They Don't Want You To Vote

TPM's handy Republican Voter Suppression guide.

-AF

Go Directly To Jail - Do Not Pass Go

Ole Uncle "Tubes" Ponders Prison

Ted Stevens gets nailed. Convicted of all seven corruption charges, the US Senate's soon-to-be former longest serving Republican is going to jail. The Anchorage Daily News has the local angle. NYT take is here.

Very nice timing given that the election is next week.

-AF

They Said It. I Repeat It.

She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone. She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.

-Unnamed McCain Adviser

Wow. What a difference a month makes. The GOP ticket's "savior" has become its sinker. Let the free-for-all begin!

It's times like these that I wish I could still do recreational drugs. Because this lil' floor show promises to get waaaaaaay weirder before the last call bell rings.

-AF

Reaganite Rollins Rips Republicans

Yet sez he'll vote for McCain just the same. Natch.

Stupid Rollins.

-AF

Years Ago I Said to Mrs. Forester

The only possible way the colossally stupid US embargo of Cuba would end is if Cuba found oil. I was kidding. Yet find it they did.

Now if that's the means to end this ugly chapter in US-Cuban relations so be it. The fact that cons, neo-cons and pissed-off Cuban ex-pats have continued pursuing this policy of vengeance is shameful.

Yes, the ex-pats have a legitimate beef. But what's the point of seeking payback in a way that harms not the powers that created and maintained the "Socialist Republic" but instead hurts the the sick and the needy most? That's not very American to me.

Enough already. With or without Cuban oil, the US needs to cut this shit out. Had we had killed this idiotic embargo years ago, we'd be far better off. Now the US sure could sure use a friendlier face 100 miles to our south -- especially if that face sits atop 10 billion barrels of crude.

Either we end the embargo or start invasion prep tout de suite.

-AF

They Said It. I Repeat It.

The issue is, truthfully, a 72 year-old is running for the Presidency so his Vice-President choice is very important. Because, let's face it, the only time a candidate doesn't have to pee is when he's peeing.

-Martin Short
Real Time with Bill Maher, 10/17/08*

-AF
*Hey, I'm still catching up, schee?

Much Like Our Fine Country, I'm Sick & I'm Crabby

So there!

-AF
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Now playing: Hollywood Brats - Sick On You
via FoxyTunes

The Tampa Bay Rays Are A Great Story But...

As a life-long (and once long-suffering) Red Sox Nation native son, it pains me somewhat to admit just how remarkable Tampa Bay's story book season has been. Manager of the Year shoe-in Joe Maddon has done an astounding job as has Tampa's front office. The Rays ability to identify and develop young talent has been text book perfect.

However, I have a coupla major-fucking-problems with the whole Tampa Bay Ray vibe:

1. Due to chronically poor home game attendence, the Rays felt compelled to pipe in artificial crowd noise over the Tropicana Field PA! They've done this for a few seasons now. That is so totally bush league. It works great on the radio but looks foolish when you watch the game on TV and you can see the rows upon rows of empty seats when the cameras pan following fly balls.
   
2. Before the season began, their management dropped the "Devil" from Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Chickens! Apparently they felt it was the "Devil" that was keeping their Bible belt attendence. It didn't work. They didn't come consistently sell out any games not featuring the Red Sox and Yankees. There were a lot of empty seats ALDS vs. the White Sox. The jam-packed ALCS games at the Trop were jam-packed with Sox fans.
3. It irked me to no end to see the throngs of Rays fans agonizing over every pitch or every play that didn't go their way in Games 6 & 7. Please. Where the fuck were you bandwagon-jumpers the previous 166 games?
4. Those goddamn cowbells. Y'all are sure stuck on your artificial noise down there. Look, I know I'm old skool. But first you damn Rays fans are too lame to sell out 98% of yer team's home games this season and then when you do show up clapping, yelling and stomping your feet aren't good enough for you? That's weak.
   

I'm looking forward to watching this World Series despite the Red Sox falter. Me? I'll be rooting for the Phillies. Heh.
-AF
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NP: Dropkick Murphys - Tessie
via FoxyTunes

Frank Rich Tees Off on McCain. Again.

From today's NY Times Op-Ed, Rich excoriates McCain's Bush-love:

As the G.O.P.’s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already setting in among the right’s storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the “headwinds” of the economy. No Republican can win if the party’s incumbent president is less popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is Issue No. 1.This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.

And...

Bush’s impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to be so devastating. McCain isn’t, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos — if not the incredible shrinking man himself — more tightly than ever. The candidate who believes in “country first” decided to put himself first and sell out his principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain campaign’s failures and its sleaze. It’s a decision McCain made on his own and for which he has yet to assume responsibility.

Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his face.

Uh-Ah!

-AF

Because Swiftboating Is Alive & Well

The consistently brilliant Media Matters documents the many GOP smears of Barack Obama in their new interactive Swiftboating 2.0.

-AF

There's A Sand Shortage In Iraq.

Stephen Colbert interviews 2001 Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. He co-authored The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict published earlier this year. Mr. Stiglitz tells of military contractors screwing US out of even more money by shipping sand from Kuwait to Iraq. To which Stephen Colbert replies:

"Wow! That's like shipping bullshit to Washington!"

Oy. Stiglitz details how the money we've spent on the Iraq War and on subsequent "reconstruction" attempts would have been better spent here at home on measures that would have prevented the current US economic crisis.

-AF

Maybe It Was Pure Unadulterated Fear.

Is it just me or did McCain seem fucking wired or what? His eyes were wide, his pupils looked huge, he was grinding his teeth, his affect and gestures were inappropriate. I know drugs. I'm just saying.

Also, will John McCain's huffs 'n' snorts of derision be reported ad nauseam and ridiculed in the same way Al Gore's sighs were in the 2000 debates?

Sadly, I think not.

-AF

In Case You Missed It

OMFG, McCain just called CBS' Bob Schieffer "Mr. Harris."

WTF?

-AF

**Update: Was McCain referring to frequent fellow Face The Nation guest WaPo National Political Editor John Harris?

They Said It. I Repeat It.

Volatility frequently occurs when everyone suddenly realizes that the stock market is just a consensual mass-delusion based on fictitious valuing of abstract assets. You know, it’s like finding out Santa Claus is real because you catch him robbing your house.

-Wyatt Cenac
The Daily Show - 10/13/08

I'm Back

I was in Boston taking care of my sick mother-in-law with only a dial-up connection and an uncooperative MacBook. No blogging for me.

-AF

She Coulda Been a Contender

The Miami Herald's Myriam Marquez takes McCain to task with a surprise VP alternative:

It should have been Linda Lingle.

Now in her second term as Hawaii's governor, Lingle is the first Republican elected to that job in 40 years. She delivered a record state budget surplus, has gone to Iraq to size up the war on terror and set Hawaii on a course of foreign-oil independence.

But Lingle, 55, never made John McCain's veep list. She's pro-choice. And she's Jewish, which would have wowed South Florida but doesn't excite the GOP evangelical base. Twice divorced with no children, she's not valued by the family values crowd.

And dare I? Lingle looks like a boring librarian, a policy wonk -- not a gun-packing, snow-plowing, moose-hunting, 44-year-old beauty queen with five kids, a figure and a hunk of a husband.

Outside the GOP tent they've posted this sign: No Brains, No Moderates, No Jews.⁺

More Marquez:

McCain, 72, was so eager to shock and awe voters that he passed over experienced conservatives like Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina. (Forget Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine -- like Lingle, she's a moderate Republican.) In our youth-obsessed political playbook, they didn't fit.

Exactly. McCain may say "Country First" but what he means is "Please, Please Please Let Me Get What I Want."⁺⁺ For this nasty & desperate old troll, adding "pretty" and "youth" to the ticket is his only ticket to the White House.

Next Marquez previews tomorrow nite's VP debate:

So now the hottest governor of the coldest state will debate Joe Biden, the Delaware senator Barack Obama picked to attract blue-collar white voters. This much we can expect Thursday: Palin will stick to memorized talking points as she has in TV interviews with ABC, FOX and CBS. Biden will talk up his foreign experience and likely stick his foot in his mouth.

Nailed it. Biden will inevitably say something stupid. It's the second biggest knock I have on him. (The first is that D-MBNA thang).

The Op-Ed concludes with a reality check:

Americans have had decades to decode McCain and Biden, and two years to check Obama.

We've had all of thirty days and three painful TV interviews to know that Palin is no Margaret Thatcher. If America were not at war and our economy wasn't facing the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, this wouldn't be so scary.

I'll take it one step further. I don't think we're acting nearly scared enough.

-AF

⁺If "progressive" assholes would stoop so low as to Photoshop a Jewish governor into a Wehrmacht uniform (here & here), I cannot imagine the right wing nuts' response to a Jewish GOP VP candidate.
⁺⁺Couldn't resist The Smiths reference.