2008 USP(G)ET pt. II: counting the days to 2012 primary thread 1

guys i know black frames with "YouTube" logo in bottom right corner are mysterious & intriguing but i am not going to click on all of them, context plz?

apols

my top one is some weird AI-bot riff on the theme of obama as antichrist which is quite creepy

second one is a humorous sample of a news presenter talking mccain's 'religious nut eruption'

deej's video is sarah palin being interviewed about her take on the bush doctrine

re: "Not at Her Best" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

And another e-mail: "Not at her best, huh? Let's see Obama, Biden or McCain do as well in a no subjects barred interview after Gibson had a week to prep. Did you see Obama get his head handed to him on a plate by O'Reilly? No comparison."

no comparison in the sense that one event is real, and the other, utterly fictitious?

(NB I only watched the first night of the Obama/O'Reilly thing)

Yeah, he came off condescending and asked questions of her no one ever thinks to ask The One, like how many countries he’d visited before becoming a senator. The exchanges were chopped to a fine mince too on the editing machine, which is why I didn’t include the bit where he asked her what insight Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives her into their actions and she said, “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” Did she really give a non-answer that goofy or did they just smear her by editing it that way? I would have given them the benefit of the doubt earlier but not after botching the prayer quote.

That said, it’s pretty clear she doesn’t know what he means by the Bush Doctrine and can’t answer the Pakistan question in anything but platitudes about stopping Islamic extremism. Even the gimme about the 9/11 hijackers’ motivations comes out garbled: She’s trying to make the basic neocon point that terrorism is a problem caused by political repression and solved by democracy, but it sounds as if she’s trying to patch it together from mental index cards, which … may in fact be what she was doing. Or maybe she was just nervous. Or thrown by Gibson’s demeanor. Not good, whichever it is, but 99% of the people who love her won’t care and the 1% who do can probably be brought around with a good interview tomorrow and, especially, a good debate with Biden. Now, tell me how brilliant she was and how wrong I am.

i love the idea that gibson is the leftwing equivalent of o'reilly

hard-hitting, buffalo-style charlie gibson journalism

the obama/o reilly interviews were fascinating

it was great to see him spar with someone, and he was otm and confident most of the time

the olbermann interview was a fukin snooze

I've grown to hate Olbermann in a big way.

i like olbermann in theory but generally speaking, the obviously partisan news personalities all get on my fucking nerves, it makes me long for some probably mythical day in the past when people just reported the fucking news without giving their opinions all the time.

I would settle for relatively partisan, but mostly content-based grousing, like "Senator Whoever said blah blah blah. This reporter would point out that no independent group has confirmed that statistic, and that Congresswoman X has never been a member of the group in question - nor would it be illegal if she had. Thank you, and here's Steve with the weather." The most vexatious thing about political news coverage - and this is obviously not an original thought on my part - is the emphasis on punditry and analysis that only goes as far as whether a given statement will help/hurt anybody, not whether it's actually true, which is what you'd kind of hope for the press to work on.

Confirmed: Obama appearance on SNL this Saturday

Those O'Reilly interviews were pretty brilliant, I thought.

all the fuss over the Gibson interview! She was platitudinous and screechy, but her remark about Russia has been wildly overplayed: if Georgia joins NATO, and it's attacked, then NATO will respond (I didn't think Obama was that great with O'RLY). Most vice presidents are coached by their teams; the bar is set too low for them to show their mettle unless their running mate is lucky enough to die in office.

Maybe ABC will air the rest tomorrow, in which he'll concentrate on issues that really tell us about Palin: her term as governor.

"term"

obama did as well as anyone can w/ that kind of horseshit interviewing. no gaffes, which was basically the opposite of what oreilly was aiming for

I thought Obama pretty much won O'Reilly over. By the end he was deferring to him - calling certain anti-Obama positions bullshit, and flirting about playing basketball with him. He's gonna vote for Obama, I think.

but he's always liked Obama! He's taken gingerly steps around him since January.

yeah all week he's been saying how much he "respects" him since he realized that he was a "driven, determined" person, which he said he could only learn after meeting him face-to-face

i think he's gonna vote for him too

obama did as well as anyone can w/ that kind of horseshit interviewing

he did do well but more to the point was that it was great to see him debate someone without the pressures of being "graded" by clueless talking heads or making sure he doesn't offend another candidate or something

these have been some of o reilly's highest rated shows ever, and not only did he end up deferring to barack in the end but barack proved that he knew his shit (confidently) and he proved it without the chance of being verbose (or "eloquent" or whatever he gets slammed for being) (in that regard o reilly being an argumentative dick turned out to be an unintended positive for barack)

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/_palin_family_shockers_what_sarahs_really_hiding/celebrity/65407

you name your kid "track" of course he's going to shoot up

"Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

wtg charlie gibson

Could just ONE fucking TV pundit not equivocate or add caveats for these two dipshits and pretend they're talking about Clinton getting his dick sucked?

Virginia registration shenanigans:

http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/09/while-the-media-sleeps-001128.php

it isn't just Virginia

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/08/voter-suppression-industry-gea.php

That reminds me, I meant to link to this great NY Review of Books article talking about the concerted efforts to exclude undesirable voters and their disproportionate racial impact:

Obama: The Price of Being Black

It also contains some scary figures about the so-called "Bradley effect".

The Obama campaign would do well to print signs to post prominently in all its offices: ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT!

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/persistent-myth-of-bradley-effect.html

that said i think the 'pollsters underrepresent people with cell phones' thing is just as much of a myth

What's the evidence?

Let's hope that Silver is right and the Bradley effect is a relic of the '80s and '90s. The other stuff about voter suppression is still pretty outrageous though.

i have none, it just seems 1. screamingly obvious, so pollsters would pick up on and adjust for it, and 2. i remember ppl saying it in 2004 and it turned out to be negligible compared to gwb's ground game.

New Obama ad attacking McCain for being email illiterate and a relic of the '80s:

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2008/09/obama-on-the-attack.html

Pros:
- Focuses on McCain rather than Palin
- Not overly partisan, crafted to appeal to independents

Cons:
- Might turn off some older voters (though they overwhelmingly support McCain anyway)

this is probably a fake ad that will run like twice, in one county - therefore oldies who don't use the internet will never see it

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/09/fact-check-pali.html

“Have you ever met a foreign head of state?” Gibson asked Palin Thursday.

“I have not,” Palin said, “and I think if you go back in history and if you ask that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I just gave you.”

However Palin, who obtained her first passport two years ago, would in fact be the first vice president in 32 years who hadn’t met a foreign head of state, if she were elected.

Palin is a throwback to an earlier, simpler age.

I cannot (this morning) fill in the zing that should come next.

Who had never met a foreign head of state, Dole or Mondale?

lolz @ McCain "I'm divorced from the day-to-day struggles" of Americans comment

Who had never met a foreign head of state, Dole or Mondale?

dunno, but if i had to guess, i'd say it's Dole, because 1) i'd guess that the info came from the campaign and that they're more wont to compare her to (and to have gotten the info from) Dole than Mondale, 2) Mondale had begun his Senate service a few years earlier than Dole, 3) Kansas is more insular than Minnesota, and 4) Dole is more hawkish than Mondale

Who had never met a foreign head of state, Dole or Mondale?

I think Rockefeller. Dole was never VP.

I find it hard to believe Rockefeller would never have met a head of state.

Yeah, I know, but the link points out that Mondale had met with foreign leaders in his 16 years in the Senate prior to becoming VP.

yeah, we all could have read the article. an Ass't Sec'y of State probably doesn't meet with foreign heads of State.