Excellent video from YouTube

I miss Dr. Seuss...

McCain's a Socialist!

Or at least he used to be, this was the guy who I was pulling for in 2000 and didn't show up to this election at all.


By the way, Socialism is not the same thing as the Nazis (Facism) or the Soviets (bastardized Communism). Just a brief -ism lesson.

Am I in Bizzaro World?

After a week of hateful and inflammatory rhetoric we FINALLY get the guy who ran in 2000?!?!

On a serious note, I applaud Sen. McCain's statements. It does speak to the character that we all observed in earlier times, I just hope its not too little to dissuade what has become an issue of bigotry and hatred in the most important of times. I would like to coin a Colbertism and praise Sen. McCain's Standupishness. (Mr. Colbert, you can find my resume on Monster.com, ignore all that bartender stuff, feel free to hand it off to Mr. Stewart).

Good article with actual FACTS about Obama/Ayers relationship

With due courtesy to the St. Petersburg Times:

Not a radical group, and Ayers didn't run it

For most of the election, Sen. John McCain's campaign has been somewhat subtle about trying to tie Sen. Barack Obama to the former '60s radical William Ayers.

No longer. A 90-second Web ad released Oct. 8, 2008, features sinister music, side-by-side photographs of Obama and Ayers, and a series of dubious allegations about their past connections, including this one:

"Ayers and Obama ran a radical education foundation together."

Ayers was a founding member of the militant Vietnam-era anti-war group the Weathermen. He was investigated for his role in a series of domestic bombings, but the charges were dropped in 1974 due to prosecutorial misconduct. He is now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and actively engaged in the city's civic life.

The McCain campaign said the "radical education foundation" to which they were referring is the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity endowed by publishing magnate Walter Annenberg that funded public-school programs in Chicago from 1995 to 2001.

We'll look at whether the foundation was radical. But first we have to grapple with whether Obama and Ayers ran it.

Obama served on the foundation's volunteer board from its inception in 1995 through its dissolution in 2001, and was chair for the first four years. So an argument can be made that he ran it, though an executive director handled day-to-day operations.

Ayers, who received his doctorate in education from Columbia University in 1987 and is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was active in getting the foundation up and running. He and two other activists led the effort to secure the grant from Annenberg, and he worked without pay in the early months of 1995, prior to the board's hiring of an executive director, to help the foundation get incorporated and formulate its bylaws, said Ken Rolling, who was the foundation's only executive director. Ayers went on to become a member of the "collaborative," an advisory group that advised the board of directors and the staff.

However, Ayers "was never on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge," and he "never made a decision programmatically or had a vote," Rolling said.

"He (Ayers) was at board meetings — which, by the way, were open — as a guest," Rolling said. "That is not anything near Bill Ayers and Barack Obama running the Chicago Annenberg Challenge."

Now, was the foundation radical?

The McCain campaign cited several pieces of evidence for that allegation, including a 1995 invitation from the foundation for applications from schools "that want to make radical changes in the way teachers teach and students learn." The campaign appears to have confused two different definitions of the word "radical." Clearly the invitation referred to "a considerable departure from the usual or traditional," rather than "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs."

The campaign also cited two projects the foundation funded, one having to do with a United Nations-themed Peace School and another that focused on African-American studies.

"That is radical in the eye of this campaign and we imagine in the eyes of most Americans," said Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for McCain. "It is a subjective thing, and there are going to be people in Berkeley and Chicago who think that is totally legitimate."

Teaching about the United Nations and African-American studies may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hardly "radical" in the same way Ayers' Vietnam-era activities were. Moreover, most of the projects the foundation funded (more on that below) were not remotely controversial.

The McCain campaign also cited an opinion piece by conservative commentator Stanley Kurtz in the Sept. 23, 2008, Wall Street Journal as evidence of the foundation's radicalism. Kurtz wrote that Ayers was the "guiding spirit" of the foundation, and it "translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice."

But Ayers' views on education, though certainly reform-oriented and left-of-center, are not considered anywhere near as radical as his Vietnam-era views on war. And even if they were, there was a long list of individuals involved with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge whose positions provided them far more authority over its direction than Ayers' advisory role gave him.

Let's look at a few, starting with the funder. Annenberg was a lifelong Republican and former ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Richard Nixon. His widow, Leonore, has endorsed McCain. Kurtz might just as plausibly have accused Obama and the foundation of "translating Annenberg's conservatism into practice."

Among the other board members who served with Obama were: Stanley Ikenberry, former president of the University of Illinois; Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University and assistant secretary of labor in the Nixon administration; Scott Smith, then publisher of the Chicago Tribune; venture capitalist Edward Bottum; John McCarter, president of the Field Museum; Patricia Albjerg Graham, former dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Journalism, and a host of other mainstream folks.

"The whole idea of it being radical when it was this tie of blue-chip, white-collar, CEOs and civic leaders is just ridiculous," said the foundation's former development director, Marianne Philbin.

The foundation gave money to groups of public schools – usually three to 10 – who partnered with some sort of outside organization to improve their students' achievement.

In his opinion piece, Kurtz puts a sinister spin on this: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with 'external partners,' which actually got the money...CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN)."

Rollings said the foundation tried to fund the schools directly, but doing so proved to be a "bureaucratic nightmare." But any external group that received money had to have created a program in partnership with a network of public schools.

And though ACORN is considered a liberal organization, the vast majority of the foundation's external partners were not remotely controversial. Here are a few examples: the Chicago Symphony, the University of Chicago, Loyola University, Northwestern University, the Chicago Children's Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association.

Had Kurtz chosen to accuse Obama of carrying water for the conservative Annenberg, he might have written: "CAC disbursed money to various business-friendly entities, such as the Museum of Science and Industry and the Commercial Club of Chicago."

See how easy it is?

The programs the foundation funded were designed to allow individuals from the "external partners" – whether the musicians in the symphony or the business leaders in the commercial club – to help improve student achievement. They were along the lines of mentoring by artists, literacy instruction, professional development for teachers and administrators, and training for parents in everything from computer skills to helping their children with homework to advocating for their children at school.

This last activity – something suburban parents practice with zeal – is also suspect in Kurtz's view: "CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents 'organized' by community groups might be viewed by school principals 'as a political threat.'" That is typical of Kurtz's essay – relatively innocuous facts cast in the worst possible light. That's appropriate for an opinion piece, perhaps, but hardly grounds for a purportedly factual political ad accusing the group of radicalism.

We could go on and on with evidence that the Chicago Annenberg Challenger was a rather vanilla charitable group. For example, under the deal with Annenberg every dollar from him had to be matched by two from elsewhere. The co-funders were a host of respected, mainstream institutions, such as the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Chicago Public Schools.

In short, this was a mainstream foundation funded by a mainstream, Republican business leader and led by an overwhelmingly mainstream, civic-minded group of individuals. Ayers' involvement in its inception and on an advisory committee do not make it radical – nor does the funding of programs involving the United Nations and African-American studies.

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism. That's Pants on Fire wrong.

I hope that clears some of this mess up, it probably won't since no Republicans read my blog.

OMG!!!! McCain's a terrorist!!!!

"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier ... It's ridiculous," Republican Rep. Diana Nelson said. "There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly."

This is a quote from former Illinois State Representative Diana Nelson during an interview with NPR. Who is it referring to? Why, William Ayers, the much maligned passing acquantance of Senator Obama! They served together on an education board for the city of Chicago. They were in the same room a grand total of six times. Six times? Not a lot of elbow rubbing to be quantified as "pallin' around with terrorists".

Well, surely this Chicago cabal of terrorists was funded by Al-Queda or something right? Not quite, funding and sponsorship came from the Annenberg Foundation. Yes, THE Annenberg Foundation, who's President and Chairman, Leonore Annenberg, was Chief of Protocol in the Reagan Presidency. Coincedentally, the McCain campaign released a list with her at the lofty position of second out of 100 former ambassadors to endorse the GOP candidate. Perhaps we should talk about McCain and his ties to a terrorist organization? Perhaps not. I suggest we use this information to cease the seemingly never ending attempts to assasinate the character of the Democratic Candidate, then move on to fixing this country.

A break from my Metaphysics homework:

An interesting "what if?" scenario (well, interesting to me):

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if Obama were the candidate who was unfaithful and left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Obama were a member of the Keating-5?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe Obama would be where he is now?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Which team would you hire?
With America facing historic debt, 2 wars, stumbling health care, a weakened dollar, all-time high prison population, mortgage crises, bank foreclosures, etc.

Educational Background:
Obama:
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude
vs.
McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

YOU DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!

I see an eerie resemblance:


You with me?

Moment of Zen

Is it just me or does McCain sound like The Penguin? Old Burgess Meridith's Penguin, not Danny Devito, just to clarify.

Ding dong the bill is dead

The House of Representatives has defeated the bailout package 228-205. Apparently all that welfare reform they wanted for years jumped up and bit them. Too bad we never got to see if McCain was going to actually make it in to vote.

Funny stuff from the Colbert green screen challenge

Ok, just watched the debate...

I've gotta give it to Obama, despite the fact that neither was overly impressive. Barack looked confident, collected, and unflappable. John McCain looked angry and bitter most of the night, and please tell me I'm not the only one who noticed that McCain never seemed to look Obama in the eye all night.

When Obama said "Can we move on Jim?" while McCain was raving about offshore drilling and Lehrer actually moved to the next question is when I realized Obama had won this debate.

"John, you act like the war started in 2007."


Ah, following McCain's prudence lecture:


Overall, a draw is still a win for Obama.

Hilarious

I love that this election has managed to make Letterman relevant again.

This is our "best and only choice" for Commander in Chief?

Come on! Who over the age of twelve doesn't know where Spain is? I can completely understand a normal person not knowing who Zapatero is (Spain's Prime Minister), but this is the man who says his experience with world leaders and foreign policy is what sets him apart! What a ridiculous strategem to use here. The entire country is wondering if you live in the same place that they do, and you dodder around like an autistic grandfather (no offense intended to autistic grandfathers meant) on Spanish television. Good move Senator, I'm sure the leaders of the rest of the world rest easy on the laurels of whether or not you remember who they are when you could be napping with a finger on the button of armaggedon.

Go here for the original reporting of the latest (part 800 in a seemingly unending series) political gaffe.

The man just speaks to me...

This is ridiculous. Genius move by the Democrats in Congress for once. Appear to cave into a sham of an energy policy, when in fact, politically c**k blocking the destruction of our beaches and further destruction of the wetlands around the Gulf Coastline. Expect the GOP to continue to call this a sham because they were outsmarted for once. Kudos to you Speaker Pelosi, keep that kind of actual leadership up.

John McCain and his ethics

Reprinted from an email my Aunt Deanna sent me and an article from Snopes.com:

I was so disappointed by John Edwards when I heard he was running around on his wife while she was dealing with cancer. I liked his politics and I still do. I planned to vote for him in the primaries, but I'm glad he was out of the running by the time it was our turn to vote in California's primary so that I voted for Barack Obama instead.

The thing is, even though he was out of the race, the media made a big deal about it when we had much more important things on which to focus. Now that we're looking at the two final candidates in the running, we see Barack Obama's history being scrutinized and facts being twisted, things taken out of context... anything they can do to try to scrape up (or make up) dirt on him. The best they can do is lie about bills he has supported and pick on his noble service as a community organizer (which we actually have to thank for causing him enough frustration to go into politics where he felt like he could actually make a difference and make some much needed changes).

We've heard bits and pieces about John McCain's failed first marriage but his ...well, character flaws would be such an understatement, let's call it personality pathology... haven't really been looked at, much less put under a microscope. It is for this reason, I followed the problem up and got this from snopes after seeing the article in the British online news, The Daily Mail. Feel free to forward this email knowing it has been verified.

If the media liked Edwards' marital and character issues when he was out of the race, why aren't they lapping this up? We've already had enough ruination from a bratty, self-centered frat boy of barely above average intelligence, now people are seriously considering another source in this guy and his unbelievably poor choice for a running mate when he had such capable females in his party from which to choose (the woman who really, actually, seriously had no clue this week what the Bush Doctrine is, Palin, whose possible jab at the presidency absolutely scares the crap out of me, really does make the likes of Libby Dole [although considering gender, of nearly the same age demographic as McCain], Olympia Snowe, and Kay Baily Hutchison look stellar).

It's kind of sad to see the sacrifice of incarceration McCain (unintentionally) made in Vietnam tainted and marginalized as it is being used as his excuse for any wrongdoing since. I'm really sick and tired of McCain getting a free pass on everything while Obama is attacked with lies and contorted misrepresentations.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Verified on snopes: Article recounts details of Senator John McCain's divorce from his first wife, Carol.

Status: True

Example: [Collected via e-mail, September 2008]

Carol McCain

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fiber by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children. But there is another Mrs. McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator's presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain's three eldest children.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam's infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news. But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969.

Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter. Today, she stands at just 5' 4" in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

"My marriage ended because John McCain didn't want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens ... it just does."

In 1979, while still married to Carol, he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage. Some of McCain's acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to 'play the field'. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans' rights, said: "I have been following John McCain's career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is, deceit."

"When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it. Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better."

"McCain is the classic opportunist. He's always reaching for attention and glory," he said. "After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history."

Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, and a former presidential candidate, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel, even by the standards of modern politics.

On 3 July 1965, 28-year-old Naval aviator John Sidney McCain III married 27-year-old Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, whom he had initially met while attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, several years earlier. John McCain adopted Carol's two sons (Douglas and Andrew) from a previous marriage, and the couple had a daughter (Sidney) together in 1966.

In July 1967, Lt. Commander John McCain was taken prisoner after his plane was shot down on a bombing mission over North Vietnam and was held as a POW for over five years. During her husband's captivity, Carol McCain was involved in a near-fatal automobile accident that left her with permanent injuries, a circumstance that posed some difficult adjustments for the couple after they were finally reunited in March 1973:

One fact was especially difficult to deal with [after McCain's return to the U.S.]: Carol's physical condition. At Christmastime in 1969, while McCain was imprisoned in Vietnam, Carol was almost killed in a car crash. "Carol had taken the kids to her parents' house for the holidays," McCain later wrote. "After dinner on Christmas Eve, she drove to our friends, the Bookbinders, to exchange gifts. It had begun to snow by the time she started back to her parents, and the roads were icy. She skidded off the road, smashed into a telephone pole, and was thrown from the car. The police found her some time later in shock, both legs fractured in several places, her arm and pelvis broken, and bleeding internally.

"Several days passed before she was out of immediate danger. It would be six months and several operations before she was released from the hospital. Over the next two years, she would undergo many more operations to repair her injured legs. By the time the doctors were finished, she would be four inches shorter than she was before the accident. After a year of intense physical therapy, she was able to walk with the aid of crutches." Carol's new appearance was one of the more shocking details McCain had to deal with during his period of adjustment; quite simply, Carol was a different person from the one she was when he left.

By the end of the 1970s, the McCains' marriage was strained to the breaking point, even if it was not evident to those who knew them:

Even though friends saw a rosy picture when they looked at John and Carol McCain's marriage from outside, privately the couple was having difficulty. After years in captivity, McCain was not totally able to return to the life he had led with Carol before he went to Vietnam. As the marriage became rocky, McCain was unfaithful to Carol, or perhaps the marriage became rocky because McCain was unfaithful. Later, there would even be reports that he had, as the Boston Globe put it, "affairs with subordinate female personnel." The McCains had tried to achieve some semblance of a normal life after McCain's return home and, to a great extent, they had accomplished this, but the problems continued nonetheless. Years later, Carol would tell a reporter the main trouble was not complicated: McCain may have been 40, but he was acting like he was 25.

In 1979, then 42-year-old John McCain first met Cindy Lou Hensley, a 25-year-old school teacher who was also the daughter (and heir) of James Hensley, the founder of one of the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorships in the United States; the two began dating and married the following year. Sources differ as to the timing of McCain's separation from his first wife, Carol, and the beginning of his relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Cindy Hensley; whatever the circumstances, McCain remarried five weeks after divorcing his first wife:

McCain has made several statements about how he divorced Carol and married Hensley that conflict with the public record.

In his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For," McCain wrote that he had separated from Carol before he began dating Hensley.

"I spent as much time with Cindy in Washington and Arizona as our jobs would allow," McCain wrote. "I was separated from Carol, but our divorce would not become final until February of 1980."

An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had "cohabited" until Jan. 7 of that year or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.

Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.

Updated: 10 September 2008

Sources:

Alexander, Paul. Man of the People: The Life of John McCain
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

Churcher, Sharon. "The Wife U.S. Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind."
The Mail on Sunday 8 June 2008.

McCain, John S. with Mark Salter. Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir
New York: Random House, 2002.

Serrano, Richard A. and Ralph Vartabedian. "McCain's Broken Marriage and Fractured Reagan Friendship."
Los Angeles Times 11 July 2008.

Timberg, Robert. John McCain: An American Odyssey
New York: Fireside Press, 1999.

"McCain May Have Conflict Brewing."
Los Angeles Times 22 June 2008.

I do so hope my Republican friends actually read this...

Here's a crude graphic of the tax plans side by side. I don't understand where everyone says Obama is going to raise my taxes like McCain keeps telling me? Am I stupid? Can I not read a simple bar chart? If so, I should get my money back from that damn math professor at school!