sweetheart-mine

mccain has been striking me as increasingly erratic and not all there. i don't even mean politically, necessarily -- as a human being. do mccain followers perceive this at all? it feels like a non-partisan observation on my part. i'm just watching the guy and he truly seems numb or something.

oh my god, it's worse than we thought. Analogman has stopped communicating with words, now he just speaks in URLs.

he can't help it, he's very good at it. seriously.

Maybe they're just trying to drastically lower expectations.

yes, that must be it.

I'm not sure who this radio commentator Ed Schultz is, but here's his take this morning

 

McCain Camp insiders say Palin "clueless"

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people

are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held

a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

they must be in a panic. and how to get rid of her? they can't, after bringing her out of the woods on a parade float and presenting her as this giant gift to the country.

i can't see potential mccain/palin voters putting up with not seeing her debate after what the country has seen in her so far. but then, some of them will excuse just about anything.

you're not looking very hard. i don't know any conservatives who think much of bush.

my experience has been that kwall is right here. most traditional fiscal conservatives that i encounter have thought bush was a disaster since the iraq invasion and believe he has only gotten worse.

Well now, here's an interesting thing: a group of House GOP folk walked out of bailout talks - evidently the proceedings weren't going to their liking. They want (dig this) less oversight - let the market work itself out.

 

Am I getting this right? This could be either the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, or a true political masterstroke: since W and the Dems now seem to be somewhat on the same page with this bailout legislation the incumbent House Reps are now gonna run on a campaign of "Anti-Bush/Anti-Dem 'socialism' legislation" - actually running against a man they have basically been in lock-step with for 8 years?

 

I think my head is gonna explode. I'm trying hard not to fall into the conspiracy theory trip here.

at the close of political and bailout business tonight, this is exactly what the upshot looked like to me. keep an open mind for tomorrow, this is one insane week.

MCCAIN HAS NO JUMP SHOT!

"I'll try and find some examples and bring em to ya."

 

 

Eloquent, funny, and wry

 

Palin's sad and very bad interview..watch @ least the last 10 seconds!

yep. more than ever i think she should be running for junior high school cheerleader. and nothing else.

Palin may also suspend her campaign.

all right, that does it. they both should be thrown out of the race on grounds of absurdity and the most shameless kind of politicking i've ever seen, in the middle of a crisis. really.

CBS will probably pull it from Youtube, but its here for now

thank you thank you

Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondence Dinner is still the greatest thing that has ever happened in entire universe.

he was absolutely brilliant and fearless, no question about it.

I hope you all just saw Letterman. He was on fire folks. I've never seen such a brutal drubbing of McSame.

missed it, damn. i'll check (cbs?)

in the morn. ?

martial law.

"mavericky" should be included in dictionaries, along with truthiness.

Minimum legal speeds by state

 

Legal doesn't mean the same thing as safe. When you can reasonably expect the majority of cars to be driving in excess of 65 mph, 45 is not a safe speed, whether it is legal or not.

when on a multi-lane highway, and the 45-mph driver stays in the right lane, i don't see a problem. it's the chronic 85's that bother me.

R_____N?

 

i love your posts! not news, i know, but this one made me say it again.

i hope they're not expecting something. i hope this isn't interesting timing.

That would be Salon

george will, in case anyone missed it:

George Will: McCain shows he's not presidential

05:05 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated.

This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" – disconnected from knowledge and principle – had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Mr. Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that Mr. McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in Mr. McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Congressman Cox, who as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, Mr. McCain's smear – that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" – is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For Mr. McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive – there are no other people.

Mr. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see the Washington Post of Sept. 17 and The New York Times of Sept. 20.)

Mr. McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions."

This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while Mr. McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Mr. Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not Mr. McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale.

On 60 Minutes Sunday, Mr. McCain said he would like to replace Mr. Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo. Mr. McCain explained that Mr. Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing Mr. McCain is crucial usually start by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Mr. Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that Mr. McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Washington Post columnist George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.

I can't understand why anyone cares what someone else's sexual preference is.

whenever i see or hear people firsthand railing against someone else's sexual preference, it literally sounds like some kind of personal fright that turns into a ridiculous aggression when they feel the impulse to speak about it. it's so revealing that i always wonder why they don't pass out in embarrassment.

That is what has been so tragically missing from our political process for the last eight years: while the GOP sought greater and greater government power, Democrats acquiesced almost completely when they weren't complicitly enabling it. While the Executive was off the charts in terms of the power it seized, the Congress was off the charts in its passivity and eagerness to relinquish its Constitutionally assigned powers to the Bush White House. That's what has caused the extreme imbalance, with a bloated Republican Party and virtually unlimited presidential power: the failure of Democrats and the Congress to serve as a check on any of that. As their newfound contempt for unlimited power makes conclusively clear, the executive-power-worshipping Republicans of the last eight years -- if there is an Obama presidency -- will quickly re-discover their limited government power "principles" and won't be nearly as accommodating.

 

UPDATE: I should add that Congressional Democrats, while largely on board with the fundamentals of the bailout plan, have been making noises about demanding some limits and oversight on how this fund is managed, and the political climate is certainly part of what is motivating the Right to voice these doubts, as illustrated by the bizarre and deeply cynical spectacle of the GOP presidential nominee -- of all people -- joining with the Democrats to demand limits on CEO compensation. The point, though, is that Democrats typically make noises of this type and then capitulate at the end if they stand alone. This Paulson bill can be stopped only with widespread opposition that cuts across the standard ideological/partisan lines, and it shouldn't be that hard to argue why handing over $700 billion to the very people who caused this disaster, while allowing them to walk away soaked with profits, is not a good idea, and that vesting unlimited power in the Bush administration to manage that is a particularly bad idea. If Democrats can't win that argument, what argument can they win?

not sure whose words these were, of the people quoted, but they sum it up nicely. the democrats' refusal or inability to stand up to the power grabs that have gone on for the last eight years -- or their actually supporting them -- has been just as appalling as the power grabs themselves. we've had sit-ins at our democratic rep's office here several times during these years, trying to get the democrat to do the right thing on votes concerning war funding, the patriot act, and more. he'd talk one way and vote another, making himself just as much a part of the larger problem as anyone else in washington. so frustrating. yes, and if this week's bipartisan agreeing regarding the bailout doesn't result in serious changes to what the white house (and thus the money czar) is demanding now, the power-grab situation in washington is even worse than i already thought.

Not really (imo)

Interesting (way?) aside

I like ketchup

let me guess: and so does kerry . . .

interesting list, and i'll have to read the article. one of my senators is #20, who knew?

I find the best strategy is just to lock someone in the car with you and not to say anything. After awhile they'll say "What is this?" and you can launch on the offensive.

excellent idea. i get far too enthusiastic with the run-up. it must create pressure. next time, it'll be your way.