Chris Rock (on Larry King)
The person who posted this on youtube added a weird introduction, but it is worth watching.
Chris Rock is one funny and insightful guy. I was equally impressed with how he fielded some bizarre and kindof racist questions from Larry King. I would refer all of you to "The Great Schlep" video by Sarah Silverman after this for some additional perspective.
Part I
Part II
Chris Rock is one funny and insightful guy. I was equally impressed with how he fielded some bizarre and kindof racist questions from Larry King. I would refer all of you to "The Great Schlep" video by Sarah Silverman after this for some additional perspective.
Part I
Part II
The Economy: Two Presidents
Dear everyone who voted for George W. Bush: Please recognize your mistake. Heal this nation. His presidency represents the greatest political tragedy in the history of America. John McCain and Sarah Palin will not be different.
CLINTON
BUSH
CLINTON
BUSH
HELP OUR TEAM GET TO A BATTLEGROUND
Since making this original announcement our numbers have exploded - and continue to grow everyday. We have made the decision to break into four seperate groups: One will travel to Colorado. The second will travel to Florida. The third will travle to North Carolina. The forth will travel to Nebraska.
Our goal is to send over 100 volunteers to these four different locations.
Do you have any frequent flyer miles?
Click on any of the names below to donate.
You will be directed to the individual's profile on TravelforChange.org
As our numbers continue to grow, the list below will be updated on a daily basis.
We are also fundraising to provide ground transportation.
Arti Doshi
Asa Zernik
Brian Bainum
Christie Frakes
Colin Kerrigan
Danny Weintraub
Darin Ranahan
Dave Middleton
Elizabeth Coombs
Elliot Scales
Felicitas Bejerano
Guadalupe Middleton
Gadalupe Q Martin
Hilda Arias
Ivan Sanz
Jacob Richey
Jenna Hahn
Jessica Bandelow
Jessica Berry
Jesus Alfaro
John Gielhufe
John Nix
Kurt Richey
Laura Hammel
Lorena O'Keefe
Marco Morelli
Mark Jurich
Martha Koutsoyannis
Michelle Jurich
Patricia Rodriguez-Nassar
Pegah Zardoost
Shelly Jarvis
Teo Merlo
Tom Diehl
William Regan
Dan Schneider
If you have any questions or you can offer assistance, please contact Dan Schneider at delegatedan@gmail.com
*
Our goal is to send over 100 volunteers to these four different locations.
Do you have any frequent flyer miles?
Click on any of the names below to donate.
You will be directed to the individual's profile on TravelforChange.org
As our numbers continue to grow, the list below will be updated on a daily basis.
We are also fundraising to provide ground transportation.
Arti Doshi
Asa Zernik
Brian Bainum
Christie Frakes
Colin Kerrigan
Danny Weintraub
Darin Ranahan
Dave Middleton
Elizabeth Coombs
Elliot Scales
Felicitas Bejerano
Guadalupe Middleton
Gadalupe Q Martin
Hilda Arias
Ivan Sanz
Jacob Richey
Jenna Hahn
Jessica Bandelow
Jessica Berry
Jesus Alfaro
John Gielhufe
John Nix
Kurt Richey
Laura Hammel
Lorena O'Keefe
Marco Morelli
Mark Jurich
Martha Koutsoyannis
Michelle Jurich
Patricia Rodriguez-Nassar
Pegah Zardoost
Shelly Jarvis
Teo Merlo
Tom Diehl
William Regan
Dan Schneider
If you have any questions or you can offer assistance, please contact Dan Schneider at delegatedan@gmail.com
*
Welcome Team!
We are off and running. This evening I sent a list of twenty-one people who have committed "200 percent" to going to Colorado Saturday November 1 - Tuesday November 4to organizers in Colorado. I have attached this list to this email.
We have another twenty people who are committed "75 percent" to attending as well, but need time to clear their schedule.
Tonight in Pleasanton we are having a Presidential Debate Party / Informational Meeting. Many of you cannot attend, and that's OK - the information we gather from the meeting will follow in a subsequent email.
In the meantime, I encourage all of you to go to www.TravelforChange.org and complete a personal bio. If you have any questions concerning this, tomorrow we will do so as a group at the party in Pleasanton. This website is going to be our tool for financing our flights to Colorado. I have received assurance from the people that run this site that anyone who commits 200% to going in the next week will have a flight provided, however, each individual must complete a biography on the webpage.
VERY IMPORANT: the first words in you bio must be "Member: Dan's Delegation to Denver" This will define you as a member of our group.
Please take a look at the messages from Alisa from TravelforChange.org below. You are going to want to forward the bottom email to all you friends and family as soon as you complete you biography. This will assure that every member of our team has a flight to Denver.
If you have any questions about this, I will have more answers for you after the meeting tonight in Pleasanton.
In the meantime, let me just say, I wish you could have heard the energy and excitement coming from the Colorado organizers I spoke with tonight. They are absolutely confident that we are going to make a HUGE difference in this election and they can't wait to meet us.
Fired up and - almost - ready to go.
DS
Dan Schneider
Democratic Delegate
California Congressional District 11
925 963 1157
We have another twenty people who are committed "75 percent" to attending as well, but need time to clear their schedule.
Tonight in Pleasanton we are having a Presidential Debate Party / Informational Meeting. Many of you cannot attend, and that's OK - the information we gather from the meeting will follow in a subsequent email.
In the meantime, I encourage all of you to go to www.TravelforChange.org and complete a personal bio. If you have any questions concerning this, tomorrow we will do so as a group at the party in Pleasanton. This website is going to be our tool for financing our flights to Colorado. I have received assurance from the people that run this site that anyone who commits 200% to going in the next week will have a flight provided, however, each individual must complete a biography on the webpage.
VERY IMPORANT: the first words in you bio must be "Member: Dan's Delegation to Denver" This will define you as a member of our group.
Please take a look at the messages from Alisa from TravelforChange.org below. You are going to want to forward the bottom email to all you friends and family as soon as you complete you biography. This will assure that every member of our team has a flight to Denver.
If you have any questions about this, I will have more answers for you after the meeting tonight in Pleasanton.
In the meantime, let me just say, I wish you could have heard the energy and excitement coming from the Colorado organizers I spoke with tonight. They are absolutely confident that we are going to make a HUGE difference in this election and they can't wait to meet us.
Fired up and - almost - ready to go.
DS
Dan Schneider
Democratic Delegate
California Congressional District 11
925 963 1157
TravelforChange.org
From Alisa Whitfield, TravelforChange.org
Dear Supporters for Change -
There are hundreds of volunteers who want to work for Barack Obama this fall in the swing states, but a lot of these volunteers don't have the resources to get where they are needed. http://www.travelforchange.org/ is an innovative new website that connects volunteers directly with sponsors so they can knock on doors in the states that will decide this election. The site has already found sponsors for more than 80 people in one month.
If we knock on enough doors we can win this year. The statistic to trust from FiveThirtyEight.com: for every twelve voters we talk to at their door, equals, on average one additional vote for our candidate (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-grand-junction-colorado.html).
In states like Colorado, Virginia, and Ohio where it could very well come down to a few hundred votes that will make the difference.
You can get involved: if you have 25,000 miles on any airline, you likely have enough miles to sponsor a verified volunteer's trip to work in a swing state! Visit the site if you want to buy a ticket using money or miles (we suggest miles!). Sponsors are really needed to help send all of our get-out-the-vote volunteers.
Note: if you wish to support members from Delegate Dan Schneider's group that is travelling to Colorado, check the bios on our webpage and find target the individuals who identify themselves as members of "Dan's Delegation".
Pass this on!
Sincerely,
Alisa Whitfield
TravelforChange.org
Dear Supporters for Change -
There are hundreds of volunteers who want to work for Barack Obama this fall in the swing states, but a lot of these volunteers don't have the resources to get where they are needed. http://www.travelforchange.org/ is an innovative new website that connects volunteers directly with sponsors so they can knock on doors in the states that will decide this election. The site has already found sponsors for more than 80 people in one month.
If we knock on enough doors we can win this year. The statistic to trust from FiveThirtyEight.com: for every twelve voters we talk to at their door, equals, on average one additional vote for our candidate (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-grand-junction-colorado.html).
In states like Colorado, Virginia, and Ohio where it could very well come down to a few hundred votes that will make the difference.
You can get involved: if you have 25,000 miles on any airline, you likely have enough miles to sponsor a verified volunteer's trip to work in a swing state! Visit the site if you want to buy a ticket using money or miles (we suggest miles!). Sponsors are really needed to help send all of our get-out-the-vote volunteers.
Note: if you wish to support members from Delegate Dan Schneider's group that is travelling to Colorado, check the bios on our webpage and find target the individuals who identify themselves as members of "Dan's Delegation".
Pass this on!
Sincerely,
Alisa Whitfield
TravelforChange.org
I’m against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG
The sad part: This was when the government bailout was set at $85,000,000.00. Now it's at $700,000,000.00
I'm against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG.
Instead I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a "We Deserve It Dividend".
To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a "We Deserve It Dividend".
Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let・s assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000.00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college - it'll be there.
Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car - create jobs - invest in the market - capital drives growth.
Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves.
Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else.
Remember this is for every adult U.S. Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.
If we're going to re-distribute wealth let・s really do it...instead of trickling out
a puny $1000.00 economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.
If we・re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U S Citizen 18+!
As for AIG - liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG does not.
Sure it's a crazy idea that can "never work".
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party?!
How do you spell Economic Boom?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion "We Deserve It Dividend" more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC.
And remember, "The Birk" plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam .
Ahhh...I feel so much better getting that off my chest.
"Birk"
T.J.Birkenmeier
A Creative Guy and Citizen of the Republic
I'm against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG.
Instead I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a "We Deserve It Dividend".
To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a "We Deserve It Dividend".
Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let・s assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000.00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college - it'll be there.
Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car - create jobs - invest in the market - capital drives growth.
Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves.
Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else.
Remember this is for every adult U.S. Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.
If we're going to re-distribute wealth let・s really do it...instead of trickling out
a puny $1000.00 economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.
If we・re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U S Citizen 18+!
As for AIG - liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG does not.
Sure it's a crazy idea that can "never work".
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party?!
How do you spell Economic Boom?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion "We Deserve It Dividend" more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC.
And remember, "The Birk" plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam .
Ahhh...I feel so much better getting that off my chest.
"Birk"
T.J.Birkenmeier
A Creative Guy and Citizen of the Republic
Going to Denver. Your questions answered here.
I can’t tell you how incredible the response has been since Sunday’s announcement. You represent the reason we are going to win this thing. You are amazing.
Since that time, many of you have asked some very good questions regarding details.
(1)HOW WILL WE GET TO COLORADO?
(2)WHAT WILL WE DO IN COLORADO?
(3)WHEN AND WHERE IS THE MEETING THIS FRIDAY?
I went right to the sources. Here are their responses. If you or any of your friends have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at delegatedan@gmail.com. Any additional questions can be answered this Friday at our meeting.
HOW WE WILL GET TO COLORADO?
My name is Alisa and I am here in Colorado canvassing as much as I can, and also running a website called TravelforChange.org. So far we have found free flights for almost 60 people and news coverage of the site is picking up (see an article about us released this morning in the SF Chronicle). I especially want to find flights for your group of volunteers because we could really use the help of Spanish speakers here in Colorado--I can't speak Spanish and sometimes it's a problem when I am out knocking on doors.
So please, come out to Colorado, and if cost is keeping you from coming here, I am very confident that I can find flights for the members of your group who need that assistance.
All the best,
Alisa Whitfield
WHAT WE WILL DO IN COLORADO?
Californians for Obama,
I’m Adam Delehanty, Border State Coordinator for the campaign in Colorado. I’m responsible for recruiting, scheduling and assigning the many hundreds of volunteers we hope will join us in the Centennial State in the coming weeks.
Colorado is, simply put, the place to be. Many journalists and political commentators have recently narrowed their list of “critical swing states” to just one: Colorado.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/colorado-rates-as-most-important-state.html
If Barack can win back all of the Kerry states, just about every combination of states he needs to get to 270 electoral votes includes this state’s 9.
And Colorado is ripe for turning blue: While George Bush won Colorado twice, since 2004 we’ve elected a Democratic Senator, and both the State House and State Senate are now controlled by a Democratic majority. Still, it will take hard work on the ground and thousands of volunteers to make it happen!
As out-of-state volunteers, you can help us get out the vote for Barack in the coming weeks, but especially during the last 10 days of the campaign. We’ll be reaching out to as many Colorado voters as possible, through canvassing, making phone calls, holding events and rallies, and getting everyone all the right information for election day. In today’s political climate of meaningless attack ads, we need to engage Coloradans in real conversations about the issues that matter. As we know, Barack is the only candidate that can bring the change we need to our ailing healthcare system, America’s standing in the world, the economy, and everything in between. Speaking genuinely with Coloradans about Senator Obama and the impending election is among the most effective routes we have to winning this election, to changing the country, and changing the world.
Please work with your local coordinator – Dan Schneider - to arrange a trip to Colorado, whether for a few weeks or the final five days of the election (Oct 31 – Nov. 4). That coordinator will then pass your information along to us.
Or, alternatively, sign up right here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/oosco
While we cannot help you with transportation to, from, and within the state, we can help find you place to stay with local supporters who’ve opened up their extra bedrooms to folks coming to work for the campaign.
However, if you have family in friends in Colorado with whom you can stay, we can set you up at a field office close by. We have 29 field offices all across the state, from downtown Denver, to the mountains of the Western Slope—we need support in all of them if we’re going to win on November 4th.
Spanish speakers are especially encouraged to join us. Colorado has a significant population of Latino voters whom we are working hard to reach out to.
Please take a look at our site, http://co.barackobama.com to get a feel for our efforts here.
See you soon in Colorado!
All best,
Adam
Adam Delehanty Border State Coordinator
Campaign for Change
WHEN AND WHERE IS THE MEETING THIS FRIDAY?
Tri-Valley United Democratic Campaign
4690 Chabot Drive
(building is on corner of Gibraltar and Chabot, same parking lot as post office)
Suite 120
Pleasanton, CA
Start time:
5:30 PM
Presidential Debate:
6:00 – 7:30 PM
Informational Meeting / Conference Calls with Colorado:
7:30 – 8:30
Party:
The whole damn time!
*********************************
P L E A S E _R S V P _V I A _M E!
*********************************
This is going to be awesome - an incredible opportunity for Democrats to rally, cheer and get to know each other. The hosts are asking for a $10.00 donation at the door to cover food and expenses – extremely reasonable.
If you cannot attend, but you are still interested in going to Colorado, I will send you the minutes that evening via email.
I want to be entirely accessible to any one with questions. delegatedan@gmail.com
Those of you who have my phone number, feel free to share it.
WE ARE OFF -
AND WE ARE ROLLING!
DS
Since that time, many of you have asked some very good questions regarding details.
(1)HOW WILL WE GET TO COLORADO?
(2)WHAT WILL WE DO IN COLORADO?
(3)WHEN AND WHERE IS THE MEETING THIS FRIDAY?
I went right to the sources. Here are their responses. If you or any of your friends have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at delegatedan@gmail.com. Any additional questions can be answered this Friday at our meeting.
HOW WE WILL GET TO COLORADO?
My name is Alisa and I am here in Colorado canvassing as much as I can, and also running a website called TravelforChange.org. So far we have found free flights for almost 60 people and news coverage of the site is picking up (see an article about us released this morning in the SF Chronicle). I especially want to find flights for your group of volunteers because we could really use the help of Spanish speakers here in Colorado--I can't speak Spanish and sometimes it's a problem when I am out knocking on doors.
So please, come out to Colorado, and if cost is keeping you from coming here, I am very confident that I can find flights for the members of your group who need that assistance.
All the best,
Alisa Whitfield
WHAT WE WILL DO IN COLORADO?
Californians for Obama,
I’m Adam Delehanty, Border State Coordinator for the campaign in Colorado. I’m responsible for recruiting, scheduling and assigning the many hundreds of volunteers we hope will join us in the Centennial State in the coming weeks.
Colorado is, simply put, the place to be. Many journalists and political commentators have recently narrowed their list of “critical swing states” to just one: Colorado.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/colorado-rates-as-most-important-state.html
If Barack can win back all of the Kerry states, just about every combination of states he needs to get to 270 electoral votes includes this state’s 9.
And Colorado is ripe for turning blue: While George Bush won Colorado twice, since 2004 we’ve elected a Democratic Senator, and both the State House and State Senate are now controlled by a Democratic majority. Still, it will take hard work on the ground and thousands of volunteers to make it happen!
As out-of-state volunteers, you can help us get out the vote for Barack in the coming weeks, but especially during the last 10 days of the campaign. We’ll be reaching out to as many Colorado voters as possible, through canvassing, making phone calls, holding events and rallies, and getting everyone all the right information for election day. In today’s political climate of meaningless attack ads, we need to engage Coloradans in real conversations about the issues that matter. As we know, Barack is the only candidate that can bring the change we need to our ailing healthcare system, America’s standing in the world, the economy, and everything in between. Speaking genuinely with Coloradans about Senator Obama and the impending election is among the most effective routes we have to winning this election, to changing the country, and changing the world.
Please work with your local coordinator – Dan Schneider - to arrange a trip to Colorado, whether for a few weeks or the final five days of the election (Oct 31 – Nov. 4). That coordinator will then pass your information along to us.
Or, alternatively, sign up right here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/oosco
While we cannot help you with transportation to, from, and within the state, we can help find you place to stay with local supporters who’ve opened up their extra bedrooms to folks coming to work for the campaign.
However, if you have family in friends in Colorado with whom you can stay, we can set you up at a field office close by. We have 29 field offices all across the state, from downtown Denver, to the mountains of the Western Slope—we need support in all of them if we’re going to win on November 4th.
Spanish speakers are especially encouraged to join us. Colorado has a significant population of Latino voters whom we are working hard to reach out to.
Please take a look at our site, http://co.barackobama.com to get a feel for our efforts here.
See you soon in Colorado!
All best,
Adam
Adam Delehanty Border State Coordinator
Campaign for Change
WHEN AND WHERE IS THE MEETING THIS FRIDAY?
Tri-Valley United Democratic Campaign
4690 Chabot Drive
(building is on corner of Gibraltar and Chabot, same parking lot as post office)
Suite 120
Pleasanton, CA
Start time:
5:30 PM
Presidential Debate:
6:00 – 7:30 PM
Informational Meeting / Conference Calls with Colorado:
7:30 – 8:30
Party:
The whole damn time!
*********************************
P L E A S E _R S V P _V I A _M E!
*********************************
This is going to be awesome - an incredible opportunity for Democrats to rally, cheer and get to know each other. The hosts are asking for a $10.00 donation at the door to cover food and expenses – extremely reasonable.
If you cannot attend, but you are still interested in going to Colorado, I will send you the minutes that evening via email.
I want to be entirely accessible to any one with questions. delegatedan@gmail.com
Those of you who have my phone number, feel free to share it.
WE ARE OFF -
AND WE ARE ROLLING!
DS
Return to Denver
Dear Supporter for CHANGE -
My name is Dan Schneider and I was a public high school history and civics teacher for ten years. Recently, I had the honor of travelling to Denver and serving as a Democratic Delegate from the 11th Congressional District of California.
The experience I had there was like no other I have ever had before. I returned confident and energized that 'Yes We Can!' and YES WE WILL win this election.
But it's not going to be easy.
The Electoral College is a strange and demented beast. I have been paying particular election to statewide polls, voter demographics and statistics.
I have come to a potential conclusion that I feel requires personal action and attention:
In 2000 the election came down to the results in Florida.
In 2004 the election came down to the results in Ohio.
In 2008, I believe, that the election will come down to the results in Colorado.
Therefore, in an effort to do everything within my ability to help assure a victory for progress - on Saturday, November 1st - I will return to Colorado for the four days prior to the election,
And this time, I want you to come with me.
In the past weeks I have been in contact with two separate groups who are dedicated to helping us get there (1) Democratic organizers on the ground in Colorado (2) Individuals who run groups dedicated to fundraising to help volunteers travel to battleground states.
Here is the plan:
Anyone who can offer their time, support and energy to Barack Obama in Colorado from November 1- 4 will have the following provided by donors and supporters:
*Air travel to Colorado.
*Room and board in Colorado.
With the help of many friends, I have already begun a separate process of reaching out to people who specifically speak Spanish. Volunteers who speak Spanish fluently are in the highest demand at this point. In fact, having our trip paid for may be contingent on assuring that at least 50% of our party is fluent. A simple way of looking at it is this: If you want to go, but you don’t Spanish, recruit someone who does, and you are locked in.
This Friday, September 26, is the first Presidential Debate between John McCain and Barack Obama – and we’re going to have a party. The purpose of this meeting will be to have a great time, but also to provide you with details and information regarding the trip. The debate begins at 6pm and will last ninety minutes. Our meeting will start immediately after at 7:30pm. We will have two separate conference calls with the individuals charged with delivering us to Denver and organizing us in Denver.
We are currently in the process of securing a private venue, but count on it being in the Pleasanton area. We are prepared to pick people up at Bart. Stay tuned for specific details. In the meantime, if you are interested, please complete the information at the bottom of this email and return it to me at delegatedan@gmail.com by Wednesday, September 24.
This is moving quickly because it needs to.
I would not ask your time, energy and support if I was not confident in the efficiency of what I am proposing.
I am not in this merely to win it for Obama.
I want to wake up Wednesday November 5th knowing I did everything I could.
In hope,
and effort,
ds
Dan Schneider
Democratic Delegate
California Congressional District 11
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
I WANT TO GO TO COLORADO NOVEMBER 1-4
Name:
Phone:
Email:
Hometown:
Fluent Spanish:
Si_____ No______
RSVP September 26 party:
Yes______ No______ Additional attendees: ________
I cannot go Nov.1-4, however, I can travel and help on these days:
Contact information of a friend I think who would be interested in this:
Name:
Phone:
Email:
Hometown:
Fluent Spanish:
Si_____ No______
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
Some websites for your information:
Register to vote by mail: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_m.htm
Statistics: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/
More Statistics: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
My name is Dan Schneider and I was a public high school history and civics teacher for ten years. Recently, I had the honor of travelling to Denver and serving as a Democratic Delegate from the 11th Congressional District of California.
The experience I had there was like no other I have ever had before. I returned confident and energized that 'Yes We Can!' and YES WE WILL win this election.
But it's not going to be easy.
The Electoral College is a strange and demented beast. I have been paying particular election to statewide polls, voter demographics and statistics.
I have come to a potential conclusion that I feel requires personal action and attention:
In 2000 the election came down to the results in Florida.
In 2004 the election came down to the results in Ohio.
In 2008, I believe, that the election will come down to the results in Colorado.
Therefore, in an effort to do everything within my ability to help assure a victory for progress - on Saturday, November 1st - I will return to Colorado for the four days prior to the election,
And this time, I want you to come with me.
In the past weeks I have been in contact with two separate groups who are dedicated to helping us get there (1) Democratic organizers on the ground in Colorado (2) Individuals who run groups dedicated to fundraising to help volunteers travel to battleground states.
Here is the plan:
Anyone who can offer their time, support and energy to Barack Obama in Colorado from November 1- 4 will have the following provided by donors and supporters:
*Air travel to Colorado.
*Room and board in Colorado.
With the help of many friends, I have already begun a separate process of reaching out to people who specifically speak Spanish. Volunteers who speak Spanish fluently are in the highest demand at this point. In fact, having our trip paid for may be contingent on assuring that at least 50% of our party is fluent. A simple way of looking at it is this: If you want to go, but you don’t Spanish, recruit someone who does, and you are locked in.
This Friday, September 26, is the first Presidential Debate between John McCain and Barack Obama – and we’re going to have a party. The purpose of this meeting will be to have a great time, but also to provide you with details and information regarding the trip. The debate begins at 6pm and will last ninety minutes. Our meeting will start immediately after at 7:30pm. We will have two separate conference calls with the individuals charged with delivering us to Denver and organizing us in Denver.
We are currently in the process of securing a private venue, but count on it being in the Pleasanton area. We are prepared to pick people up at Bart. Stay tuned for specific details. In the meantime, if you are interested, please complete the information at the bottom of this email and return it to me at delegatedan@gmail.com by Wednesday, September 24.
This is moving quickly because it needs to.
I would not ask your time, energy and support if I was not confident in the efficiency of what I am proposing.
I am not in this merely to win it for Obama.
I want to wake up Wednesday November 5th knowing I did everything I could.
In hope,
and effort,
ds
Dan Schneider
Democratic Delegate
California Congressional District 11
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
I WANT TO GO TO COLORADO NOVEMBER 1-4
Name:
Phone:
Email:
Hometown:
Fluent Spanish:
Si_____ No______
RSVP September 26 party:
Yes______ No______ Additional attendees: ________
I cannot go Nov.1-4, however, I can travel and help on these days:
Contact information of a friend I think who would be interested in this:
Name:
Phone:
Email:
Hometown:
Fluent Spanish:
Si_____ No______
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
Some websites for your information:
Register to vote by mail: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_m.htm
Statistics: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/
More Statistics: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
Mad Dog Palin
The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America.
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
October 2, 2008
I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for Vice President. If I hadn’t quit my two pack a day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain smoking right now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.
All around me, a million cops in there absurd post-9/11 space combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in paper-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joylessly out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “Unbelievable Time” they will inevitably report to there pals back home. Only 21st-centrury Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.
The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into the sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague – They were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation – At the Xcel gates.
“She totally reminds me of my cousin!” the delegate screeched. “She’s a real woman! The real thing!”
I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party’s fortunes around faster
Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made on of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman – Reportedly his real preference – By picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-Thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy know?
But watching Palin’s speech I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker – And immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who “Five children later” is “Still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American; the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set or drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.
Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “Difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.
In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set – Who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else’s wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review – Seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn’t the most qualified candidate, that the party “went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.”
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflective prejudices of their demographic, as they would for a reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-Syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would “Have a friend and advocate in the White House.” This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.
Palin’s charge that “government is too big” and that Obama “Wants to grow it” was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical bush-era republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “Taxes are too high” and Obama “Wants to raise them.”
Palin hasn’t been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin’s paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn’t collect from her own; Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation. The rest of Palin’s speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin’s crack about a mayor being “like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities” testified to the Republican’s apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They’re probably right.) The incessant pausing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people – Reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever – For their failures.
Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to “forfeit” to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, it’s total disregard for reality, it’s absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.
Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won’t matter that she’s got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson (50 cent) holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don’t need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate’s bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.
One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor’s record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the “truth” about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection knows by know that Palin was originally for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she opposed it (She actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn’t actually sell the Alaska governor’s state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).
Then there are the salacious tales of Palin’s swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister’s ex-husband), Palin also fired a campaign aide who had an affair with a friends wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.
Then there’s the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush “Come from Hell” and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a “refuge state” for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was “God’s Will.” She also described the Iraq War as a “task that is from God” and part of a heavenly “Plan.” She supports teaching creationism and “Abstinence only” in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.
All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.
The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job – But not in America. In America, it takes about 2 weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He’s been on TV every day for two years and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that’s a lifetime of hands-on experience.
It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin’s Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-“I love you, Obama!” ritual at the Democratic nominee’s town-hall appearances.
So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much as a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.
Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and porked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: That you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for few hours around election time.
Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in awhile, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
And when it comes time to vote all you have to do is put your Country First – Just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, Baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
October 2, 2008
I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for Vice President. If I hadn’t quit my two pack a day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain smoking right now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.
All around me, a million cops in there absurd post-9/11 space combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in paper-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joylessly out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “Unbelievable Time” they will inevitably report to there pals back home. Only 21st-centrury Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.
The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into the sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague – They were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation – At the Xcel gates.“She totally reminds me of my cousin!” the delegate screeched. “She’s a real woman! The real thing!”
I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party’s fortunes around faster
Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made on of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman – Reportedly his real preference – By picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-Thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy know?
But watching Palin’s speech I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker – And immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who “Five children later” is “Still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American; the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set or drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.
Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “Difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.
In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set – Who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else’s wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review – Seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn’t the most qualified candidate, that the party “went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.”
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflective prejudices of their demographic, as they would for a reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-Syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would “Have a friend and advocate in the White House.” This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.
Palin’s charge that “government is too big” and that Obama “Wants to grow it” was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical bush-era republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “Taxes are too high” and Obama “Wants to raise them.”
Palin hasn’t been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin’s paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn’t collect from her own; Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation. The rest of Palin’s speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin’s crack about a mayor being “like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities” testified to the Republican’s apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They’re probably right.) The incessant pausing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people – Reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever – For their failures.
Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to “forfeit” to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, it’s total disregard for reality, it’s absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.
Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won’t matter that she’s got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson (50 cent) holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don’t need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate’s bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.
One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor’s record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the “truth” about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection knows by know that Palin was originally for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she opposed it (She actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn’t actually sell the Alaska governor’s state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).
Then there are the salacious tales of Palin’s swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister’s ex-husband), Palin also fired a campaign aide who had an affair with a friends wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.
Then there’s the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush “Come from Hell” and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a “refuge state” for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was “God’s Will.” She also described the Iraq War as a “task that is from God” and part of a heavenly “Plan.” She supports teaching creationism and “Abstinence only” in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.
All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.
The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job – But not in America. In America, it takes about 2 weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He’s been on TV every day for two years and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that’s a lifetime of hands-on experience.
It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin’s Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-“I love you, Obama!” ritual at the Democratic nominee’s town-hall appearances.
So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much as a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.
Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and porked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: That you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for few hours around election time.
Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in awhile, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
And when it comes time to vote all you have to do is put your Country First – Just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, Baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!
McCain and the POW Cover-up
The Nation
October 6, 2008
by Sydney H. Schanberg
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind."
Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive.
There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.
Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory had played tricks on him.
But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.
On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.
The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."
McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry.
After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those 20 POWs.
The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180 pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally rebelled against the cover-up.
Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the ground.
In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me privately that as it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)
For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others (including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary).
An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon.
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.
The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.
It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."
McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes, "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."
Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.
October 6, 2008
by Sydney H. Schanberg
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind."
Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive.
There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.
Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory had played tricks on him.
But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.
On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.
The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."
McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry.
After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those 20 POWs.
The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180 pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally rebelled against the cover-up.
Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the ground.
In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me privately that as it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)
For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others (including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary).
An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon.
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.
The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.
It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."
McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes, "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."
Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.
Richard Milhouse McCain
Sep 18th 2008
The Economist
Americans cannot escape from the shadow of Tricky Dick
Republicans admire no one more than Ronald Reagan, the man who, in their view, destroyed communism, rolled back welfare-state liberalism and reintroduced God into American politics. But when it comes to practising politics, particularly at election time, the Republicans have a rather different hero, a man of frowns rather than smiles: Richard Nixon.
Nixon’s great contribution to Republican politics was to master the politics of cultural resentment. Before him, populism belonged as much to the left as the right. William Jennings Bryan railed against the eastern elites who wanted to crucify common folk on a “cross of gold”. Franklin Roosevelt dismissed Republicans as “economic royalists”. Nixon’s genius was to discover that the politics of culture could trump the politics of economics—and that populism could become a tool of the right.
Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country’s self-satisfied elites. The “silent majority” had been disoriented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values. And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism. Nixon recognised that the Republicans stood to gain from “positive polarisation”: dividing the electorate over values. He also recognised that the media, which had always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, to declare war on the “effete corps of impudent snobs” in the media, with their Ivy League educations and Georgetown social values.
Many people predicted that 2008 would finally mark the end of the Nixon era. The issues were too grave to be swamped by a squabble about culture, the argument went. And the candidates, in the form of John McCain and Barack Obama, were too noble to be distracted by the siren voices of the culture war. George Packer dismissed the remains of the culture wars as “the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead”. Andrew Sullivan hoped that Mr Obama might finally take America “past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby-boom generation that has long engulfed all of us”. This paper saw the two candidates as “America at its best.”
Not quite. Two weeks after the Republican convention, America seems to be hellbent on repeating the 1972 election. Forget about the “sunny uplands” of post-partisan politics. The American electorate is still trapped in Nixonland: a land where Democrats and Republicans exchange endless gibes about who despises whom, where simmering class and regional resentments trump all other political considerations and where the airwaves crackle with accusations about lies and counter-lies.
The Republicans now have all the material that they need to do what they do best. Mr Obama is an Ivy-League-educated intellectual whose associates include unrepentant terrorists and swivel-eyed preachers. Mr McCain’s running-mate, Sarah Palin, is a Nixonian fantasy come true, perfectly designed to create a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation. The “liberal media” cannot do its job without questioning Mrs Palin’s qualifications, which are astonishingly thin; but they cannot question her qualifications without confirming the Republican suspicion that they are looking down on ordinary Americans. “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators,” Mrs Palin told the Republican convention, doing her best to channel Agnew. “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”
Nixon’s original insight remains as true now as it was in the late 1960s: lots of liberals do, indeed, look down on flyover Americans as stump-toothed imbeciles and, for some strange reason, lots of flyover Americans resent them for it. What is more, the culture wars have intensified since Nixon’s last election, supersized by the Roe v Wade decision on abortion in 1973.
Not victims but victors
Yet the Republican Party’s decision to rely so heavily on Nixon’s 1972 template is nevertheless depressing. Aren’t Republicans supposed to deplore the politics of victimhood? Conservatives make a good case that treating minority groups as victims diminishes America and institutionalises dependency. But when it comes to election-time they not only play the politics of victimhood, but play it with extraordinary relish, presenting ordinary Americans as the victims of diabolical conspiracies.
Haven’t Republicans done quite well when it comes to power? They have controlled the White House for 28 of the past 40 years, and have a solid majority on the Supreme Court. And aren’t Republicans rather good at getting their message across? Nixon was justified in feeling that the press liked to kick him around. But the past 30 years have seen the emergence of a conservative media establishment that excels at kicking liberals around, not least Fox News and talk radio. Nixon at least had the excuse that he spent his life as an outsider, despite his intellectual gifts and relentless hard work. Mr McCain is the ultimate insider: the offspring of a naval dynasty, a bad boy turned war hero, the media’s favourite Republican.
The bigger question is whether the politics of resentment will be enough on its own to win an election. Rick Perlstein, the author of “Nixonland”, points out that, from Nixon’s time onwards, “culture” has always been just one part of the Republican trifecta, which also includes economic management and foreign policy. Richard Nixon and George Bush senior offered mastery of foreign policy. Ronald Reagan offered a revolutionary mixture of free-markets at home and assertiveness abroad. But this year the Republicans are left with nothing but a culture war to sell to the voters—Richard Nixon with the redeeming features left out.
The Economist
Americans cannot escape from the shadow of Tricky Dick
Republicans admire no one more than Ronald Reagan, the man who, in their view, destroyed communism, rolled back welfare-state liberalism and reintroduced God into American politics. But when it comes to practising politics, particularly at election time, the Republicans have a rather different hero, a man of frowns rather than smiles: Richard Nixon.
Nixon’s great contribution to Republican politics was to master the politics of cultural resentment. Before him, populism belonged as much to the left as the right. William Jennings Bryan railed against the eastern elites who wanted to crucify common folk on a “cross of gold”. Franklin Roosevelt dismissed Republicans as “economic royalists”. Nixon’s genius was to discover that the politics of culture could trump the politics of economics—and that populism could become a tool of the right.Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country’s self-satisfied elites. The “silent majority” had been disoriented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values. And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism. Nixon recognised that the Republicans stood to gain from “positive polarisation”: dividing the electorate over values. He also recognised that the media, which had always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, to declare war on the “effete corps of impudent snobs” in the media, with their Ivy League educations and Georgetown social values.
Many people predicted that 2008 would finally mark the end of the Nixon era. The issues were too grave to be swamped by a squabble about culture, the argument went. And the candidates, in the form of John McCain and Barack Obama, were too noble to be distracted by the siren voices of the culture war. George Packer dismissed the remains of the culture wars as “the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead”. Andrew Sullivan hoped that Mr Obama might finally take America “past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby-boom generation that has long engulfed all of us”. This paper saw the two candidates as “America at its best.”
Not quite. Two weeks after the Republican convention, America seems to be hellbent on repeating the 1972 election. Forget about the “sunny uplands” of post-partisan politics. The American electorate is still trapped in Nixonland: a land where Democrats and Republicans exchange endless gibes about who despises whom, where simmering class and regional resentments trump all other political considerations and where the airwaves crackle with accusations about lies and counter-lies.
The Republicans now have all the material that they need to do what they do best. Mr Obama is an Ivy-League-educated intellectual whose associates include unrepentant terrorists and swivel-eyed preachers. Mr McCain’s running-mate, Sarah Palin, is a Nixonian fantasy come true, perfectly designed to create a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation. The “liberal media” cannot do its job without questioning Mrs Palin’s qualifications, which are astonishingly thin; but they cannot question her qualifications without confirming the Republican suspicion that they are looking down on ordinary Americans. “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators,” Mrs Palin told the Republican convention, doing her best to channel Agnew. “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”
Nixon’s original insight remains as true now as it was in the late 1960s: lots of liberals do, indeed, look down on flyover Americans as stump-toothed imbeciles and, for some strange reason, lots of flyover Americans resent them for it. What is more, the culture wars have intensified since Nixon’s last election, supersized by the Roe v Wade decision on abortion in 1973.
Not victims but victors
Yet the Republican Party’s decision to rely so heavily on Nixon’s 1972 template is nevertheless depressing. Aren’t Republicans supposed to deplore the politics of victimhood? Conservatives make a good case that treating minority groups as victims diminishes America and institutionalises dependency. But when it comes to election-time they not only play the politics of victimhood, but play it with extraordinary relish, presenting ordinary Americans as the victims of diabolical conspiracies.
Haven’t Republicans done quite well when it comes to power? They have controlled the White House for 28 of the past 40 years, and have a solid majority on the Supreme Court. And aren’t Republicans rather good at getting their message across? Nixon was justified in feeling that the press liked to kick him around. But the past 30 years have seen the emergence of a conservative media establishment that excels at kicking liberals around, not least Fox News and talk radio. Nixon at least had the excuse that he spent his life as an outsider, despite his intellectual gifts and relentless hard work. Mr McCain is the ultimate insider: the offspring of a naval dynasty, a bad boy turned war hero, the media’s favourite Republican.
The bigger question is whether the politics of resentment will be enough on its own to win an election. Rick Perlstein, the author of “Nixonland”, points out that, from Nixon’s time onwards, “culture” has always been just one part of the Republican trifecta, which also includes economic management and foreign policy. Richard Nixon and George Bush senior offered mastery of foreign policy. Ronald Reagan offered a revolutionary mixture of free-markets at home and assertiveness abroad. But this year the Republicans are left with nothing but a culture war to sell to the voters—Richard Nixon with the redeeming features left out.
"Yes You Can!" From Florence, Italy
The following story was sent in from a former student of mine, Caitlin Adams.
Tonight my roommate and I went across the street to a pizzeria...we are about get on an all night bus to Munich for Oktoberfest, so I am in sweats and a "barack the vote" t-shirt. The owner of the pizzeria came up to us as we were waiting for our food..he shook my hand and said "yes you can!"
He then told us that the reason that so many Italians don't like Americans is because "Bush is the baddest president the United States of the America has ever seen." He also said, "Old man mccain is just like bush and the Italians know it so he hopes the Americans too."
He then had his pizza makers start chanting "yes you can" while throwing dough in the air..and wouldn't let the other American couple stopping by for dinner order until they swore they were voting for Obama.
I wish the whole world could vote in this election. Interesting night, right?
I have my first Democrats Abroad meeting on Wednesday. I'll let you know how it goes.
Take care...and let's hope the US votes the Italian way..."yes you can!"
Tonight my roommate and I went across the street to a pizzeria...we are about get on an all night bus to Munich for Oktoberfest, so I am in sweats and a "barack the vote" t-shirt. The owner of the pizzeria came up to us as we were waiting for our food..he shook my hand and said "yes you can!"
He then told us that the reason that so many Italians don't like Americans is because "Bush is the baddest president the United States of the America has ever seen." He also said, "Old man mccain is just like bush and the Italians know it so he hopes the Americans too."
He then had his pizza makers start chanting "yes you can" while throwing dough in the air..and wouldn't let the other American couple stopping by for dinner order until they swore they were voting for Obama.
I wish the whole world could vote in this election. Interesting night, right?
I have my first Democrats Abroad meeting on Wednesday. I'll let you know how it goes.
Take care...and let's hope the US votes the Italian way..."yes you can!"
Free Obama T-Shirt
Want an Obama T-shirt? MoveOn's giving them out if you make a small donation to their young-voter registration program, aimed at registering half a million young voters in swing states. I just got mine, and wanted to share the opportunity with you.
Click this link to get your Obama T-shirt:
‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally is HUGE!
From: http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/
(A wealth of photographs can be found on this page as well)
I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.
After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.
So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.
Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.
So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.
(A wealth of photographs can be found on this page as well)
I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.
After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.
So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.
Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.
So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.
Do yourself a favor -- read a book
Miami HeraldLeonard Pitts, Jr.
September 21, 2008
Of course, we all have questions for Sarah Palin:
Does she actually think living across the Bering Strait from Russia constitutes foreign policy expertise? Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth? How, exactly, does one field dress a moose? And why would one want to?
My first question, though, would not be one of those. I'd simply ask which books she wants to ban -- and why.
Yes, there's a list of titles floating around the Internet right now, but it's a fake. It is, however, established fact that our would-be vice president has in the past tried to pull books off library shelves.
The New York Times reports that as a member of the City Council of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin complained to colleagues about a book called Daddy's Roommate, described in promotional material as being ''for and about the children of lesbian and gay parents.'' Laura Chase, who ran Palin's campaign for mayor, explained that the book was harmless and suggested Palin read it.
Chase told The Times that Palin replied she ``didn't need to read that stuff. It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.''
Later, as mayor, Palin reportedly asked the town's librarian three times whether she would agree to remove controversial books from the shelves. Three times, the librarian refused. Palin fired her, but eventually bowed to public pressure and gave the woman her job back.
''I'm still proud of Sarah,'' said Chase, ``but she scares the bejeebers out of me.''
And in that context, it seems apropos that next week is Banned Books Week.
As you doubtless know, that's the week set aside each year by the American Library Association to bring attention to attempts by some of us to regulate what others of us may read. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reports that it has seen 9,700 ''challenges'' -- a challenge is defined as a formal written request to remove a book from a library because the content offends or is deemed inappropriate -- since 1990. Chillingly, the office suggests that's probably an undercount. It estimates that for every challenge reported, four or five are not.
So Palin has company, to say the least.
Count among that number the woman from a Cuban exile group who bragged to a Miami Herald reporter how in 2006 she checked out and kept an elementary school library book she felt painted too rosy a picture of life on that communist island. Like Palin, she thought she had good reason. Would-be book banners always do.
I'm reminded of how someone challenged me the other day on my contention that anti-intellectualism has overtaken this land. I mentioned by way of example Palin's Bible literalism, but really, there's so much more. There's the ''Jay Walking'' segment on Leno. There's this notion that ''elite'' is a four-letter word. There's the White House's censorship and politicization of science. There's the recent survey which found that more people can name all five Simpsons than all five freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.
And there's this: as many as 50,000 incidents since 1990 in which a book was forced to justify its existence. We're talking books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, books like The Color Purple, books like Harry Potter and, yes, books like Daddy's Roommate, books that offended because they expressed ideas that made someone uncomfortable. As if any other kind of idea was worth expressing.
We are becoming the stupid giant of planet Earth: richer than Midas, mightier than Thor, dumber than rocks. Which makes us a danger to the planet -- and to ourselves. This country cannot continue to prosper and to embrace stupidity. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
So do us all a favor: Annoy Sarah Palin. For goodness sake, read.
Palin's Alaskonomics
Time
By Michael Kinsley
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Sarah Palin thinks she is a better American than you because she comes from a small town, and a superior human being because she isn't a journalist and has never lived in Washington and likes to watch her kids play hockey. Although Palin praised John McCain in her acceptance speech as a man who puts the good of his country ahead of partisan politics, McCain pretty much proved the opposite with his selection of a running mate whose main asset is her ability to reignite the culture wars. So maybe Governor Palin does represent everything that is good and fine about America, as she herself maintains. But spare us, please, any talk about how she is a tough fiscal conservative.
Palin has continued to repeat the already exposed lie that she said "No, thanks" to the famous "bridge to nowhere" (McCain's favorite example of wasteful federal spending). In fact, she said "Yes, please" until the project became a symbol and political albatross.
Back to reality. Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 2 1/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.
Alaska is, in essence, an adjunct member of OPEC. It has four different taxes on oil, which produce more than 89% of the state's unrestricted revenue. On average, three-quarters of the value of a barrel of oil is taken by the state government before that oil is permitted to leave the state. Alaska residents each get a yearly check for about $2,000 from oil revenues, plus an additional $1,200 pushed through by Palin last year to take advantage of rising oil prices. Any sympathy the governor of Alaska expresses for folks in the lower 48 who are suffering from high gas prices or can't afford to heat their homes is strictly crocodile tears.
As if it couldn't support itself, Alaska also ranks No. 1, year after year, in money it sucks in from Washington. In 2005 (the most recent figures), according to the Tax Foundation, Alaska ranked 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434) but first in federal spending received per resident ($13,950). Its ratio of federal spending received to federal taxes paid ranks third among the 50 states, and in the absolute amount it receives from Washington over and above the amount it sends to Washington, Alaska ranks No. 1.
Under the state constitution, the governor of Alaska has unusually strong powers to shape the state budget. At the Republican National Convention, Palin bragged that she had vetoed "nearly $500 million" in state spending during her two years as governor. This amounts to less than 2% of the proposed budget. That's how much this warrior for you (the people) against it (the government) could find in wasteful spending under her control.
One thing Barack Obama and McCain disagree on is an oil windfall–profits tax. McCain is against it, on the theory that it is a tax and therefore bad, and also that it would discourage domestic production. Obama is for it, on the theory that if oil companies can make a nice profit when oil sells for $50 per bbl., they can still make a nice profit when it sells for more than $100, even if the government takes a bit and spreads the money around to those who are hurting from higher oil prices.
Although Palin's words side with McCain in this dispute, her actions side with Obama. Her major legislative accomplishment has been to revamp Alaska's windfall-profits tax in order to increase the state's take. Alaska calls it a "clear and equitable share" tax. The state assumes that extracting oil from the tundra costs about $25 per bbl. and takes as much as 75% of the difference between that and the sale price.
Why is a windfall-profits tax good for Alaska but not for the U.S.? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? People in Alaska are better than people in the rest of the U.S. They're more American. Although there are small towns and farms and high school hockey teams in the lower 48, there are fewer down here, per capita, than in Alaska. And there are many more journalists and pollsters and city dwellers and other undesirables who might benefit if every American had the same right to leech off the government as do the good citizens of Sarah Palin's Alaska.
By Michael Kinsley
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Sarah Palin thinks she is a better American than you because she comes from a small town, and a superior human being because she isn't a journalist and has never lived in Washington and likes to watch her kids play hockey. Although Palin praised John McCain in her acceptance speech as a man who puts the good of his country ahead of partisan politics, McCain pretty much proved the opposite with his selection of a running mate whose main asset is her ability to reignite the culture wars. So maybe Governor Palin does represent everything that is good and fine about America, as she herself maintains. But spare us, please, any talk about how she is a tough fiscal conservative.
Palin has continued to repeat the already exposed lie that she said "No, thanks" to the famous "bridge to nowhere" (McCain's favorite example of wasteful federal spending). In fact, she said "Yes, please" until the project became a symbol and political albatross.
Back to reality. Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 2 1/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.
Alaska is, in essence, an adjunct member of OPEC. It has four different taxes on oil, which produce more than 89% of the state's unrestricted revenue. On average, three-quarters of the value of a barrel of oil is taken by the state government before that oil is permitted to leave the state. Alaska residents each get a yearly check for about $2,000 from oil revenues, plus an additional $1,200 pushed through by Palin last year to take advantage of rising oil prices. Any sympathy the governor of Alaska expresses for folks in the lower 48 who are suffering from high gas prices or can't afford to heat their homes is strictly crocodile tears.
As if it couldn't support itself, Alaska also ranks No. 1, year after year, in money it sucks in from Washington. In 2005 (the most recent figures), according to the Tax Foundation, Alaska ranked 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434) but first in federal spending received per resident ($13,950). Its ratio of federal spending received to federal taxes paid ranks third among the 50 states, and in the absolute amount it receives from Washington over and above the amount it sends to Washington, Alaska ranks No. 1.
Under the state constitution, the governor of Alaska has unusually strong powers to shape the state budget. At the Republican National Convention, Palin bragged that she had vetoed "nearly $500 million" in state spending during her two years as governor. This amounts to less than 2% of the proposed budget. That's how much this warrior for you (the people) against it (the government) could find in wasteful spending under her control.
One thing Barack Obama and McCain disagree on is an oil windfall–profits tax. McCain is against it, on the theory that it is a tax and therefore bad, and also that it would discourage domestic production. Obama is for it, on the theory that if oil companies can make a nice profit when oil sells for $50 per bbl., they can still make a nice profit when it sells for more than $100, even if the government takes a bit and spreads the money around to those who are hurting from higher oil prices.
Although Palin's words side with McCain in this dispute, her actions side with Obama. Her major legislative accomplishment has been to revamp Alaska's windfall-profits tax in order to increase the state's take. Alaska calls it a "clear and equitable share" tax. The state assumes that extracting oil from the tundra costs about $25 per bbl. and takes as much as 75% of the difference between that and the sale price.
Why is a windfall-profits tax good for Alaska but not for the U.S.? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? People in Alaska are better than people in the rest of the U.S. They're more American. Although there are small towns and farms and high school hockey teams in the lower 48, there are fewer down here, per capita, than in Alaska. And there are many more journalists and pollsters and city dwellers and other undesirables who might benefit if every American had the same right to leech off the government as do the good citizens of Sarah Palin's Alaska.
John McCain and the Lying Game
Time
by Joe Klien
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Politics has always been lousy with blather and chicanery. But there are rules and traditions too. In the early weeks of the general-election campaign, a consensus has grown in the political community — a consensus that ranges from practitioners like Karl Rove to commentators like, well, me — that John McCain has allowed his campaign to slip the normal bounds of political propriety. The situation has gotten so intense that we in the media have slipped our normal rules as well. Usually when a candidate tells something less than the truth, we mince words. We use euphemisms like mendacity and inaccuracy ... or, as the Associated Press put it, "McCain's claims skirt facts." But increasing numbers of otherwise sober observers, even such august institutions as the New York Times editorial board, are calling John McCain a liar. You might well ask, What has McCain done to deserve this? What unwritten rules did he break? Are his transgressions of degree or of kind?
Almost every politician stretches the truth. We journalists try to point out the exaggerations and criticize them, then let the voters decide. When McCain says, for example, that Barack Obama favors a government-run health-care system, he's not telling the truth — Obama wants a market-based system subsidized by the government — but McCain's untruth illuminates a general policy direction, which is sketchy but sort of within the bounds. (Obama's plan would increase government regulation of the drug and insurance industries.) Obama has done this sort of thing too. In July, he accused McCain of supporting the foreign buyout of an American company that could lead to the loss of about 8,000 jobs in Wilmington, Ohio. McCain did support the deal, but the job loss comes many years later and was not anticipated at the time. That, however, is where the moral equivalency between these two campaigns ends.
McCain's lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth. Even after 38 million Americans heard Obama say in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that he was open to offshore oil-drilling and building new nuclear-power plants, McCain flatly said in his acceptance speech that Obama opposed both. Normal political practice would be for McCain to say, "Obama says he's 'open to' offshore drilling, but he's always opposed it. How can we believe him?" This persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.
Worse than the lies have been the smears. McCain ran a television ad claiming that Obama favored "comprehensive" sex education for kindergartners. (Obama favored a bill that would have warned kindergartners about sexual predators and improper touching.) The accusation that Obama was referring to Sarah Palin when he said McCain's effort to remarket his economic policies was putting "lipstick on a pig" was another clearly misleading attack — an obnoxious attempt to divert attention from Palin's lack of fitness for the job and the recklessness with which McCain chose her. McCain's assault on the "élite media" for spreading rumors about Palin's personal life — actually, the culprits were a few bloggers and the tabloid press — was more of the same. And that gets us close to the real problem here. The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions.
This new strategy emerged during the first week of Obama's overseas trip in late July. McCain had been intending to contrast his alleged foreign policy expertise and toughness with Obama's inexperience and alleged weakness. McCain wanted to "win" the Iraq war and face down the Iranians. But those issues became moot when the Iraqis said they favored Obama's withdrawal plan and the Bush Administration started talking to the Iranians. At that point, McCain committed his original sin — out of pique, I believe — questioning Obama's patriotism, saying the Democrat would rather lose a war than lose an election. Ever since, McCain's campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning ads accompanied by the daily gush of untruths that have now been widely documented and exposed. The strategy is an obvious attempt to camouflage the current unpopularity of his Republican brand, the insubstantiality of his vice-presidential choice, and his agreement on most issues — especially economic matters — with an exceedingly unpopular President.
The good news is that the vile times may be ending. The coming debates will decide this race, and it isn't easy to tell lies when your opponent is standing right next to you. The Wall Street collapse demands a more sober campaign as well. But these dreadful weeks should not be forgotten. John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign.
by Joe Klien
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Politics has always been lousy with blather and chicanery. But there are rules and traditions too. In the early weeks of the general-election campaign, a consensus has grown in the political community — a consensus that ranges from practitioners like Karl Rove to commentators like, well, me — that John McCain has allowed his campaign to slip the normal bounds of political propriety. The situation has gotten so intense that we in the media have slipped our normal rules as well. Usually when a candidate tells something less than the truth, we mince words. We use euphemisms like mendacity and inaccuracy ... or, as the Associated Press put it, "McCain's claims skirt facts." But increasing numbers of otherwise sober observers, even such august institutions as the New York Times editorial board, are calling John McCain a liar. You might well ask, What has McCain done to deserve this? What unwritten rules did he break? Are his transgressions of degree or of kind?
Almost every politician stretches the truth. We journalists try to point out the exaggerations and criticize them, then let the voters decide. When McCain says, for example, that Barack Obama favors a government-run health-care system, he's not telling the truth — Obama wants a market-based system subsidized by the government — but McCain's untruth illuminates a general policy direction, which is sketchy but sort of within the bounds. (Obama's plan would increase government regulation of the drug and insurance industries.) Obama has done this sort of thing too. In July, he accused McCain of supporting the foreign buyout of an American company that could lead to the loss of about 8,000 jobs in Wilmington, Ohio. McCain did support the deal, but the job loss comes many years later and was not anticipated at the time. That, however, is where the moral equivalency between these two campaigns ends.
McCain's lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth. Even after 38 million Americans heard Obama say in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that he was open to offshore oil-drilling and building new nuclear-power plants, McCain flatly said in his acceptance speech that Obama opposed both. Normal political practice would be for McCain to say, "Obama says he's 'open to' offshore drilling, but he's always opposed it. How can we believe him?" This persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.
Worse than the lies have been the smears. McCain ran a television ad claiming that Obama favored "comprehensive" sex education for kindergartners. (Obama favored a bill that would have warned kindergartners about sexual predators and improper touching.) The accusation that Obama was referring to Sarah Palin when he said McCain's effort to remarket his economic policies was putting "lipstick on a pig" was another clearly misleading attack — an obnoxious attempt to divert attention from Palin's lack of fitness for the job and the recklessness with which McCain chose her. McCain's assault on the "élite media" for spreading rumors about Palin's personal life — actually, the culprits were a few bloggers and the tabloid press — was more of the same. And that gets us close to the real problem here. The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions.
This new strategy emerged during the first week of Obama's overseas trip in late July. McCain had been intending to contrast his alleged foreign policy expertise and toughness with Obama's inexperience and alleged weakness. McCain wanted to "win" the Iraq war and face down the Iranians. But those issues became moot when the Iraqis said they favored Obama's withdrawal plan and the Bush Administration started talking to the Iranians. At that point, McCain committed his original sin — out of pique, I believe — questioning Obama's patriotism, saying the Democrat would rather lose a war than lose an election. Ever since, McCain's campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning ads accompanied by the daily gush of untruths that have now been widely documented and exposed. The strategy is an obvious attempt to camouflage the current unpopularity of his Republican brand, the insubstantiality of his vice-presidential choice, and his agreement on most issues — especially economic matters — with an exceedingly unpopular President.
The good news is that the vile times may be ending. The coming debates will decide this race, and it isn't easy to tell lies when your opponent is standing right next to you. The Wall Street collapse demands a more sober campaign as well. But these dreadful weeks should not be forgotten. John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign.
The McCain of the Week
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: September 18, 2008
VIENNA, Ohio
“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.
Folks were wildly enthusiastic as the event began. That was partly because Sarah Palin was also on the bill. (With Todd!) And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.
Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.
Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)
“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.
The whole transformation was fascinating in a cheap-thrills kind of way. It’s not every day, outside of “Incredible Hulk” movies, that you see somebody make this kind of turnaround in the scope of a few hours.
On Monday in Jacksonville, Fla., McCain made his now-famous reassurance that the fundamentals of the economy were still good. It’s a longstanding line of his, but this was perhaps not the best week to dredge it up. So the handlers went to work, and by the time McCain arrived in Orlando a few hours later he was reprogrammed. And angry!
“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street! Enough is enough! We’re going to put an end to the greed!” he told a town hall meeting crowded with Hispanic Republicans. It was a rather jumbled message, but the new story line was firm. The fundamentals were not things like employment rates or trade statistics. The fundamentals were the workers.
We are the fundamentals!
And, naturally, the humble, hard-working fundamentals are good. Who could doubt it? Was Barack Obama trying to say that he didn’t think the American working man and woman was good? Was this the sort of thing they talked about at those fancy-schmancy Hollywood fund-raisers? Which, of course, John McCain hates. Give him some hard cider and a log cabin, and he’s happy as a clam.
But wait! The fundamentals are in danger! At risk because of “greed.” Which John McCain was shocked to discover has been running rampant in the canyons of Wall Street.
Now in an election like this, you expect a certain amount of tactical reimagining. McCain used to like reporters, and now he treats them as if they were carrying the Ebola virus. Fair enough, although given the fact that he’s terrible at speeches, and the famous town halls have now become Republican-only lovefests, the campaign really should invent some new method of communication. (And remember, the man doesn’t text.)
It is also disconcerting, of course, to hear the Republicans rail against Washington as if the Socialist Workers Party had been running things there for the last eight years. But really, what would you do if you were McCain? There aren’t a lot of options, and he never did like George W. anyway.
This new tactic is different. McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new “comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest.” It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.
This week, while McCain’s chief economic adviser was telling reporters that it was wrong to “run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people,” McCain’s ad people were unveiling a new spot announcing “Our economy in crisis!” and calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street” along, of course, with more offshore drilling. Mournful unemployment-line music swells.
I have absolutely no idea of how John McCain would handle a financial crisis if he were president. But on behalf of all the nation’s fundamentals I would like to say that he now has me ready to stage a run on the first bank in sight.
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: September 18, 2008
VIENNA, Ohio
“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.
Folks were wildly enthusiastic as the event began. That was partly because Sarah Palin was also on the bill. (With Todd!) And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.
Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.
Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)
“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.
The whole transformation was fascinating in a cheap-thrills kind of way. It’s not every day, outside of “Incredible Hulk” movies, that you see somebody make this kind of turnaround in the scope of a few hours.
On Monday in Jacksonville, Fla., McCain made his now-famous reassurance that the fundamentals of the economy were still good. It’s a longstanding line of his, but this was perhaps not the best week to dredge it up. So the handlers went to work, and by the time McCain arrived in Orlando a few hours later he was reprogrammed. And angry!
“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street! Enough is enough! We’re going to put an end to the greed!” he told a town hall meeting crowded with Hispanic Republicans. It was a rather jumbled message, but the new story line was firm. The fundamentals were not things like employment rates or trade statistics. The fundamentals were the workers.
We are the fundamentals!
And, naturally, the humble, hard-working fundamentals are good. Who could doubt it? Was Barack Obama trying to say that he didn’t think the American working man and woman was good? Was this the sort of thing they talked about at those fancy-schmancy Hollywood fund-raisers? Which, of course, John McCain hates. Give him some hard cider and a log cabin, and he’s happy as a clam.
But wait! The fundamentals are in danger! At risk because of “greed.” Which John McCain was shocked to discover has been running rampant in the canyons of Wall Street.
Now in an election like this, you expect a certain amount of tactical reimagining. McCain used to like reporters, and now he treats them as if they were carrying the Ebola virus. Fair enough, although given the fact that he’s terrible at speeches, and the famous town halls have now become Republican-only lovefests, the campaign really should invent some new method of communication. (And remember, the man doesn’t text.)
It is also disconcerting, of course, to hear the Republicans rail against Washington as if the Socialist Workers Party had been running things there for the last eight years. But really, what would you do if you were McCain? There aren’t a lot of options, and he never did like George W. anyway.
This new tactic is different. McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new “comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest.” It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.
This week, while McCain’s chief economic adviser was telling reporters that it was wrong to “run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people,” McCain’s ad people were unveiling a new spot announcing “Our economy in crisis!” and calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street” along, of course, with more offshore drilling. Mournful unemployment-line music swells.
I have absolutely no idea of how John McCain would handle a financial crisis if he were president. But on behalf of all the nation’s fundamentals I would like to say that he now has me ready to stage a run on the first bank in sight.
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