Palin Blasts the Media

In this video, Palin makes a lot of good points about media coverage of this last campaign.

The media coverage, to say nothing of the attitude of many of the bloggers, was a goddamned disaster. And yes, it was sure as hell sexist. To say nothing of it being classist and elitist.

Gene Lyons Column

People can analyze all they want about this election, but in the end it was our dictator who proved the GOP ticket's undoing.

Campaign Notes

I wouldn't be gloating too soon; in fact, I would be asking a LOT of questions about how Obama, who isn't "the greatest orator of our age," got as far as he has on as little ability and experience. It was a set-up, a clear set-up by the GOP to screw us down the road.

This analysis is better, and the Democrats are really being set up to fail.

The Democratic gains in the congressional races were in large measure due to the increased turnout among youth and minority workers associated with the Obama campaign. The Democrats also had an unusual financial edge as corporate donors shifted a considerable amount of campaign funds away from the Republicans. Both House and Senate Democrats raised more than their Republican counterparts.

According to data filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $77.5 million in the 90 most competitive House raises, compared to only $24.4 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee. This three-to-one spending advantage mirrors that enjoyed by the Obama over McCain in the final month of the campaign.

Democratic candidates also made significant gains in state legislative races, taking over control of the New York state senate, giving them control of the entire legislature and governor’s office there for the first time since 1935. In the entire Northeast region comprising 11 states from Maine to Maryland, the Republican Party controls only one state legislative chamber, the Pennsylvania state senate.

When you talk about corporate donors giving piles of money to Democrats, don't expect the Democrats in return to act like the Democrats of yore, including FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, or even the more conservative Carter or Clinton.

Selected Editorials

"HOW DARE YOU???!!!!" I ask in my faux Olbermann voice. "How DARE you bring up the possibility the GOP is throwing the election?"

I don’t know which is scarier: The American landscape the next President of the United States is destined to inherit, the people who will make that decision (us), or the fact that these two guys seem to want it so bad.

Or do they? Did you ever think of that? Maybe John McCain is deliberately trying to throw the election. “Let me get this straight. Ten trillion in debt? Losing two wars? Tampa Bay in the World Series? Not what I envisioned when I gave this country the best five years of my life. Barack, my man, this one is all yours.”

It would explain a lot. Like why he and his people are running the worst campaign EVER. And that includes New Coke and Penn Jillette’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Or for you older folks: France in ’39.

If he loses tonight, there is NO question the GOP is throwing the election to a truly awful candidate who is BOUND to screw up if he isn't indicted first.

That's why I am praying, hope against hope, for a McCain victory. I KNOW the GOP's MO, and they are already looking at 2010 and 2012.
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Campaign Notes

The candidates are making a final push this weekend, with Obama going through the West including southern Nevada, while McCain makes a pitch in Virginia, which for some reason is seen as a battleground state.

Obama better hope the AP poll is accurate, for his campaign hasn't done shit in the last week getting surrogates up here in northern Nevada on his behalf. Kerry did it last time, and he lost the state by just a couple of percentage points. The Kerry campaign worked its ass off here. Obama seems to think that because of the uptick for Democrats in registrations, he can just rest on his laurels. However, I suspect Nevada isn't as competitive as the Obama campaign tries to pretend.

In the fall of 2004, ALL of the candidates and their spouses campaigned in Washoe County. ALL of them. There were many, many surrogates who came to town from both parties, as I documented on this blog four years ago. Kerry had surrogates coming through the final weekend, which included the late Ann Richards, Wesley Clark, and Madeleine Albright. Dick and Lynne Cheney came to Sparks just hours before Election Day. Thanks to the work of the Kerry and Edwards campaign, the Republican margin of victory was very, very slim statewide, and the margin of victory in Washoe County was cut in half from 2000.

This is not the case this year, though there have been candidates and surrogates here. It's just not like four years ago. It was the primary and caucus campaign where the "celebrities" came in droves.
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Campaign Notes

In case you haven't voted, the NYT posted a couple of articles from a few days ago about the two:

McCain

Obama

Biden

I don't know if there is a similar piece on Palin.
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Night owl that Bill Clinton is, he campaigned in the middle of the night for Obama. There is a video clip of the two.

Al Gore is to be there, too, to remind everybody who REALLY should have been president in 2000, and was, but for a corrupt USSC.

The Obama campaign believes it has a real shot at Florida, since Jeb is no longer running the state and Governor Crist has no desire to rig it. Joe Biden was also there making a pitch for support of Israel.

Florida, as we know, has a high percentage of Jewish voters, which was one of the reasons Al Gore tapped Joe Lieberman as his running mate back in 2000.
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John McCain was on Larry King's show last night.

Today he was in the aptly-named Defiance, Ohio, promising to get this country moving again with tax cuts. He is on a two-day campaign trip in Ohio.

Yesterday, Sarah Palin was in Toledo, Ohio, talking about energy independence.

Campaign Notes

The candidates will spend the last days of the campaign mostly in states our dictator "won" or stole in 2004.

I honestly can't see Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana ultimately being in play, let alone South Carolina and Georgia.

In any case, it appears we who live out west will probably be ignored these last days, unlike 2004, when appearances by the candidates and their surrogates happened right up to the wire. Dick and Lynne Cheney, for example, appeared in Reno just hours before the 2004 campaign officially ended.
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Political/Campaign Notes

John Kerry should have run for president again if he wants a New Deal II because I seriously doubt Obama is the one to do it.
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Barack Obama was in Denver, and he drew an estimated 100,000.

One should always bear in mind only THREE states west of the Mississippi are considered competitive at all: Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. One of the major reasons, if not THE major reason, for the huge crowds is many people who did not see the candidates during the primaries are now coming out to see them, and MANY of them are from neighboring states.

I know this was true in Reno yesterday. I talked to many people who were from out of state, especially California, who came in to see Obama on a weekend. The same was true in 2004, by the way. There are also many volunteers from around the country working on this campaign.
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John McCain was on Meet the Press today.

It much suck to have once been the media's bride only to be jilted in favor of a younger model.
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Sarah Palin went on the attack today in Florida.
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Joseph Biden made his pitch in West Virginia Friday.
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People may think Obama is an egotistical airhead. Others think McCain is a candidate long past his prime. Still others think Sarah Palin simply isn't prepared to be VP. And others still say while Joe Biden should be president, he is too much of a gaffing gasbag for his own good. But despite this embarrassment of riches, or embarrassments, they all love their country and can't be said to be "un-American."

Candidates using the "patriotism" card gets rather tedious.
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Campaign Trail.

Later in the day, Obama went to Vegas, where a mere 18,000 showed up.
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John McCain was in New Mexico.
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Sarah Palin was in Iowa warning people about "unchecked power."
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Joseph Biden was in Virginia trying to get that state to turn blue.
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Economy

Incredibly enough, Obama, the darling of Wall Street, might actually pull off an upset this fall with the economy in the tank.

I find it hard to believe the Electoral College votes are there, and if he does pull off a win, it's because the GOP has decided to throw the election because THEY don't want to be saddled with the mess.

Obama doesn't have the intellectual acumen to be able to do much about the mess, since he has the same Wall Street connections as the corrupt GOP. Sure, there's Biden, but I wouldn't count on Obama's ego allowing Biden to handle the situation.

By the way, there is no such thing as a "free market." It's either government helps out the masses by putting more of the tax burden on the wealthy and corporations, or it is government screwing over the masses by giving handouts to the wealthy and corporations, and then, when the latter screws up as they always do, the government forces the masses to bail these elites out.

That's Friedmanomics for you.

Campaign Notes

Sarah Palin will be in Carson City today. I am sure she will draw a good crowd there.

If I had a car I would go. Buses do not run between Reno and Carson City on the weekends, and it is too damned far to cycle out there, especially at my age. It would be close to 70 miles round trip. Besides, it is too late in the day to do it.

Note the sidebar says cameras are allowed but no videos. I have never heard of that before.

More Campaign Notes

Rumor has it Sarah Palin may be coming to northern Nevada as early as the end of next week.

Political Commentary

"Experience" has been way oversold. After all, we have had some candidates in both political parties who have little real political experience.

This nails it:

In the past, when Americans expected presidents to have a record of political service, Mr. Obama would have been called a poseur or imposter and sent home. Not anymore. This is the day of the dilettante.

Experience is overrated. It is unnecessary. As someone recently put it, anyone can grow up to be president in America, but now you don't even have to grow up anymore.

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Pat Buchanan decides he likes McCain's running mate pick and thinks the GOP ticket has a fighting chance.

How about a landslide, considering how far the Obama campaign and its supporters they are willing to go to piss off huge chunks of the electorate?

Our dictator set the standard for experience or lack of it, and Obama and his ilk are just following the latest precedent.

Theories, Theories

There are many theories floating around trying to explain what looks to be the disintegration and even the destruction of the Democratic Party. This post does a good job in implicating the nutroots, and so does this post. But the nutroots don't exist in a vacuum. I still submit the mainstream media, in cahoots with the GOP, much more than the nutroots, played THE major role in damaging the Democratic Party. The nutroots would NOT have joined the Obama bandwagon in the first place were it not for the 24/7 media propaganda pumping this fraud up as the next MLK, JFK, RFK, Lincoln, or Jesus Christ. They came relatively late on the scene.

Sure, the shit got much worse AFTER Iowa and AFTER Edwards was forced out. But how did Edwards GET forced out? Who was responsible? How did Biden, Dodd, and Richardson get marginalized? Who was responsible? Did the bloggers do that? No, it was the media. The bloggers had NOTHING to do with that. It was only after the two weakest general election candidates, Clinton and Obama, were left that the nutroots attacks began. THEN you saw the viciousness of the so-called progressive blogosphere directed towards the Clinton supporters. Lies about the Clintons were being perpetrated, and the worst of all was shitting all over them by helping Obama play the race card.

And why did they do this? Mostly it was a result of the massive propaganda campaign in favor of Obama, and partly it has to do with the relative age and political experience of the so-called left blogosphere. Basically these people are very susceptible to propaganda and few remember the ratfucking of yore against the Democratic Party (e.g., 1972). Some of these idiots pulled on Hillary Clinton exactly what they did to Joe Lieberman back in 2006 and shit all over him because of the Iraq War and pumped up an idiot to run against him. That was the first sign of trouble, when so-called progressives were willing to hound Democrats out of the party because they didn't kowtow to their notion of what a Democrat is. They began to shred to pieces the big tent of the Democratic Party. In 2008, these same fools actually believed the crap Obama was anti-war, but he wasn't. Not at all. But they didn't care what the truth was. What they knew was Clinton was supposedly pro-war, and they were going to work like hell to defeat her. Moreover, the nutroots didn't care the guy didn't appear to stand for a goddamned thing except give little Hallmark platitudes about getting along with the fascistic right. He got away with a lot of shit in all honestly because of his racial background. He was saying things and is STILL saying things nobody else would get away with because of it. He knew that and played it up to the hilt. The danger signs surrounding Obama were there for ANYBODY to see; the nutroots simply refused to see it.

The one thing missing from the analysis is the fact the media are in the tank for McCain. The media also manipulated the Republican voters into selecting McCain, despite many voters' misgivings. The manipulation went on with both sides, although it was MUCH worse with the Democrats.

We also cannot leave out the structural problems with the primary and caucus system which made it VERY easy for the GOP to manipulate. And manipulate they did to benefit somebody they felt would be very easy to beat. Many Republicans may despise McCain, but they were willing to put up with him as their party's standardbearer in hopes they can manipulate him. And perhaps many of them feel as I do McCain would serve just one term anyway and look for a running mate a little more in tune with their own goals.

So did the Obama campaign manipulate the nutroots or did the McCain campaign? Well, both I suppose, but the GOP-leaning media created the manipulation in the first place by force feeding the two candidates on voters to the exclusion of much better candidates (at least on the Democratic Party side).

Finally the party apparatus itself joined in the mess and ultimately forced Hillary Clinton out, just as they had forced John Edwards out when it looked as if he would actually gain traction for Super Tuesday. They wanted to "make history" because the media were pushing that narrative, but more important, they were afraid of offending a key constituency and never mind the constituency would have supported any Democrat regardless.

Yes, the nutroots played and still play a key role in the division of the Democratic Party, but the GOP and the GOP-leaning media laid the groundwork for the division. They will continue to manipulate our elections until we wake the hell up.

We've got a mess, and yes, once Obama is defeated I want the nutroots purged once and for all from the Democratic Party. They were and are either willing or unwitting tools of the GOP/GOP-leaning media propaganda machine.

Campaign Trivia.

Just in case you care, no matter who wins or loses in Janaury, assuming neither party standardbearer is dumped by his party, it will be a left-handed person who will be elected or appointed president.

In 1992, all three major candidates (Bush I, Clinton, and Perot) were all left-handed.

Just because both Obama and McCain are left-handed that doesn't mean I will vote for either. And I am left-handed as well.

Is There Any Doubt

Democrats are stupid followers who are about to hand the party a massive defeat in November, thanks to 24/7 media propaganda and caucuses and primaries which make it easy for Republicans to ratfuck the primary season?

The so-called liberal blogosphere won't ask just WHY it is the Republican primaries and caucuses have relatively few voters in comparison to the Democratic ones. Well, duh. The Republicans and indies were allowed to fuck up our elections to help them in the fall. THIS should be illegal. ALL primaries and caucuses should be closed.

Heads had better roll at the DNC, starting at the top, over this impending disaster. I haven't been very critical of the Mouth since he took over the top job, but now he has almost totally fucked up, and with him everybody else who is responsible.

We are SO screwed. The media have decided to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton once and for all. Of course, it goes beyond saying the DNC should never have encouraged the Clintons to do this in the first place. And then the Obama thing is a total fucking disaster, just because these morons in the party organization didn't want John Edwards, somebody who could have easily won this election.

No, it couldn't happen because Edwards would have hurt their donor base. Well, now we are screwed and will get McCain in the White House.

I have written time and again the GOP has NO intention of EVER relinquishing the White House, and instead of rigging the fall elections, they will just abuse the election laws to fuck up the primaries so Democrats pick a surefire loser.

It's Time

for the media hacks to write Hillary Clinton's political obituary.

So when will you, Walter, and you media whores start vetting Obama? I won't under any circumstance vote for him because he hasn't been vetted.

It Would Be Foolish

in the extreme for Democrats to have a "unity" ticket. We are going to get beaten and badly in the fall if either of the two remaining candidates or both are selected for the ticket.

Our only hope is a brokered convention with a different nominee.

I can't believe the DNC deliberately squandered away a surefire victory by playing identity politics this year. It's unbelievable, but we have incompetents running the party apparatus who simply don't want to win.

Virginia is

the next on the agenda.

The Republicans

are using the media to promote the 50-state loser against John McCain by going after Hillary Clinton.

And Drudge claims the Clintons may be dipping into their own wealth in order to compete.

We're being ratfucked people. No way is Obama going to be president.