Rovian friends put another dime bag in the jukebox…

McCain has been in Congress for more than a quarter-century; he’s bound to shift now and then on various controversies. But therein lies the point — McCain was consistent on most of these issues, right up until he started running for president, at which point he conveniently abandoned literally dozens of positions he used to hold. The problem isn’t just the incessant flip-flops — though that’s part of it — it’s more about the shameless pandering and hollow convictions behind the incessant flip-flops. That the media still perceives McCain as some kind of “straight talker” who refuses to sway with the political winds makes this all the more glaring.

Here’s the list.

[From Jukebox John keeps changing his tune – The Carpetbagger Report]

76 different flip-flops as of today1…

Footnotes:
  1. please note, I have nothing against people changing their mind – I have a different favorite ten albums every day, perhaps even every hour, but I am not running television ads smearing my neighbor for changing his favorite ten albums. John McCain is, and should be excoriated for it. [↩]

Blizzard of Lies

Seth Anderson1 Comment
Blizzard of Liars - McCain and Palin

Blizzard of Liars - McCain and Palin

Paul Krugman worries that the McCain campaign is even more untruthful than the 2000 Bush Rove group of liars.

how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

[Click to read more of Paul Krugman – Blizzard of Lies – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Obviously my collage skills are a bit atrophied, but you see what I mean. If you have a knack for such caricature, send my your version, and I’ll replace my lame-o one with yours…

“Blizzard of Oz” (Ozzy Osbourne)

McCain is computer illiterate

Seth Anderson0 comment

The ad is actually pretty funny, and McCain did admit he is a relic from a prior age.

“Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. “We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain’s attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people.”

The newest ad showcasing their hard line includes unflattering footage of McCain at a hearing in the early ’80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubik’s Cube.

“1982, John McCain goes to Washington,” an announcer says over chirpy elevator music. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t.

“He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail, still doesn’t understand the economy, and favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class,” it says. It shows video of McCain getting out of a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush and closes with a photo of him standing with the current President Bush at the White House. “After one president who was out of touch, we just can’t afford more of the same.”

[From The Associated Press: Obama mocks McCain as computer illiterate]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ2I0t_Twk0

McCain and his little drug problem

Seth Anderson0 comment

John McCain and his little drug problem called Cindy McCain are back in the news. Matt Stoller has unearthed a potentially explosive story concerning John McCain, Cindy McCain, the DEA, and obstruction of justice. Ru-oh, if this story ever leaks out into the broader corporate media, McCain will have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. He might want to hide out in one of his houses for a while.

A whistleblower is coming forth against John and Cindy McCain, and the picture he is painting is not a pretty one. You’ve probably heard about Cindy McCain stealing prescription drugs from her charity in the 1990s. Today, Tom Gosinski, her former employee and a close friend of the McCain’s, came out on the record about the entire sordid episode. And it appears that McCain used his Senate staff and resources to cover up Cindy’s drug use, and potentially to prevent the Drug Enforcement Agency from investigating his wife’s theft of illegal prescription drugs. John McCain certainly used his political connections to begin a campaign of intimidation against Gosinski, because at the time – this was after the Keating 5 scandal – another major scandal would have derailed his career. Gosinski stayed quiet out of fear until today; a recent fight with cancer has strengthened his resolve. As he told me today, if he can beat cancer, he can go on the record regarding how the McCain’s do business.

[From Open Left:: Did McCain Tamper with the Drug Enforcement Agency to Protect His Career?]

Cut Rate Liquors and Real Drugs

and

The charity was supposed to conduct medical missions abroad, but Cindy was also stealing from the charity’s supply of drugs for her own personal use. In August of 1994, the story was going to come out, and so John McCain came out with his side of the story. He claimed he didn’t know that Cindy McCain was using drugs until 1994, a clear lie. Cindy McCain overdosed in 1991, and John McCain went to the hospital in Sedona and told the hospital staff not to make the information about Cindy public. Gosinski heard about the overdose in 1992, after he began work for Cindy McCain.

There are lots of unanswered questions, but the basic contours of the story are clear. John McCain used his position as a Senator to help his wife abuse illegal drugs and avoid being searched by customs, and somehow his wife managed to avoid any charges by the DEA or the state (which has mandatory minimums in cases like this) on drug charges despite ample evidence. Did the DEA or the state not file charges against her because of political pressure? Did they keep this on the Federal level to avoid mandatory minimums for Cindy McCain because of political pressure from McCain? Did John McCain and/or his Senate staff tamper with a criminal investigation of his wife and her conspiracy to fraudulently obtain illegal drugs?

Whether illegal or not, and an investigation by Congress should happen, this is clearly a massive and overreaching case of both corruption on a personal sordid level and an abuse of power.

Plenty more details, and some YouTube interview footage, here Silly kids, drug busts only happen to those earning under $5,000,000 a year.

via – Pam Spaulding, who writes:

And there’s much more, so click over. So how is the McCain campaign going to try to weasel out from under this? There are too many landmines in this story that will result in questions Straight Talk McCain will have to answer. There should be a Congressional investigation into this, given the gravity of the situation and the questions raised about the abuse of power. What does this thuggery say about how McCain will behave in the White House? How many other people may be persecuted with our taxpayer dollars under his orders?

If there’s one thing that the McCain camp wants to avoid is anything that deviates from the milked-to-death image of John McCain as the “Maverick” and patriotic POW, and neither of those labels applies to the insider, backstabbing, petty man using his power to destroy someone to protect his reputation and image because of his drug-addled wife’s “little problem” that was about to break wide open. This is The Real McCain, and it’s time for voters to see this image before they go to the polls.

This story needs to be driven hard – is this the kind of change McCain/Palin plan to bring to Washington? He looks an awful lot like the long list of corrupt GOP officials we’ve been dealing with since Cindy was popping pills back in the day.

When Doves Cry

Seth Anderson0 comment

More precisely, this is what happens when Republicans are in charge of a government they profess to despise – total and complete failure to govern.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

[From Wide-Ranging Ethics Scandal Emerges at Interior Dept. – NYTimes.com]

Hey, but according to the polls, Americans are still evenly decided if they want 4 more years of this sort of leadership or whether they would prefer having a government that attempts to serve the country (versus the Republican mentality of crony capitalism and ethical considerations be damned).

John McCain and his little red Corvette, Sarah Palin, would fit right in to this mentality, since they’ve already expressed their joy to reward lobbyists with federal money whenever possible.

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing probes of the troubled program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency has had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, the new set of reports raises questions about the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

In one of the new reports, investigators conclude that a key supervisor at the agency’s minerals revenue management office worked together with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.

Two other reports focus on “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” and unethical behavior in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in the form of oil and gas rather than cash royalties.

The Interior Department dropped all pretense of being anything other than a division of the oil and gas industry. I wonder what does happen in the Bush White House since Bush and Cheney both consider themselves part of the oil industry taking a short sabbatical, and why exactly did Jeff Gannon make all those hundreds of visits to the White House?

One of the reports says that the officials viewed themselves as exempt from [ethical] limits, indulging themselves in the expense-account-fueled world of oil and gas executives.

In addition, the report alleges that eight royalty-program officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business, and took money from a technical services firm in exchange for urging oil companies to hire the firm. In sometimes lurid detail, the report accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said.

There are plenty more details in Charlie Savage’s article, including this lovely tidbit:

two of the highest-ranking officials who were targets of the investigations will apparently escape sanction. Both retired during the investigation, rendering them safe from any administrative punishment, and the Justice Department has declined to prosecute them on the charges suggested by the inspector general.

Cheney would have instructed Bush to pardon them anyway…

from the (redacted) document covering Gregory Smith, page 19:

The RIK employee recalled that on one occasion in late 2004, Smith telephoned her repeatedly asking for drugs. She said she provided cocaine to him early that evening, but he continued to call her. Eventually, she said, Smith traveled to her house and wanted her to have sex with him. She said he also asked her if she had more cocaine, and she stated that she did not but that someone who was staying with her might. She said Smith obtained crystal methamphetamine from one of these individuals and she watched him snort it off the toaster oven in her kitchen. The RIK employee also said she and Smith engaged in oral sex that evening.

update: the actual documents (PDF) are available at ProPublica.org and are quite a fun read.

Some of these files are quite large, so beware.

In a cover letter (PDF), Inspector General Earl Devaney details the “culture of ethical failure” in the department.

In the first report (PDF), investigators focus on Gregory Smith, the former program director of the royalty-in-kind program. As the Times reports, “The report accuses Mr. Smith of improperly accepting gifts from the oil and gas industry, of engaging in sex with two subordinates, and of using cocaine that he purchased from his secretary or her boyfriend several times a year between 2002 and 2005.”

The second report (PDF) look at the Interior officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil. From theTimes: “The report found that 19 officials — about one-third of the program’s staff — accepted gratuities from oil companies, which was prohibited because they conducted official business with the industry.”

And the third report (PDF) focuses on Lucy Denett, the former associate director of minerals revenue management, who allegedly manipulated the contracting process to steer a contract to her friend Jimmy Mayberry. Mayberry pleaded guilty to conflict of interest charges earlier this year.

I could only imagine the sustained gnashing of teeth if this scandal could be linked to a Democratic client. Since it only involves Republicans and oil industries, it will get a mention or two in passing, and be off the news cycle by the weekend.

McCain and His Masters

Seth Anderson0 comment

We mentioned this factoid yesterday, commenting that it reflected poorly upon John McCain that he wasn’t even in charge of his own campaign, and didn’t have the mental strength to stand up to nay-sayers in his own party. How would he perform against strong willed leaders like Vladimir Putin, for instance? I’d wager on Putin defeating Rush Limbaugh in a bar fight, or back alley brawl any day, but McCain couldn’t even stand up to the Vulgar Pig Boy, or “Mittens” Romney. Weak sauce, Johnny, weak sauce.

Only last month, friends say, Mr. McCain wanted to reach beyond his base and ask Mr. Lieberman to be his running mate; in that instance, though, party influence proved too strong, with many Republican officials and delegates insisting they would reject Mr. Lieberman because of his support for abortion rights and some gay rights laws.

[From Lieberman Highlights His Kinship With McCain – NYTimes.com]

According to Joe Sudbay of AMERICAblog, it was even more craven:

There’s more according to my sources in Connecticut (who have never steered me wrong). The word working its way through political circles in Connecticut is that John McCain actually called Joe Lieberman to ask him to be the GOP v.p. candidate. The “ask” was made. However, a revolt ensued, led by Mitt Romney and others, threatening a floor fight. That resulted in a second call a couple hours later to Lieberman from McCain pulling the offer.

There is so much in that little anecdote if my sources are accurate. First, it shows what a tool Lieberman is. Last night, Lieberman spoke at a convention where he’s actually vilified, yet he went anyway and flat out lied about Obama. More importantly, it shows what a wimp McCain is. He’s supposed to fight al Qaeda, but won’t stand up to the religious fanatics in his own party. Instead, McCain made an impulsive choice, Sarah Palin, who wasn’t vetted. McCain couldn’t have the v.p. he wanted. So, he was forced to pick someone he didn’t even know. Says a lot about John McCain’s willingness to gamble with America’s future.

Droopy Dog and the Old Timers

Seth Anderson0 comment

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair got sucked into watching Joe Lieberman perform soft-shoe in front of his new bestest friends:

Lieberman’s speech redefined unctuousness. He lubricated unctuousness with his own personal brand of smiling smarm. As a few bloggers have noted, this was a speech that didn’t mention President Bush (neither did Thompson’s, I believe) but used President Clinton as an applause line. It wasn’t much applause but it was more than he got when he praised McCain for trying to address thorny issues such as global warming, campaign finance, and immigration reform–issues that the Rush Limbaugh fans either consider bogus (global warming) or feel McCain was on the wrong side of (campaign finance, immigration). The reaction in the hall to Lieberman’s speech reminded me of the SCTV bit in which Love Boat’s Gavin MacLeod (Joe Flaherty) pays tribute to One Day at a Time’s Bonnie Franklin as her face is flashed on the big screen:

“I think she’s a helluva entertainer, folks–don’t you?”

Deathly silence.

Moving right along…

As the camera snapshotted the delegates during the Lieberman speech, it underscored what a tired, old congregation has been gathered, the Republicans never more looking like the Party of the Past, yesterday’s news. It’s bad enough listening to fake Dixieland, it’s worse having to look at it.

[Click to read more of James Wolcott’s Blog: vanityfair.com]

Other than Norm Coleman’s line1 that was tailor-made for Obama’s team to use as YouTube fodder2 , Whiny Joe’s shout-outs to the forbidden topics of global climate change and immigration were the most unintentionally funny moments of the RNC, so far.

Footnotes:
  1. “John McCain has a face that says yes” [↩]
  2. I could image YouTube ads such as “John McCain has a face that says yes…to corporate lobbyists [↩]

Hatred For The American Government

swanksalot2 Comments

Simply imagine the uproar if an associate of Barack Obama voiced such an opinion of the United States – the gnashing of teeth could be heard as far away as the moon.

The founder of the Alaska Independence Party — a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years — once professed his “hatred for the American government” and cursed the American flag as a “damn flag.”

The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, made the comments in 1991, in an interview that’s now housed at the Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

“The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.

“And I won’t be buried under their damn flag,” Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system. “I’ll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home.”

At another point, Volger advocated renouncing allegiance to the United States. In the course of denouncing Federal regulation over land, he said:

“And then you get mad. And you say, the hell with them. And you renounce allegiance, and you pledge your efforts, your effects, your honor, your life to Alaska.”

[From TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Founder Of Group Palin Courted Professed “Hatred For The American Government”; Cursed “Damn Flag”]

Simply imagine if somebody, like a preacher at the church Obama attended, for instance1, claimed to hate America and despise the American flag. You wouldn’t even hear of any more hurricane news, the coverage would be so vigorous. However, since Sarah Palin is a Republican, such connections are not worthy of much discussion.

If you want to hear the audio of Joe Vogler, click here [MP3] Too bad there isn’t any video of the event.

Footnotes:
  1. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, remember him? [↩]

A roll-the-dice commander

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Yikes, when even the Financial Times excoriates John McCain and his damn-the-torpedos mentality, one has to wonder.

Mr McCain will not run a “safe” foreign policy. He adores rolling the dice. His decision to select Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate typifies the man. It is a big risk. It could turn out to be inspired. Or it might turn out to be a disaster. But it is not “safe”.

Mr McCain approaches international affairs in the same spirit. His instinct is always to take the radical option and to march towards the sound of gunfire.

…

The Georgian crisis also looks, at first sight, like a vindication for Mr McCain. He has been a longstanding critic of the Russian government. He saw the crisis in Georgia coming a long time ago.

When I visited Georgia last April I discovered that President Mikheil Saakashvili counted Mr McCain as one of his closest friends and allies. Mr Saakashvili told me (with a laugh) that the South Ossetians – whose rebel enclave he later attacked, with such disastrous consequences – had even shot a missile at a helicopter carrying Cindy McCain, the Senator’s wife. And the Georgian president told me proudly that Mr McCain had given him a gift – a bullet-proof vest.

Even at the time, this struck me as an ambiguous present. Was it saying, I’m behind you all the way; or was it saying, best of luck, I’ll be cheering for you – from a safe distance? Now that Georgia has been so severely mauled by Russia, the dangerous ambiguities in the policies pushed by Mr McCain and the Bush administration are even clearer. The Georgians were flattered, hugged and trained by the Americans. But when the Russian tanks rolled in, there was little the west could do.

Mr McCain says that President Teddy Roosevelt is one of his heroes. But Mr McCain’s proclamation in the aftermath of the Russia’s invasion – that “we are all Georgians now” – was the opposite of Roosevelt’s famous advice to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. It was tough talk, with very little to back it up.

Mr McCain’s failure to spell out the implications of his strong rhetorical support for Georgia may mean that he has failed to think things through – or just that he does not want to alarm voters. But the Republican needs to answer some difficult questions.

Is the US really prepared to fight Russia to protect Georgia and Ukraine – as Mr McCain’s firm support for swift Nato membership for these countries implies? Are we entering a new cold war, as his determination to isolate Russia suggests? If the tough talk is not backed up by tough action, what does that do to American credibility?

Mr McCain’s instinct certainly is to confront Russia – and indeed China. Even before the conflict in Georgia, he was arguing for throwing Russia out of the Group of Eight and forming a new League of Democracies.

Mr McCain’s confrontational instincts are even more to the fore when it comes to Iran. He has said that the only thing worse than a war with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran. Taken at face value – and given what we know of Iran’s nuclear programme – that sounds like a commitment to attack Iran within the first term of a McCain presidency.

[From FT.com / Columnists / Gideon Rachman – McCain: A roll-the-dice commander]

I don’t the world’s leaders are very gung-ho for a McCain presidency: too much is at stake for the United States to be helmed by a belligerent and impetuous Commander in Chief.

Half-Assed Vetting Process

Seth Anderson2 Comments

John McCain and his impulsiveness is not what the country needs. He couldn’t even wait until the RNC finished vetting Sarah Palin before announcing her as his VP. Not good judgement, not good judgement at all.

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.

[From Disclosures on Palin Raise Questions on Vetting Process – NYTimes.com]

One day before announcing her, and moments after meeting her the first time? That’s pretty pathetic.

Evilution
[Evilution, Seattle, Washington]

Also worth noting1 is that John McCain wanted to select Joe Lieberman2 but was told by his bosses, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, that an wasn’t acceptable choice. Who is really making the decisions in the McCain campaign? Who would make the decisions if by some weird circumstance3 McCain snuck into the White House? Can the country afford another 4 years of a Karl Rove/Rush Limbaugh presidency?

Up until midweek last week, some 48 to 72 hours before Mr. McCain introduced Ms. Palin at a Friday rally in Dayton, Ohio, Mr. McCain was still holding out the hope that he could choose a good friend, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, a Republican close to the campaign. Mr. McCain had also been interested in another favorite, former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

But both men favor abortion rights, anathema to the Christian conservatives who make up a crucial base of the Republican Party. As word leaked out that Mr. McCain was seriously considering the men, the campaign was bombarded by outrage from influential conservatives who predicted an explosive floor fight at the convention and vowed rejection of Mr. Ridge or Mr. Lieberman by the delegates.

Perhaps more important, several Republicans said, Mr. McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out — and as Mr. McCain discarded two safer choices, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable — he turned to Ms. Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

“They didn’t seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before,” said a Republican close to the campaign. “This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.”

Dont Bring Yer Guns to Town
[Don’t Bring Yer Guns to Ketchikan, Alaska, at least to Trident Seafoods]

Footnotes:
  1. explicitly, that is, we did mention this in passing previously [↩]
  2. Whiny Joe, the former Democrat who has since been married to John McCain – a civil union, of course [↩]
  3. Diebold related perhaps [↩]

Experience Muh Arse

Seth Anderson0 comment

Don’t know who either of these people are, but Tucker Bounds is unembarrassed to lie and evade the question about Sarah Palin’s vast experience taking over the Alaskan National Guard:

Campbell Brown interviews Tucker Bounds on Sarah Palin’s national security experience

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYYiw_y2qDI

Via TPM

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on CNN with a new line on Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience: McCain and Palin have more combined military command experience than Obama and Biden put together.

Palin And The Alaska Independence Party

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The unfunny Palin is chummy with a super right wing group of separatists who want Alaska to secede from the Union. She’ll fit right in when touring the Deep South.

This seems worth digging into a bit. The Alaska Independence Party, which was formed with the goal of seceding from the union and establishing Alaska as an independent state, says that Palin addressed their 2008 convention.

The AIP has posted video of what it claims is her address on its Web site.

It’s hard to gauge how fringe the group is. Its Website features this quote from one of its founders:

“The problem with you John Birchers’ is that you are too damn liberal!”
— Joseph Vogler, Founder Alaskan Independence Party

[From TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Sarah Palin And The Alaska Independence Party]

via Greg Sargent who has an excellent roundup of this weekends bad news for McCain/Palin, including the fact that there is a team of 10 lawyers being dispatched to Alaska by the Republican Party to cover-up as much scandal as possible, and do a proper vetting of Palin, presumedly before she is officially nominated. I bet the RNC is happy they had a good excuse to cancel their speeches scheduled for today. Might have been awkward for Republican Party regulars to mention Palin so many times before cutting her loose ala Thomas Eagleton in 1972.1

The faux-pregnancy story turned out to be just a family affair, and perhaps a Rovian play for sympathy.

Bush and his buddy McCain celebrate Hurricane Katrina

Bush and his buddy McCain celebrate Hurricane Katrina

Regardless, heck of a job on selecting your VP, McSamey.

Footnotes:
  1. Eagleton wasn’t thoroughly vetted by George McGovern’s staff, and the press had a field day discussing Eagleton’s mental hospital visits [↩]

Palin backed Bridge To Nowhere Before She Opposed It

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sarah Palin and John McCain haven’t had the smoothest transition into running mates. Compared to Obama and Biden, especially, the selection of Palin as VP seems impulsive, poorly planned, and suspect.

Bridge Milwaukee IR2
[A Milwaukee bridge to somewhere]

For instance, Palin’s mantle of being anti-corruption has already been stripped:

In her nationally televised speech accepting the job as John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said she “championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress” and opposed federal funding for a controversial bridge to a sparsely populated island.
“I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere,” Palin said Friday in Ohio, using the critics’ dismissive name of the project. “‘If our state wanted a bridge,’ I said, ‘we’d build it ourselves.'”

While running for governor in 2006, though, Palin backed federal funding for the infamous bridge, which McCain helped make a symbol of pork barrel excess.

And as mayor of the small town of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin also hired a Washington lobbying firm that helped secure $8 million in congressionally directed spending projects, known as earmarks, according to public spending records compiled by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste and lobbying documents.

[From Palin backed ‘bridge to nowhere’ in 2006 – USATODAY.com]

So much for being a reformer, though Republicans obviously don’t care too much if their candidates engage in crony capitalism, as long as everyone gets a taste.

McCain and his Baked Alaska

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gail Collins on the surprising Sarah Palin VP pick:

Wrong Bus
[Wrong Bus, Juneau, Alaska]

John McCain has a low opinion of the vice presidency, which he’s frequently described as a job that involves attending funerals and checking on the health of the president. (Happy 72nd birthday, John!) There’s a lot we don’t know yet about Palin, and I am personally looking forward to deconstructing her role in the Matanuska Maid Dairy closing crisis. But at first glance, she doesn’t seem much less qualified than Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota who most people thought was the most likely pick. Unlike Joe Lieberman, Palin is a member of the same party as the presidential candidate. And unlike Mitt Romney, she has never gone on vacation with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

However, I do feel kind of ticked off at the assumptions that the Republicans seem to be making about female voters. It’s a tad reminiscent of the Dan Quayle selection, when the first George Bush’s advisers decided they could close the gender gap with a cute running mate.

The idea that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong. When the sexes have parted company in modern elections, it’s generally been because women are more likely to be Democrats, and more concerned about protecting the social safety net. “The gender gap traditionally has been determined by party preference, not by the gender of the candidate,” said Ruth Mandel of the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

[From Gail Collins – McCain’s Baked Alaska – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

I don’t think there are many women who will vote a certain way just because the anatomy of a candidate resembles their own. Women I’ve known are more intelligent than that.

Ms. Collins also manages to work in the famous Lloyd Bentson line:

If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”

Since I had to look up the Matanuska Maid Dairy reference too, here’s what RobertoW of TPM Muckraker wrote about the topic:

Matanuska Maid was a failing, state-run dairy that had lost about $600,000 over two years when the state Creamery Board finally decided to shut it down in the spring of 2007.

Sarah Palin felt so strongly that Matanuska Maid should continue operating that she fired the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation, which appoints the Creamery Board, just to install new members who would reverse the Creamery Board’s decision and keep Matanuska Maid alive.

Sustaining a money-losing state-run business certainly doesn’t sound like fiscal responsibility. But neither does increasing the price the hemorrhaging enterprise pays for milk, which is precisely what the Creamery Board did, making it even more likely Matanuska Maid would not be able to continue as a viable entity.

and

The Anchorage Daily News reported May 31st that Matanuska Creamery “got off the ground with help from a $643,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and a lot of support from Stevens and from state Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla”. Stevens and Don Young even turned out for a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, their presence testifying to the uncorrupt, newly responsible way things now work in Alaska, thanks to Sarah Palin’s vigorously cleaning house.

But while Dairygate looks definitely sleazy to me, maybe I’m taking a parochial, Lower 48 view. To an Alaskan, what Sarah Polin did just looks like an innovation in fiscal management. After all, what happened here, aside from a little deception, insider-dealing and rank hypocrisy?

A failing state-run enterprise supported by Alaskan taxpayers ends up reborn as a private enterprise, run by a struggling local businessman and subsidized by Federal taxpayers.

To the locals, what a win/win: why should Alaskans have to support the local dairy farmers that bring them fresh milk and cheese, after all, when they have Uncle Ted and Uncle Don (and Aunt Sarah) around to make sure Uncle Sam picks up the tab?

More details and links to primary sources here

Worse Than Quayle

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sarah Palin does seem to be an odd pick for McCain’s Number 2. But, worse than Dan Potatoe Quayle, that’s pretty damn bad…

Another Second Choice

But she’s fantastically inexperienced, far more so than Quayle was when he was tapped. And she possesses an attribute far worse than Quayle’s stupidity – she’s a big corrupt wheel in Alaska’s big corrupt Republican Party, arguably the most corrupt political apparatus in the United States.

We’re told that McCain really wanted to pick his old friend Joe Lieberman to run with him, but that Karl Rove and the rest of the elite Republican politburo nixed the idea, and told McCain that he had to take a conservative. And as he has at every step of his campaign, the one-time “maverick” sold out to the venal, icy core of the Republican leadership, and acquiesced by selecting Palin. Palin is really a Republican after Rove’s heart – she’s a product of the party that produced the indicted Ted Stevens and ethically tarred Don Young, and she’s embroiled in a Troopergate scandal of her own, with state investigators looking at serious allegations that Palin abused her office by pressuring the state Public Safety Commissioner to fire “an Alaska state trooper involved in a rough divorce from Palin’s sister.” Sounds like a woman after Karl Rove’s heart.

In addition to further associating McCain with the Republican culture of corruption, the Palin pick undermines one of his main anti-Obama narratives. It’s going to be laughable to hear McCain assail Obama’s supposed lack of experience after naming the first-term governor — only one-and-a-half years into her term — of the 47th largest state to be his running mate. Palin lacks any foreign policy experience, and is bereft of even the two core areas of policy expertise that governors are supposed to bring to a ticket — ag policy (Alaska doesn’t have much in the way of traditional agriculture) and urban affairs (Anchorage is the 65th largest city in the US, behind giants such as Corpus Christi). She’s easily the least experienced running mate in recent memory, which is pretty scary, given McCain’s age and his history of cancer.

By picking Palin, McCain revealed his desperation to make a splash to rival the genuine excitement generated by the Obama campaign. But desperation leads to poor decisions — and McCain’s Hail Mary, like most last second desperation moves, is destined to fail miserably. He’s smeared himself with the pungent mud of Alaska Republican corruption, while cutting the legs out from one of his most reliable attacks against Obama. And he’s presented Americans with the prospect of electing a dangerous neophyte to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, behind a man whose life expectancy is less than two presidential terms.

[From Daily Kos: Worse Than Quayle]

Must have been her anti-evolutionary beliefs that tipped her over other vetted candidates.