2008 Primaries Thread 3: The Rejecting and Denouncening

Does anybody know the stats for national surveys? I've completely & deliberately forgotten/destroyed my probability knowledge "learned" from a single stupid undergrad class.

What's the sampling amount required for an accuracy of like a point or two plus/minus for 100M+ voters?

are you fucking abysmally stupid idiots really still convinced mccain has any chance of winning the election?

-- El Tomboto, Friday, March 21, 2008 6:55 AM

now i want mccain to win so that a) the gop will be driven into the ground for a generation or so and b) i can repost this

Who do we suppose will be the first to begin calling out the media for giving McCain an easy ride? Clinton? Obama? I mean, they're pushing him a little bit over this Al Qaeda/Shiite mix-up, but what about the Airbus kerfuffle?

Kerfuffle is a fun word. I wish more people would use it. I only associate with "Little Britain" sketches, of course, but still...

yes, really official response to the 'clinton and rev. wright once hung out' thing in the times: Asked for a response tonight through email, Howard Wolfson, a top aide to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote, “Urgent indeed — a picture — oooooooo!”.

I genuinely believe that the democratic party is being set up to look like a ship of fools in this race. I'm sorry if that sounds dickish. I genuinely think both candidates would make excellent presidents. In 2012. I think the best thing we can do for the long game, for the country, is to let a Republican take the fall for Bush's mess. I think whoever we elect is going to have a good old Hoover/Carter time, and I have no interest whatsoever in allowing any Democrat to wear that stock. I think the Republican party is smarter than all of you put together, and I think McCain won the GOP nomination because they hate him and know he will lose. Again, I'm sorry if that makes me sound like a paranoid asshole.

i also visited the mccain site the other day (out of a mix of curiosity and work-avoidance), and I can frustratingly see how his tidy and impossibly slim personal iraq timeline (ie. 'calls for more troops on day one, continues calling for more troops every five minutes from then until the surge, gets the troop increase he's always wanted, america starts winning the war') might become more compelling to people as he starts hammering it in (any day now).

It does make you sound like a paranoid asshole. xp

karl rove, r.i.p.

The kerfuffle mentioned above:

McCain advisers lobbied in tanker deal that McCain tried to referee

By JIM KUHNHENN and MATTHEW DALY , Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Top current advisers to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign last year lobbied for a European plane maker that beat Boeing to a $35 billion Air Force tanker contract, taking sides in a bidding fight that McCain has tried to referee for more than five years.

Two of the advisers gave up their lobbying work when they joined McCain's campaign. A third, former Texas Rep. Tom Loeffler, lobbied for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. while serving as McCain's national finance chairman.

EADS is the parent company of Airbus, which teamed up with U.S.-based Northrop Grumman Corp. to win the lucrative aerial refueling contract on Feb. 29. Boeing Co. Chairman and CEO Jim McNerney said in a statement Monday that the Chicago-based aerospace company "found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal."

McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, has been a key figure in the Pentagon's yearslong attempt to complete a deal on the tanker. McCain helped block an earlier tanker contract with Boeing and prodded the Pentagon in 2006 to develop bidding procedures that did not exclude Airbus.

EADS retained Ogilvy Government Relations and The Loeffler Group to lobby for the tanker deal last year, months after McCain sent two letters urging the Defense Department to make sure the bidding proposals guaranteed competition.

"They never lobbied him related to the issues, and the letters went out before they were contracted" by EADS, McCain campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said Monday.

According to lobbying records filed with the Senate, Loeffler Group lobbyists on the project included Loeffler and Susan Nelson, who left the firm and is now the campaign's finance director. Ogilvy lobbyist John Green, who was assigned the EADS work, recently took a leave of absence to volunteer for McCain as the campaign's congressional liaison.

"The aesthetics are not good, especially since he is an advocate of reform and transparency," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the aerospace consulting firm Teal Group. "Boeing advocates are going to use this as ammunition."

McCain, a longtime critic of influence peddling and special interest politics, has come under increased scrutiny as a presidential candidate, particularly because he has surrounded himself with advisers who are veteran Washington lobbyists. He has defended his inner circle and has emphatically denied reports last month in The New York Times and The Washington Post that suggested he helped the client of a lobbyist friend nine years ago.

He has also cast himself as a neutral watchdog in the Air Force tanker contract, one of the largest in decades.

"All I asked for in this situation was a fair competition," he told reporters Monday at Lambert Field in St. Louis, home of a Boeing fighter jet plant.

On Friday, he defended his aggressive oversight: "I never weighed in for or against anybody that competed for the contract. All I asked for was a fair process. And the facts are that I never showed any bias in any way against anybody — except for the taxpayer."

Last week, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the EADS-Northrop Gruman plane was "clearly a better performer" than the one proposed by Boeing.

It is unclear what EADS hired the lobbyists to do. Loeffler and Airbus officials did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages left late Monday.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment Monday on the links between McCain and lobbying efforts on behalf of EADS.

But Boeing supporters already have begun to accuse McCain of damaging Boeing's chances by inserting himself into the tanker deal.

One of them, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said the field was "tilted to Airbus" because the Pentagon did not weigh European subsidies for Airbus in its deliberations — a decision he blamed on McCain. Everett, Wash., is where Boeing would perform much of the tanker work, and Dicks is a senior member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

In December 2006, just weeks before the Air Force was set to release its formal request for proposals, McCain wrote a letter to the incoming defense secretary, Robert Gates, warning that he was "troubled" by the Air Force's draft request for bids.

The United States had filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization alleging that Airbus unfairly benefits from European subsidies. Airbus in turn argued that Boeing also receives government support, mostly as tax breaks.

Under the Air Force proposal, bidders would have been required to explain how financial penalties or other sanctions stemming from the subsidy dispute might affect their ability to execute the contract. The request was widely viewed as hurting the EADS-Northrop Grumman bid.

The proposed bid request "may risk eliminating competition before bids are submitted," McCain wrote in a Dec. 1, 2006, letter to Gates. The Air Force changed the criteria four days later.

Dicks said the removal of the subsidy language was a "game-changer" that favored EADS over Boeing.

"The only reason that they could even bid a low price is because they received a subsidy," Dicks said last week. "And Senator McCain jumped into this and said that (the Air Force) could not look at the subsidy issue — which I think is a big mistake, especially when the U.S. trade representative is bringing a case in the (World Trade Organization) on this very issue."

EADS' interest in the tanker deal is evident in the political contributions of its employees. From 2004 to 2006, donations by its employees jumped from $42,500 to $141,931, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. So far this election cycle, company employees have donated $120,350. Of that, McCain's presidential campaign has received $14,000, the most of any other member of Congress this election cycle.

McCain prides himself in the role he played blocking an earlier version of the tanker deal that gave the contract to Boeing. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and of an Armed Services subcommittee, McCain led an investigation that eventually helped kill that contract in 2004. A former Air Force official and a top Boeing executive both served time in prison, and the scandal led to the departure of Boeing's chief executive and several top Air Force officials.

"I intervened in a process that was clearly corrupt," McCain said Friday. "That's why people went to jail."

While McCain has praised Boeing for fixing its practices, his campaign said the experience prompted him to demand "a full, fair and open competition." His letters — one to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England in September 2006 and the other to Gates — were sent with that spirit in mind, Hazelbaker said Monday.

Once the rules were in place, Hazelbaker said, bidders submitted proposals, the Air Force reviewed them and the contract was awarded.

"That is a process that McCain, appropriately, had absolutely no role in," she said.

re: tombot - i think i had enough of this 'let's let them clean up their own mess' hands-off rhetoric last time around. sure, the potential democrat-in-chief is going to have an almost guaranteed tough and miserable time for maybe most of the first term, maybe more, but how much more failure and fallout do people want before, erm, change?

plus, that argument implies that at some point, the mess will actually be cleaned, as opposed to made much messier (bloodier/more expensive).

if you believe in roosevelt, elect roosevelt. but remember reagan.

you think a democrat's gonna have an easier time cleaning up the aftermath of an iranian invasion?
xp

which army are we going to invade iran with?

the french foreign legion?

never mind

tom you're being really arch and condescending

If Cheney has the codes, the nuclear one.

also all this prognosticating crap is just that, crap. i think it's fallacious to assume that the future will follow, in fully predictable outline, one past event from 25+ years ago. the dangers of a mccain presidency would seem real enough not to wager on some smart-aleck cynical prediction.

I AM a paranoid-american, and it's to the point where i just want them out. I put very little faith in any feedback control mechanism that supposed to operate for more than a term or even a year. The system is too fucked at present for such control mechanisms to work, so i'll take a Democrat in office to at least begin shifting thru all the bullshit, to reroute the rivers and clean out the stables and civil service(if need be, literally, with a fire hose).

We're in for some dire fucking times, and I'd much prefer we get an FDR(or anything within light years of approaching him) in place than just keep another Hoover douche in power for four years just to drive the point home to an short-memoried and easily demagogued populace. Somebody who we won't feel horrible about telling, "Look, dude*, here's the keys and a wrench. Get to work on fixing this shit."

*"dude" used in gender-neutral sense here, but who are we fucking kidding

(windows xp)

tom you can't see enough black voters (and young voters let's pretend lol) going 'o go fuck yrself' to cost the dems if hill steals the nod or enough white/older/maybe catholic or jewish voters going 'o i'm not sure' if obama gets the nod (regardless of whether the wright flap had happened) to tilt a few states mccain's way? i mean (and maybe this is just being in a one party state) i can ALWAYS picture the gop winning. shit i could see them fuxxors taking the house back this fall under the right circumstances.

okay, that post more or less made sense.

oops. referring to mine own rantings

amateurist I'm just really tired of everybody following the media storyline word for fucking word and not a god damned one of you thinking for yourselves for even a fucking minute, much less actually considering a larger picture, forget history, just, you know, think for a fucking minute besides "I like obama! people who don't like obama are WRONG!" go outside, put on a pencil skirt and some pom-poms if that's how you feel. I've never seen so much insipid repetition and boring self-righteousness as on these threads.

Then again, I rarely bother to read ILM.

...

Maybe I should shut up with my high-mindedness and just blithely encourage you all to stay over there.

cynical and paranoid people otm

fuck it

don't you mean the wright circumstances?
many xposts

lol i almost did that but the first version of that post had some custos action in it so i was all 'do not trust yr impulses at this moment'.

I think folks will be sullen a la 2004 if Obama loses the general due to distortions and smears, but if he somehow has the nomination wrested...I can only imagine.

Back to the news. Some Latino help for Obama in the form of a Bill Richardson endorsement:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gIWF-cWWTIzLwKoOVfi50PnqNM0wD8VHLSSO0

yeah, i don' think it'll be chicago 68 like wilder was saying if only cuz even now i can't picture ppl caring enough. shortsighted/smallminded but weirdly the thing i dread most is obama losing ge and the party going 'o well see this doesn't work and we need to go back to caution and calculation' and the whole 90s dlc/clinton model or mediocre boring careerists like the gephardt/daschle/kerry model being the default position regardless of its losing streak.

lol richardson must've decided 'no way obama loses the nod - time to buy my veepstakes ticket!'. a good sign i guess.

put on a pencil skirt and some pom-poms

i dont think you meant this. pencil skirts are usually pretty close-fitting and difficult to move around in.

I didn't know he was going to be in town.

Also, it's kinda disconcerting to see the contraction spellt like "Ore," correct tho that may be.

http://harpmagazine.com/articles/detail.cfm?article_id=6709

Except for the AIDS controversy he'll have to explain, I'm all for this!

i barely keep up with this thread anymore - did we talk yet about Bill Clinton's saying that Obama 'mugged' him?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18bill.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.davidstuff.com/opinion/los-clinton.jpg

I was mugged by that man... Mr. Obama

I think he's talking about the press.

he's using the word 'mugging' in the same sentence as 'Obama' and 'Jackson', dumbass

"Mr. Hussein Obama had a smoking gun, that took the form of a mushroom cloud."

I apologize for the mugging of my husband

don't you mean the wright circumstances?
many xposts

-- gershy, Friday, March 21, 2008 7:41 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

valiant

I guess it's a good sign tho - we know the Clintons aren't going to hold back in the general. I mean Barack Obama is just too nice to play up McCain's age and infidelity - the people for that job are Hillary and Bill.

also, they're obviously the people to go after him for having a vitriolic temper

which is why the clintons should take the back seat and attack mccain on obama's behalf during the GE, allowing obama to keep his hands clean and letting the clintons do what they do best

Symmetry required gabbneb to start this.

I be freakin people out with my sarcasm

You know what? You need to hear the whole Wright sermon instead of the bits that got cut out for anti-Obama purposes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ

Wolf concluding 'no concession'. It's not the feeling I got from that speech.

man, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz needs to lay off the bronzer

18 million out of 200 million voters? WOOT.

She so knows she's nowhere near that ticket. Cabinet or bust!

Keith Oberdouche with dark intimations of the communications-shielded BARUCH BUNKER.

The Southeast Asian guy standing behind her was the best. Does anyone have a screen cap of that?

he was v v excited about her website

Last one:
http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/080603DailyUpdateGraph1_ytrdfcg.gif

Russert says H advisor confirms that she wants the VP slot.

Check it owwwwwwt:

I'm about to take the stage in St. Paul and announce that we have won the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

It's been a long journey, and we should all pause to thank Hillary Clinton, who made history in this campaign. Our party and our country are better off because of her.

I want to make sure you understand what's ahead of us. Earlier tonight, John McCain outlined a vision of America that's very different from ours -- a vision that continues the disastrous policies of George W. Bush.

But this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past and bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

It's going to take hard work, but thanks to you and millions of other donors and volunteers, no one has ever been more prepared for such a challenge.

Thank you for everything you've done to get us here. Let's keep making history.

Barack

Dude is like a BLOGGER. What does his Twitter say?

where did you get that suzy?

sorry, it really *was* on his blog, ha!

dKos liveblog from St. Paul.

My mom: I still don't know what she's up to.

http://www.cnn.com/live/
speech is broadcast here

Obama: Still don't you realize. The next time we see sky, it'll be over another town, the next time we take a test, it'll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the bestest stuff for us. But right now, they've gotta do what's right for them, cause it's their time. It's there time up there. Down here, it's our time. It's our time down here. That's all over the moment we ride up Troy's bucket.

<inhaler hit>

fuckin love that movie

lock?

OBAMA!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

brainwasher otm