Funny How Loser's Good Ideas Suddenly Become Winner's Bad Ones

McCain was the top sponsor of 2005's The Community Broadband Act. A program to give tax breaks to companies increasing broadband access to rural communities was the nucleus of his 2008 Presidential campaign's technology platform. McCain now sez it's a wasteful part of the stimulus package since it "will take years."

It's a bad idea now only because McCain is unable to take credit for it & he has nothing to gain from its passage.

-AF

Straight Dope Inna Campaign Stylee

Newsweek reveals both camps' inner workings:

1. McCain rarely spoke to Palin.
2. Palin spent waaaaay more than $150k on duds.
3. Before the final debate McCain advisers considered telling him he was toast.
4. McCain and Hillary are much tighter than Obama and Hillary.
5. Wingers' wet dream realized: At GOP Convention Palin met McCain advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter wrapped in a towel!
6. Obama drops an occasional F-bomb.
   

There's tons more.

-AF
(HT: Mrs. Forester)

Irony Alert: "Surge" Boosted Obama More Than McCain

Iraq "surge" success aided Obama by de-emphasizing Commander-In-Chief bona fides as a prerequisite for the next Prez. WaPo explains.

-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

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

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?

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.

Met All My Heroes, Found Out They Were Zeroes.*

What a total letdown.

I grew up watching Tom Brokaw. Millions of us did. As a long time broadcaster myself, I respected Mr. Brokaw for many things not the least of which was his unimpeachable journalistic integrity. Boy, was I wrong!

MoveOn sent me this:

Dear MoveOn member,

Sunday on Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw moderated a debate between McCain strategist Steve Schmidt and Obama strategist David Axelrod on topics ranging from Iraq to the Wall Street bailout. At the end, Tom Brokaw did something strange. He opted to give himself the last word and told the audience:

In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note. And that is that we continue to poll on who's best equipped to be Commander in Chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

We checked, and the latest NBC poll actually has no question about Commander in Chief. We contacted NBC about this, and it turns out Brokaw was referring to a poll taken weeks ago--right after the Republican convention and well before Friday's big national security debate. And in each of NBC's last two polls, Americans chose Obama over McCain.
(MoveOn link with sources here).
(Demand an NBC retraction thru the "Meet The Press" feedback forum here).

"In fairness to everybody here"? is a bizarrely inappropriate us of the phrase. There is no goddamn "fairness" whatsoever in quoting out-of-date poll numbers to inaccurately portray one candidate as strong and the other as ineffectual. I was dumbstruck before I clicked on Media Matters to find this:

On Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC's Tom Brokaw allowed McCain strategist Steve Schmidt to falsely claim that John McCain had called for Don Rumsfeld to be fired. That's an old lie that the McCain campaign had abandoned long ago -- but Brokaw let Schmidt get away with bringing it back.

What the fuck?!? This fucking guy is moderating the second Presidential debate on Oct. 7th! How could it possibly get worse? Oh, it can and it does.

HuffPo tips us to today's NY Times Brokaw profile:

But less widely known is that Mr. Brokaw has also played a pivotal role out of public view, both within NBC and in its dealings with the campaign of John McCain in particular.

In an interview here after Sunday’s broadcast, Mr. Brokaw said that over the summer he had “advocated” within the executive suite of NBC News to modify the anchor duties of the MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election night and on nights when there were presidential debates. Their expressions of strong political opinions from the MSNBC anchor desk has run counter to the more traditional role Mr. Brokaw played on “NBC Nightly News” for more than two decades. NBC said earlier this month that the two hosts would mostly relinquish their anchor duties to Mr. Gregory, while being present as analysts.

“Keith is an articulate guy who writes well and doesn’t make his arguments in a ‘So’s your old mother’ kind of way,” Mr. Brokaw said. “The mistake was to think he could fill both roles. The other mistake was to think he wouldn’t be tempted to use the anchor position to engage in commentary. That’s who he is.”

Mr. Brokaw said he had also conducted some shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between NBC and the McCain campaign. His mission, he said, was to assure the candidate’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular — Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates — until his name was invoked.

“One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, ‘If it’s an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won’t go,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said. “My name came up, and they said, ‘Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it’s going to be Brokaw.’”

So Brokaw is acting as mediator/go-between/chief-sucker-upper for NBC to McCain-Palin 2008. If this sort of interaction occurred between a kid running for high school class president and his high school's paper, it would be considered unseemly. This is one of the Big fucking Three! NBC's use of Tom Brokaw in this role is not only distasteful, but it also spells the very death of their news division's integrity and objectivity. This is absolutely one of the strangest moves I've ever seen a network pull.

NBC's motivation is unclear. Is Brokaw moderating this debate in order for NBC to guarantee McCain's participation? Or were McCain's handlers' complaints about Keith & co. a successful blackmail campaign+ that forced the network to ensure a McCain-friendly Brokaw as moderator? Or both? Or something else entirely? Dunno. And why the hell, at this stage in an otherwise stellar & legendary career, would Tom Brokaw willingly let NBC pimp him out?

But wait...There's more:

Last week during the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, Mr. Brokaw said, he spoke briefly with Mr. McCain, who has not appeared on “Meet the Press” since Mr. Russert’s death. While Mr. Brokaw said he and the Republican nominee are not personal friends, he did say they are “friendly” and “always had a great relationship.”

Of the prospects for a potential booking, Mr. Brokaw said: “We’re going to get him. I don’t know exactly where or when.”

As for Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, thus far she has passed over “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” in favor of interviews with “World News With Charles Gibson” on ABC and the “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.” She has also yet to accept an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press,” a point Mr. Brokaw said he raised with her when they met for a moment at the Clinton Global Initiative.

“I told her, ‘I’m the only one in this business who ever had Susan Butcher as a house guest,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said, referring to the Iditarod champion, who died in 2006. “Susan Butcher is to Alaska what Cal Ripken is to Baltimore.”

Ugh. I cannot tell how much of this Brokaw bungle can be attributed to: intense NBC News' pressure to secure McCain and Palin for "Meet The Press", individual ideology, diminished ability, the network's and/or his personal desire to overcompensate (for the Olbermann/Maddow faction's many "sins"), poor judgment, weariness, a massive McCain man-crush or what have you.

What I do know is that the Tom Brokaw I grew up with would never quote a three-week-old poll and present it as current. What's worse is I now find it entirely conceivable that Brokaw's lil' poll faux pas may been accidentally on purpose. That's a very bad thing.

C&L's Nichole Belle has more here and here.

-AF

*(I'm paraphrasing some damn song and it's driving me crazy that I cannot recall the title). +McCain has obviously adopted the Bush administration "punish any critical news media" credo.

Frank Rich Rips "Angry Old Ironsides McCain" McCain A New One

Rich has no patience for John "Drama Queen" McCain's antics. McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere:

What we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.

For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.
(Emphasis added)

I couldn't have said it better myself.

-AF

John McCain's 'Lil Gambling Problem

The NY Times has everything you ever wanted to know about John McCain, his lobbyists/advisers and the gaming industry.

-AF

McCain Surprise Sabotages Bail Out

John McCain:
Pretty pleased with himself tonite.








Since early yesterday, we been told that a "fundamental agreement" had been reached on the big bail out bill. That is sooo yesterday. That was before John McCain rode into DC and, this time with his House GOP henchmen at his side, tossed a surprise bail out bomb on America. McCain did this just before the bi-partisan Congressional bail out confab with President Bush. (musta delighted our panicked Preznit). The very meeting Johnny planned as his big photo op.

Think Progress has the deets. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D) describes the drama:

All of a sudden there was some new core agreement floating around, which no one had heard of before, until we sort of got to the White House...

...we’re told it came out of the Republican House. We were even told at one point that this was, maybe, John McCain was floating the idea. That Hank Paulson was considering it. And of course Barney Frank and I, along with Republicans from the House and the Senate, of course, had spent three hours this morning working on a different core. We were told for the last seven days this was the core issue that would give the secretary the authority to move, to deal with the crisis.

As Johnny has confessed to know jack-all about economics, it's a sure bet that this "new core agreement" was whipped up by key McCain advisors. A CBS News report that this new plan features more, not less, deregulation seems to confirms my theory.

Obviously, the plan his top lobbyists advisors, didn’t pass the sniff test.

This could be a win-win-win-win-win-win move by Johnny.

McCain gets to say:

1. “As promised, I rushed to America’s rescue.”“The reckless Obama-led Dems want America to continue suffering."
2. “Instead of debating tomorrow, I’m crawling into the corner w/my blankie & my top lobbyists advisors.”
3. “Delay my debate & we hafta delay the VP debate too.” Johnny wants this baaad.
   
4. This one's huge: the McCain camp gets the chance to craft a brand new "core agreement" in which any “compromises” will still be incredibly advantageous to McCain’s Wall St. donors.
   
5. There will be less time and greater pressure on the "do nothing" Dems to make new McCain plan law.

Gee, I thought John McCain was desperate before when he sold his soul to the evangelical nuts the first time. Then crazy Johnny went all drastic pushing himself deeper in bed with these Jesus freaks going so far as to let them pick his running mate. But this shit takes the cake.

Will the media and the voters fall for it?

Stay tuned...

-AF
*Update: McCain sabotage central@HuffPo.
**Update: The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder sez:

Republicans like John Boehner brought up the concerns of House GOPers and McCain acknowledged hearing about their concerns. McCain, and staffers, did seek to gauge the level of support of the GOP working group's white paper. The Democrats were left with the impression that McCain endorsed the GOP efforts, but they concede that he did not raise them directly.

Smartly, McCain's well insulated on this one.
***Update: That completely contradicts Ambinder's report one hour earlier:

During the White House meeting, it appears that Sen. John McCain had an agenda. He brought up alternative proposals, surprising and angering Democrats. He did not, according to someone briefed on the meeting, provide specifics.

Armbinder needs to get his stories straight.
(HT:TPM)

They Said It. I Repeat It.

Sarah Palin said today one more gaffe from McCain and she’s going to drop him from the ticket.

Bill Maher
Real Time With Bill Maher
9/19/08

-AF

Richard Cohen Comes Clean

One of the all-time great McCain media shills goes off the reservation:

Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain's abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on "The View," the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig -- an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

But that's not the most remarkable part of Cohen's op-ed. This is:

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty.

Ho-lee She-it!

Let's just hope Cohen sticks to his guns and aggressively pushes this issue.
If he does, will any the other 2045 some-odd journalists in thrall to "honest" John McCain follow suit?

Cohen's entire mea culpa is here.

-AF

(HT: Raw Story)

Update: The St. Petersburg Times chimes in with "Campaign of Lies Disgraces McCain"

Because we already had McLies.com...

All you really need to know about "mavericks" John McCain & Sarah Palin: mclobbist.com.

-AF

ASIAF Responds To John McCain's Acceptance Speech

-AF

You Be The Judge

Was McCain checking out Sarah Palin's ass during her announcement presser or was he just nodding off? 10 times in the first 60 seconds is crazy. This video is fairly massive on YouTube. MSM takes notice...

CNN's Jeanne Moos takes a hard, err, look:

"We're convinced he was just catching a look at whatever was on the podium," she stated. "The moral of the story? Don't look down."

Yeah, right. Raw has the CNN report here.

-AF

McCain Was Against Palin Earmarks

Unbelievable. While mayor, Palin earmarks made John McCain's own naughty "pork list" three times. The LA Times has the skinny.
-AF

*Update: Time has oh, so much more in "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record"...

John McCain was clear about why he picked half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. "I found someone with an outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and entrenched bureaucracies," he said in introducing her in Dayton, Ohio, on Friday. Palin was someone, he noted, "who reached across the aisle and asked Republicans, Democrats and independents to serve in government."

McCain does have a serious potential post-Senate career as an insult comic.

** Update #2: TPM sez that last year, Palin requested more earmarks per person than any other state -- including some that were criticized by McCain himself.

Radical Christian Group Picked McCain Veep

Yep, it was billed as The Return of The Maverick! The McCain campaign may want us to believe "his" Palin pick was intended as gesture to disaffected Hillary supporters (which just so happens to call attention to Dem disunity too). Nothing could be further from the truth. He sold out to the Jesus masters.

Via Talk To Action:

Last week, while the media focused almost obsessively on the DNC's spectacle in Denver, the country's most influential conservatives met quietly at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis to get to know Sarah Palin. The assembled were members of the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive cabal that networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy.

CNP members have included Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich. At a secret 2000 meeting of the CNP, George W. Bush promised to nominate only pro-life judges; in 2004, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told the group, "The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement." This year, thanks to Sarah Palin's selection, the movement may have finally aligned itself behind the campaign of John McCain.

Though Dobson and Perkins reportedly attended the recent CNP meeting in Minneapolis, a full roster of guests would be nearly impossible to require. The CNP deliberately operates below the radar, going to excessive lengths to obscure its activities. According to official CNP policy, "The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs before or after a meeting." Thus the CNP's Minneapolis gathering was free of reporters. I only learned of the get-together through an online commentary by one of its attendees, top Dobson/Focus on the Family flack Tom Minnery.

The 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential nominee was chosen by America's most powerful radical Christian activist leaders and their rich friends.*

Scary shit, folks. I called it on Friday.

I would have far rather been wrong.

-AF
(H/T: Crooks&Liars)

*Update: McCain's campaign raised $47 million last week including $10 million since the Palin picked. CNP's pals have deep pockets indeed.