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

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080927_Palin_grabs_a_seat_at_the_bar.html

While the crowd inside was friendly, hundreds of people lined the street outside in protest with signs that read things like "Palin is Santorum With Lipstick."

a) GROSS
b) time to update santorum.jpg with lipstick?

"Palin is Santorum With Lipstick."

I think we've found the title of the next general election thread.

also, philadelphia, grow up and learn how to name your bars. "irish pub"???

election.twitter.com has been discovered by McCainites who are trying to use it like a chatroom.

plz to post entertaining examples

Jesus Taibbi's rants are tiresome.

Um, that sb "Jesus, Taibbi's."

He wants to be Hunter, but his writing is too shakey.

TIME is the putrid KOS of magazines 21 minutes ago from Election 2008

hinnis I am so disappointed I didn't get to see Obama live. I've never seen a live racist in person. 2 minutes ago

MonkPDX Sara Silverman<------"Dykes for Obama" 2008 2 minutes ago

Sara Silverman<------"Dykes for Obama" 2008

???

Christ that twitter election thing is the heat death of the universe in real time

politicalticker Palin takes questions during cheesesteak run http://tinyurl.com/4nalzt about 1 hour ago from Twitter Tools

http://twitter.com/TOCB
http://twitter.com/MonkPDX

http://twitter.com/notrolls <-- loool

if you watch the twitter election scroll while listening to ariel pink you see the evil anti-God smiling from his fiery heaven

Yeah, all those pro-McCain twitter profiles created in the last 36 hours with no user pic and 100+ updates. Who do they think they're fooling?

Quick question, McCain said that North Koreans are 3 inches smaller than South Koreans during the debate. Was he saying short people are inherently evil?

@JBax52 dude Obama Called John McCain Tim and JIm he couldnt keep his name stright and didnt adress him as Sent Mcacin the correct way 1 minute ago from web in reply to JBax52

^ apparently the first application of twitter for mainstream use will be making talk radio callers sound like geniuses

Obama doesn't understand the real problems facing the middle class in America... obama is too hollywood.. $28,500 a plate?? less than 5 seconds ago from Election 2008

Obama is going after people who are uneducated an easily fooled by the media 10 minutes ago from Election 2008

Favorite reply to USA_Patriot
community organizer?? LoL 11 minutes ago from Election 2008

Favorite reply to USA_Patriot
community organizer?? LoL 11 minutes ago from Election 2008

Favorite reply to USA_Patriot
If Hillary Clinton wants to win tin 2012, it would be best if Obama loses this election 11 minutes ago from Election 2008

i wanna know why he said north koreans are smaller... seriously why

web 2.0 will help us analyze the debate!!!!!

Common Words in Sen. McCain's Responses
afghanistan (11) against (13) american (14) control (12) country (12) defeat (11) general (12) going (19) government (17) iraq (17) lot (17) nuclear (11) people (22) president (21) russian (14) senate (16) senator obama (45) spending (28) strategy (17) tax (17) think (17) troops (11) understand (12) united states (27) work (15)

Common Words in Sen. Obama's Responses
afghanistan (19) billion (22) country (14) deal (15) done (14) economy (13) energy (13) going (55) important (18) iran (17) iraq (16) john (25) nuclear (17) president (25) problem (13) senator mccain (35) sure (24) talk (15) tax (27) think (40) troops (18) united states (13) war (14) work (16) years (21)

n koreans lack nutrition, obv.

Because of the brutal regime in North Korea. Lots of poverty and malnutrition.

whats their height have to do with anything

obvious troll is obvious

yes. and john mccain opposes that brutal regime, and he thinks if north korean kids can get some good old waffles and syrup for breakfast instead of their smelly gook food then maybe they will grow up taller

or they could just wear lifts, like mccain does

His comment definitely came off as an insult to North Koreans because it was so out of place in the rest of his speech.

" What Senator Obama doesn't seem to understand that if without precondition you sit down across the table from someone who has called Israel a "stinking corpse," and wants to destroy that country and wipe it off the map, you legitimize those comments.

This is dangerous. It isn't just naive; it's dangerous. And so we just have a fundamental difference of opinion.

As far as North Korea is concerned, our secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to North Korea. By the way, North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag.

We don't know what the status of the dear leader's health is today, but we know this, that the North Koreans have broken every agreement that they've entered into."

this stray comment was so out of the ballpark.. not to mention, mccain smiled after saying it and obama said something like "wtf" I don't remember. also, why is he referring to the leader of north korea as the "dear leader?"

That's what they call Kim Jong Il in NK.

no, it's because McCain and Kim Jong Il are bff

ya it was a slip

Kim Jong-il (also written as Kim Jong Il) (born 16 February 1941, Vyatskoye, Soviet Union; official biographies state 16 February 1942, Baekdu Mountain, Japanese Korea) is the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He is the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, and General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea (the ruling party since 1948). He succeeded his father Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea, who died in 1994, and commands the fifth largest standing army in the world. North Korea officially refers to him as the "Great Leader" or "Dear Leader".

oh

watching the opening snl sketch. Tina fey really does have that accent down, doesn't she?

It will be taken down soon, but for now:

i think the original interview was unsatirizable

It gets better & better! - While segments of this belief system have been a part of Pentecostalism and charismatic beliefs for decades, the excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000. The beliefs and manifestations of the movement include the use of 'strategic level spiritual warfare' to expel territorial demons from American and world cities.

from Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave: New Video Documentary

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/sarah-palins-churches-and_b_124611.html

yeah the original interview > than the SNL version.

Today's Frank Rich:
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September 28, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere

By FRANK RICH
WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.

For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.

By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.

To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)

Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain. As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll. The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new polls from Fox News, Marist and CNN/Time, each with numbers closer to Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose strongholds of Alaska and Montana.

That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin. The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.

But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.

What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.

The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.) By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.

By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)

It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.

Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains, Bono, and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.

There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on the down-low.

Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”

In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience. Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.

It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”

Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”

That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David Blaine: Dive of Death.”

It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.
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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/28/us/28mccain_337.jpg

In the not too distant future.

lul

I looks like someone has made nice big a model of the OS X Aqua toolkit in order to explain computers to him.

Sen. John McCain retracted Sarah Palin's stance on Pakistan Sunday morning, after the Alaska governor appeared to back Sen. Barack Obama's support for unilateral strikes inside Pakistan against terrorists

"She would not…she understands and has stated repeatedly that we're not going to do anything except in America's national security interest," McCain told ABC's George Stephanopoulos of Palin. "In all due respect, people going around and… sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that's—that's a person's position… This is a free country, but I don't think most Americans think that that's a definitve policy statement made by Governor Palin."

BWAHAHAHA.

In all due respect, people going around and… sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that's—that's a person's position democracy, motherfucker

sometimes i yell at the teevee