happy halloween

Since everyone is putting up Halloween videos, here's a spooky song by Jill Tracy, with a video that's sort of Bunel/Dali meets Edward Gorey:



Plus, mourning rings from the Columbia University Archives.

calling bs

As usual, you have to go to the Daily Show. Via Modern Medieval.



Once again, if you don't like Obama's policies, fine, don't vote for him. But this "socialism," "communism," or "spreading the wealth" stuff is horseshit.

a poem for the youth voter

vote irish

a gift from cowboyangel:

the ultimate endorsement

Via my Uncle Gary:

Good? Bad? Odd.

Independent political ads are getting strange, perhaps not really informative, but yes, funny.





Via Andrew Sullivan, of course.

more on lower instincts

From Andrew Sullivan, via CowboyAngel:

The Dangerous Panic On The Far Right

There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannot be president - because he's black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O'Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies - not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God's sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

From TPM:

Frank Schaeffer, writing in the Baltimore Sun ...

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

lower instincts: appealing to the mob

From Huffington Post:

"John Aravosis at AmericaBlog writes:

McCain was speaking today in New Mexico, doing his usual personal attack on Barack Obama, as the stock market plummeted (you can see the ticker next to McCain on the screen, an apt reminder of what McCain and his fellow Republicans represent), and McCain asked the crowd "who is Barack Obama?" Immediately you hear someone yell "terrorist." McCain pauses, the audience laughs, and McCain continues on, not acknowledging, not chastising, not correcting. Oh, but McCain does say in the next sentence that he's upset about all the "angry barrage of insults."

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports on a similar moment at a Palin rally today:

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" said the crowd.

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

And Dana Milbank highlights another incident from Tuesday:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

"Getting ugly out there," says ABC's Jake Tapper.

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Via Andrew Sullivan.

quote of the week (not even about politics!)

“Wow, wow, wow, wow. I think if I had to describe that one, I’d say that was gangsta. That’s gangsta. That’s serious gangsta right there.”

-Mets Manager Jerry Manuel, after pitcher Johan Santana pitched a three-hit shutout, only four days after pitching a 125-pitch game.



UPDATE: Not that it matters. The Mets once again squander the end of their season, do not make the playoffs, and break my heart.

the joker?

Don't worry -- the Joker is suspending his campaign and canceling his debate to solve the problems of our economy. And this not yet another stunt by a candidate that is ethically, politically, and intellectually bankrupt. It's country first!

UPDATE: Sam Stein details McCain's disgustingly hypocritical opportunism at a time of national crisis.

UPDATE II: McCain arrives, everything goes to hell. Which explanation do we prefer: that he is a slave to the extreme right wing of his party, or that he's willing to let the country fall into depression to avoid a debate? What a turd.

Money quotes -- From a GOP lawmaker, on his own colleagues:

"For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?"

From a Democratic staffer:

"Bush is no diplomat, but he's Cardinal freaking Richelieu compared to McCain. McCain couldn't negotiate an agreement on dinner among a family of four without making a big drama with himself at the heroic center of it. And then they'd all just leave to make themselves a sandwich."

don't worry...

Rembrandt, Beggars at the Door.

















"I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong."
John McCain, "Black Monday," September 15, 2008.

"The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."
Herbert Hoover, the day after "Black Thursday," October 25, 1929.

From The American Prospect via Think Progress via Bob Cesca.

McCain/Palin -- Lies, all lies!

via Andrew Sullivan.

And for something sillier, from the same source, "Les Misbarack":

community organizing

St Vincent de Paul, community organizer.

Okay, I'm going to lay off politics soon. But since I'm still steaming about Giuliani and Palin's disrespect towards community organizers, I can't help passing on this Joe Klein article (hat tip to Kevin). Klein refers to this press release, from a group called Catholics Democrats:

Catholic Democrats is expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's acceptance speech tonight mocked her opponent's work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street. In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice.

Klein comments:

So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed--job training, help with housing and so forth--from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work--the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a "task from God.")

This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service--the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other--as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.

Perhaps La Pasionaria of the Northern Slope didn't know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giuliani--a profoundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few religious folk toiling in the inner cities--should have known. ("I don't even know what that is," he sneered.") What a shameful performance.

narratives

Orlando Furioso -- now that's a narrative we can believe in!

Caught on mike:

Chuck Todd: Yeah, I mean is she [Palin] really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

Uberrepublican Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --

I'm trying to just get work done, but unfortunately I'm on edge all day waiting to see how the media defines its simplistic and mistaken narrative.

Here's the truth: John McCain so desperately wants to be president that he gave up long ago in resisting the Bush GOP in any meaningful way. Even if he really were a "maverick" (whatever that means), he's still a poor choice for president. His approach to economics is stuck in the 80s. His approach to foreign policy is frightening. He seems impatient with any facts -- whether there's a difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis, what countries border Iraq, what countries even exist anymore. Everything is reduced to good vs evil, victory vs defeat. If possible, he is even more hawkish and simplistic than Bush. He makes jokes about bombing other countries. Granted, his personal story regarding Vietnam is compelling, but by all accounts he took the wrong lesson from that war: the disaster of Vietnam was for him not due to hubris and overreaching or the cynical policy of using our own troops and the civilians of another country as expendable pawns in a game of geopolitics, rather it was due to a loss of nerve -- we should have won, whatever winning in Vietnam could possibly have meant. McCain's "toughness" translates into a terrifying reality -- he will go to war with anyone from Iran to North Korea to even Russia because he believes there is no problem that doesn't have a military solution, and no matter how badly things go, he will never admit he was wrong and change policy.

Meanwhile, his lack of judgment is pretty much proven by his irresponsible vp pick. Un-vetted and with absolutely no experience or even display of interest in foreign policy (the McCain campaign keeps echoing the idiotic and desperate "Alaska is close to Russia" line as its only response to this question), Sarah Palin is an incredible gamble. She may turn out to be capable, but how would we know? McCain certainly doesn't, since he picked her after only having met her once. The more I learn about her the less I like her. Ideologically she is from the far right wing of the Republican party, and her extremely brief time in office is already marked by scandals and abuse of executive power. She has shown herself to be confident in reading a speech written by a Bush speechwriter (decrying Washington insiders!). She seemed to warm to the Rovian talking points in that speech -- I was especially struck by her cold-hearted mocking of community organizing, which at its best was typical Republican disdain for anyone who wants to empower and help the less fortunate and discriminated people in our society, and at its worse was encoded racism (urban community organizer = black; small town mayor = white).

The truth is that the GOP convention was pathetic -- delayed at first because of a storm that might remind the country of the Republican criminal negligence after Katrina, it was marked by the uncomfortable avoidance of the president they had so emotionally praised in the last two conventions. A series of speakers attacked the Democratic party using hateful divisiveness and unbridled hypocrisy (Mitt Romney, wealthy former governor of Massachusetts and d*******g, decried the dems as "eastern elites") and the rhetoric climaxed with Palin's speech full of outright lies about her own record (bridge to nowhere) and Obama's (just about everything she said about him was mendacious). Then after this red-meat hate-fest, McCain comes out and promises reform and bipartisanship. This is an insult to our intelligence.

So we shouldn't worry, right? The GOP has run this country into the ground and there's no way Americans would give them another four years, especially when any sane observer can tell they promise nothing new, right? Well, here comes the media. Palin is "a rising star" that "energized the base" and once again, McCain is "the maverick." This is the narrative they seem to have chosen and perhaps no amount of reality will prevail against it. I hope I'm wrong. I hope the cognitive dissonance it takes to support McCain can't hold up. I hope the debates will reveal how much more prepared to be president Obama is than his rival. I hope Palin's and McCain hypocrisy tumbles and falls open for all to see. Unfortunately, for now, I'm still waiting.


UPDATE: for a snarky, but sadly accurate, take on the obscene double standard the press narrative follows for the two parties, here's vol. 1 and vol. 2.

out of the park

Everybody's quoting Andrew Sullivan on this, because he nailed it:

It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

Read the whole thing. Watch and read the speech. Incredible.

My favorite part:

But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.

quote of the week

From Tuesday's Wonkette, In response to CNN's Leslie Sanchez's moronic comment "Is it the dress or what's in it? Michelle Obama covered the key milestones but the image of her in a cocktail dress left us wondering":

Watching Michelle Obama’s speech last night, you might have been struck by how deeply shameful it is that such an obviously smart and decent person must repeatedly assure the public of her patriotism so that a nation of suspicious and resentful idiots don’t think she’s planning to bomb their local scrapbooking club with a Socialist Black Muslim Virus. Or you might have looked at her dress and thought, well, whatever the f**k Leslie Sanchez was thinking.

God save us from the trivial and shallow pontifications of TV news commentators who look for news where there's none and never mention the news that is actually there. What qualifies these pathetic swindlers for their jobs?

UPDATE: If you were watching the networks, you probably had to listen to pompous pundits and missed the great populist speech of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana. Go Big Sky Country! My dad was from Butte.


SECOND UPDATE (Okay, I know I'm getting out of control and I promise to go back to work after this): You know when you see an ad for a book or a movie that you know is terrible and that you know that nobody liked it, yet still the ad puts out highly truncated quotes from the critics? Like "...fantastic... a great movie..." I always suspect that the original quote must be something like "It was a fantastic waste of time. I was expecting a great movie, but it was crap."

Well, that's what McCain is doing in his new ad (this is via TPM).

The ad's narrator says: "Obama says Iran is a 'tiny' country. 'Doesn't pose a serious threat.' Terrorism? Destroying Israel? Those aren't serious threats?"

Here is the full May 18th Obama quote, as supplied by the McCain press release itself:

"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet."

This is not just twisting Obama's words. It is altering the context so dramatically that it utterly changes the meaning. In other words, it is a lie. Can people be so naive to fall for this? Can they?

One thing I wonder -- how can someone be so lazy that they never do research on what a candidate actually says or does, but they still have the energy to go to the poll to vote?

favorite places... Madrid

quote of the day

From Juan Cole:

"John Tirman questions the GOP's victory narrative about Iraq.

It is a measure of the Orwellian state of the US media and politics that he should have to bother. I mean, the place is a burned out hulk where hundreds die every month in political violence, where armed militias are ubiquitous, where nearly 5 million people remain displaced from their homes, where you have unemployment rates of 50% in some major cities, and where pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists face off against Sunni Arab nationalists and Salafis and Kurdish separatists. If this is a success, I'd hate to see a failure."

an announcement...

Just one little thing...

ANYONE WHO MAINTAINS THAT OFFSHORE DRILLING WILL HAVE ANY EFFECT ON CURRENT GAS PRICES IS LYING OR MISINFORMED.

That's all, thank you. Now I have to get back to work.