Wanda Rants

I came across this political rant by Wanda Sykes on Jay Leno yesterday. Check it out :-)

Will on McCain

I don't agree with George Will too often, but his column in the Washington Post today begins with:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Even the Wall Street Journal referred to McCain's reaction as "untethered" and "unpresidential"!

I must say it's been astonishing to see McCain flailing and all over the map on this. I had read about his impetuousness, but his lack of seriousness and the absence of a governing philosophy has been in evidence most clearly over the last week. I wonder if this will have an impact on the electorate - or do people not pay any attention to the content and only register that he sounds decisive and authoritative?

Meltdown

I can't claim to be an expert on what's going on in the financial industry right now (can anyone?), but this Salon article about the parallels between the current bailout proposal in Congress and the full court press to pass the US eavesdropping program was interesting.

I will grant that some of the parallels are a little bit of a stretch, but there are murmurs from some Democrats in Congress about the lack of information, and the lack of safeguards or assurances tied to the money the Treasury Dept is asking for. Is this another piece of the Bush's "legacy" that someone else is going to have to unravel?

From a purely political standpoint I'm taking perverse pleasure in the whiplash that poor Sen.McCain is going through as he adjusts his regulatory world-view :-). Is the libertarian ideal of letting the markets work and getting out of the way still operative?

Bollywood, meet Hollywood!

The Wall Street Journal confirmed today that Steven Spielberg and his partners have engineered a deal for Reliance Industries to invest $1.2B in Dreamworks, so they can break free of Viacom.

So how much longer before we see Abhishek Bachchan and Angelina Jolie in Indian Jones and the Temple of Dhoom?

The Second Coming of George W

According to an AP story today, the Alaska Attorney General has said that he will instruct state employees not to respond to subpoenas issued by the Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee that's investigating the firing of the state public safety commissioner by Gov.Sarah Palin.

Where have we heard this one before?

Also worth reading is this column by a conservative talk show host in the Alaska Daily News.

Falafel Man

I don't know if you folks are watching the Bill O'Reilly-Obama interview. I must admit I was baffled when Obama agreed to go on O'Reilly's show, and was apprehensive about how it would turn out, knowing Bill-O's rude and bullying style.

I just watched the latest segment on taxes and the economy, and I must say I'm absolutely impressed. Bill-O constantly interrupts and bloviates as always, but Obama handles himself extremely well. He shows mastery of the subject matter, and keeps his cool and his sense of humor.

If there's one small nit, it's that I would love to see Obama show some irritation with being interrupted repeatedly. Still, it seems to me that getting on Bill-O's show was a great way to reach that audience and show them that he's a reasonable person who will protect their interests. I thought he made Bill-O come off as a rich elitist. Check it out ...

Not so fast ...

I went through some of the AK issues and votes, and Palin is fine.
This USA Today piece today captures her style of governing nicely.
She's smart and a tough cookie - forget the issues you bring up, this is politics after all - lies, exaggerations, false outrage etc. are all part of the game. The kitchen gets hot during elections ...
Both Palin & McCain (order intentional :-) represent the right brand of republicanism - frontier, more libertarian than doctrinaire. Obama seems to have lost a step (or several), but there is no real worry for him/Dems - the election is going to turn on 10-50 congressional districts in just a few mid-western states, and he's doing quite OK in the polls.

Bush Doctrine

Many commentators have correctly pointed out that Sarah Palin obviously didn't know what Charlie Gibson was referring to when he asked her about the "Bush Doctrine". Most people associate it with Bush's idea that the US can wage preventive war against anyone we feel threatened by, and it really is appalling that a person who could be president a year from now is unaware of this.

However Dan Froomklin in this Washington Post column points out that Jacob Weisberg, in his book "The Bush Tragedy", actually identified six different Bush Doctrines:

• Bush Doctrine 1.0 was Unipolar Realism (3/7/99--9/10/01)


• Bush Doctrine 2.0 was With Us or Against Us (9/11/01--5/31/02)


• Bush Doctrine 3.0 was Preemption (6/1/02--11/5/03)


• Bush Doctrine 4.0 was Democracy in the Middle East (11/6/03--1/19/05)


• Bush Doctrine 5.0 was Freedom Everywhere (1/20/05-- 11/7/06)


• Bush Doctrine 6.0 (11/8/06 to date) is the "absence of any functioning doctrine at all"

I guess arrogance and shallow political sloganeering do not constitute a "doctrine"!

Twitch

I'm not sure how many of you watched the Sarah Palin interview by Charles Gibson. More the content (or the lack thereof) I found the twitch and glint in her left eye every so often, terrifying! I believe there is a strong correlation between twitching eyes and lying.

Also-Rans

After the many hours of media coverage about cosmetics and swine that passes for political dialog these days, I thought a change of pace would be interesting.

For one thing, I didn't realize that Ralph Nader was running again! I used to admire Ralph for his tough and single-minded advocacy on behalf of consumers, but I'm one of those who will never forgive him for the damage he did in 2000, and his continued stubborn insistence that it wouldn't have made a difference whether Bush or Gore had won that election!

In any case I was reminded of him because he apparently appeared with Ron Paul on CNN today. I missed the interview, but according to this posting Ron Paul admitted that he would campaign for Nader because "it will take the votes away from Obama". I wonder what St.Ralph had to say about that ...

Hide the Palin

The strategy the McCain team has taken of shielding Sarah Palin from one-on-one interviews (at least so far) is an interesting one, and I wonder how long they can keep it up?

After all, there's been a steady drip-drip of questions and information being uncovered that call into question the "reformer" mantle that she has claimed. These include:

• "Thanks but no thanks" on the Bridge to Nowhere


• Pork-barrel politics and earmarks


• Husband's membership in a secessionist group


• Charging the state for children's "official" travel, per diem, etc.


• Trooper-gate and the firing of state employees


• Views of her church, her pastor, ...

Can the strategy of ignoring the press really work, and will all of these stories just go away if Palin refuses to address them, or will the drip turn into a flood that cannot go unrefuted at some point?

One interesting viewpoint from Newsweek about the impact that the blogs are having on this:

That said, the most interesting thing about today's give-and-take is not that Palin and McCain are misleading the public. In politics, that happens all the time. It's that the Internet--and, through the Internet, the Obama campaign--is forcing major media outlets to repeatedly reject the Bridge to Nowhere deception. In the past, Time and NEWSWEEK and the Times and the Post would've run a thorough factcheck the first time the falsehood surfaced. But then they would've ignored subsequent repetitions. .... But now sites like TPM are (in their own words) forcing "the same news orgs that debunked the original Bridge to Nowhere falsehood" to "aggressively stay on McCain and hold him accountable every time he and his campaign repeat it." That's a certain kind of progress.

CSPAN: AK governor debate 2006

I watched the 2006 Alaska governor debate on C-SPAN last night - SP is a quick & smart debater. The veep debate is bad news for JB, he's likely to go on & on, and she'll deliver a memorable line or two.
There's not much here - the issues mainly pertain to AK, and the 3
candidates agreed on most things. No controversial topics covered.

Here's the link:
http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=alaska%20debate
(uses rtsp), else check out: http://cspanjunkie.org/?p=407

Continuing the resentment politics theme, MSNBC makes election coverage changes

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/08/msnbc/

Pity - KO and FOX provide the most fun - analysis, opinions, bias, shouting etc. :-)

Greetings. Thought I'd kick off my first post with some cheap & ridiculous humor ...

Obama v McCain: who has the bigger imaginary penis? AMERICA DECIDES

http://theridiculant.metro.co.uk/2008/09/obama-v-mccain.html

Resentment Politics

Watching the Republican convention immediately after the Democratic convention highlighted one distinct difference for me.

While Democrats are afraid of offending their own shadow, and live in mortal fear of turning off any possible demographic, ethnic group or lifestyle, the Republicans seem to relish ridiculing and demonizing large swaths of the populace (trial lawyers, community organizers, public school teachers, unions, mainstream media, urban people, Eastern elites, Hollywood, New York, San Francisco, liberals, etc. etc.).

Paul Krugman refers to this in the New York Times as the 'Politics of Resentment'.

As the article points out, this is a strategy that the GOP has successfully employed since Nixon. You would think the Democrats would have learned to play that game by now! After all, the numbers are on their side if they want to play the populist game. However whenever a Democrat takes a populist tone and the right predictably bleats about "class warfare", the Democrats run for cover.

So what do you think? Has this strategy run its course or is Obama going to be yet another victim of the GOP's resentment playbook?

A Coup d'état attempt - pure and simpe

Let's take a step back. If Sarah Palin, sans gender, ran in the Republican primaries, where would she have finished? Put another way, which of the also-ran Republicans, mirror her views? Sam Brownback? Duncan Hunter? Fred Thompson? Tommy Thompson? Tom Tancredo? Mike Huckabee? Where did they finish? Except for Huckabee, the rest dropped out quickly in the race. So, fundamentally, the only way a Sarah Palin can make it into power is through the back door.

Must see

In case you missed it last night, Jon Stewart did a brilliant take on the contortions the McCain apologists are going through on the Palin pick. Uses their own words against them as only the Daily Show can. Why don't other news and opinion shows do this - he makes calling out the bullshit look so easy!

McCain Gamble May be Shrewd

Despite most initial reactions which could be summarized as a hair’s breadth from laughter at the bimbo from a state that does not count, McCain and his cohorts might be working Game Theory with a sinister twist. The following article from Financial Times is well worth reading http://tinyurl.com/5acxzh.

This line of thinking is further substantiated by the abundance of "worry" relating to why Palin in the Politico article http://tinyurl.com/68gwxw.

On a lighter note, this pick reminds me of I think Reagan times when one of the Secretary of State picks was supposed to be a handicapped Jewish women to appeal to a variety of special interests. If that were the case, Condi would have been a better pick - but then it would substantiate the claim of Bush III instead of McCain I. Don't know whether any of you read the latest Economist - Kucinich was censored from saying something tantamount to "Republicans were asking for 4 more years, in a just world they should be getting between 10 and 20!"