Conflict of interest

The Washington Post reports that Verizon and AT&T provided cell phone towers to the McCain ranch for free, gratis, without charge.  This would seem to be a conflict of interest since McCain is on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC and the telecommunications industry.  McCain has been a tireless fighter for deregulation of the telecom business.

Gosh, how mavericky!  I get crappy cell phone reception in my apartment--will Verizon and AT&T put a tower on my porch?

Maybe not hope

Looking back on the Hope post below, I think I was being naive.  If the economy were not in the toilet, the McCain camp's smear tactics and whisper campaigning would work as well for Johnny Mac as they have for any other Republican.

Nothing like the threat of a worldwide depression to focus people's minds on the essentials.  Too bad for the POW.

Hope

This headline in The New York Times this morning gives me, for the first time in 8 years, reason to be optimistic for the future:  Poll Says Attacks Backfire on McCain. 

Apparently 16 years of unrelenting personal attacks and smears have begun to pall on at least some of us.  Seemingly, we find screaming mobs of racists and xenophobes more than a little disquieting.

The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found.

After several weeks in which the McCain campaign unleashed a series of strong political attacks on Mr. Obama, trying to tie him to a former 1960s radical, among other things, the poll found that more voters see Mr. McCain as waging a negative campaign than Mr. Obama. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking.

 

Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 percent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain.

 

The findings come as the race enters its final three weeks, with the two candidates scheduled to hold their third and last debate on Wednesday night, and as separate polls in critical swing states that could decide the election give Mr. Obama a growing edge. But wide gaps in polls have historically tended to narrow in the closing weeks of the race.

 

Voters who said their opinions of Mr. Obama had changed recently were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable as to say they had worsened. And voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.

 

The top reasons cited by those who said they thought less of Mr. McCain were his recent attacks and his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. (The vast majority said their opinions of Mr. Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee, and Mr. McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, had remained unchanged in recent weeks.) But in recent days, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin have scaled back their attacks on Mr. Obama, although Mr. McCain suggested he might aggressively take on Mr. Obama in Wednesday’s debate.

Palin as President

Neat site via Political Animal.  Move your mouse around the picture over various objects and watch the fun!  Don't forget the door.   Palin as President!!! 

Sarah Palin remixed

And you can dance to it.  From funnyordie.com via Rumproast.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Alaskan women speak out on Sarah Palin

This apparently ran on CNN, or at least has been vetted to run n CNN--I got the link through the CNN website anyway.  It's posted on ireport.com.  Quite entertaining; very thoughtful young women.

Al Franken's words of wisdom

via Betty Cracker on conservative versus liberal love of country.

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a four-year-old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow.

Dow up on foreign governments' action

But what about our government?  I haven't seen one damned thing our government is doing.  What HAS Paulson done, except yap, for the last two weeks?  

Perhaps the plan is to do nothing at all and just let this problem fester, along with all the other festering sores Bush is leaving for his successor.

Obama as Roadrunner

Andrew Sullivan notes in The Times Online that Barack Obama has, in his infinite cool and laid-back strategery, more than a passing resemblence to the roadrunner, and John McCain has more than a passing resemblence to Wiley E. Coyote.

 My favorite paragraph:

Obama? He lollops along with a calm smile and a physical fluency that is hard to mock or copy. If he were a boxer, he’d be the kind who keeps moving but hangs back. He waits for his opponents to take a swing, ducks and comes back into the game. He sticks to a game plan and rarely deviates. And he waits for his opponent to make an error. Watching his autumn fight with McCain reminds me of the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Every elaborate attempt to blow Obama up leaves his opponents with sooty faces and a trail of smoke rising from the tops of their heads. 

Sullivan points out something that hadn’t occurred to me in all my outrage at watching the Clintons behave like a pair of Arkansas racists:

Obama rarely directly attacks. He subtly baits. His most brilliant rope-a-dope of the entire campaign was against Bill Clinton in the spring. In a newspaper interview, Obama cited Ronald Reagan as the last transformational president. He didn’t mention Clinton. The former president was offended by being implicitly dissed, took the bait and unleashed a series of unwise public scoffs at the young Democrat, culminating in a dismissal of Obama as another Jesse Jackson. Suddenly, black Democrats abandoned Clinton’s wife, and the Clintons’ base collapsed. Obama merely stepped out of the way as the Clintons self-destructed. He didn’t just end their campaign; he helped to bury their reputation. 

If that’s how it went, Obama is a far smarter and more subtle politician than I gave him credit for.  And if it’s true, and if the Clintons ever figure out how they were played, they’ll be furious.  Maybe they already have, and that’s the reason for Bill Clinton’s impossibly petulant behavior since the end of the primaries.  But the Clintons have nobody but themselves to blame.  Nobody forced them to behave like a couple of bigoted yahoos – they did it of their own accord.  Obama simply allowed them to be themselves. 

Now, Sullivan says, he’s using exactly the same tactics on McCain and Palin: 

Instead of attacking him frontally, he got in his head and provoked him into error. It’s easier with McCain than with the Clintons, because McCain is more volatile and more easily provoked. And so Obama cruised through August, picking a conventional running mate and punching his foreign-policy-credentials card with trips to Iraq and Europe. McCain’s response? He put out an ad equating the son of a poor single mother who made it to become president of the Harvard Law Review, a University of Chicago professor and the first black nominee for president with . . . Paris Hilton, whose only accomplishments are being born into immense wealth and making an internet porn tape.

 

When that didn’t work, and an unfazed Obama ran a flawless convention, calmed the Clintons and delivered one of the best acceptance speeches in modern times, McCain blew himself up with the Palin pick. His one sure-fire advantage – experience – was thrown away. His real base – independent voters and the media – was first wowed and then woke up. And as Palin became a national and international joke, as her ratings plummeted and as she lost her debate to Joe Biden (quite hard to do, given Biden’s capacity for verbal diarrhoea), McCain got even crankier and more unstable.

 

Then the financial crisis hit and a desperate McCain decided to seize the moment. Again, Obama did little but stay calm.

 

McCain made a huge splash of “suspending” his campaign and rushed back to Washing-ton to talk his own party into backing the bailout. It refused, the bailout sank for a week and McCain’s campaign was just as suddenly unsuspended. He had to crawl back and agree to have the first debate as planned. Wile E Coyote blew himself up again. Meanwhile, Obama purred “beep, beep” and raced down the home stretch.

 

So last week McCain tried one more thing. He went 100% negative on his television ads, and day after day accused Obama of being someone who had a “secret”, who, in Palin’s words to overwhelmingly white crowds, “doesn’t see the world the way you and I do”, who “palled around with terrorists” and whose middle name – repeated at almost every Palin rally – was Hussein. Yes, they’re now playing the fear card: fear of the unknown, fear of black people, fear of Arab-sounding names, fear of terrorism, fear of Islam.

 

Obama has not been a saint. He resurrected the long-buried Keating Five scandal that tainted McCain in the 1980s. He has used language that resonates with the notion that McCain is senile: “erratic”, “uncertain”. He has played a little class warfare. But nothing too dramatic, nothing too angry, nothing too risky. The polling around the country is now more emphatically Democratic than ever before. Obama is now ahead in every battleground state and, by most estimates, could lose all the currently close states and still win the election.

 

And still he’s calm. Not too cocky. A little aloof, but very professional. He learnt all of this as a black man in a white country: no sudden moves; no anger. That’s how he managed his white mother in adolescence. That’s how he manages a white electorate increasingly at ease with him. And, by a massive stroke of luck, that’s what voters want now. In an economy that is melting down, with two wars still raging, they want calm above everything else. They want to know that the man in charge will not panic, will not be flustered, will not blow up.

It's deeply satisfying to me to see a Democrat with that kind of smarts.  If the worst happens, and McCain somehow ends up being president, at least we'll have the memory of seeing a Democratic campaign  run the way a campaign should be.

Computer...Is...Dying

No posting until the new one gets here next week.  Oh, well, at least my cat will be happy.