It (Continually) Gets Worse

Palin inadvertently makes the case for Obama over McCain. Katie Couric deserves an emmy. Steve Schmidt deserves to be fired for allowing Palin within a hundred feet of her.

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Please Don’t Talk

This is likely the main thought on the brain of every strategist inside both the McCain and Obama camps as the Vice-Presidential debates approach. So far, Palin has been so bad at answering questions, that McCain is now chaperoning her interviews and accusing random voters who try to shout questions at her of “gotcha journalism” if she gives an answer.

On the other side, Joe Biden has contracted foot-in-mouth disease. Now he’s no Sarah Palin, and has 35 years of intelligent comments, has given hundreds of interviews over the past few years, and has debated Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (did quite well in these debates too). But he should still try to keep from talking about FDR going on TV.

So as the two campaigns near the end of a ridiculously long election, both sides I’m sure are hoping their candidate will shut the hell up and let the other person embarrass themselves.

However, I personally think the Republicans NEED Sarah Palin to talk at this debate. A lot. And say really, really intelligent things. McCain is getting slammed in the polls. Check out the latest numbers from my favorite (and the most accurate from the primary season) political predication website, fivethirty-eight.com. They currently have Obama up 4 points in the polls, and are predicting 325 electoral college votes for Obama, with an 83% chance of an Obama victory overall. If Palin doesn’t do something to convince people that McCain has not placed the country at risk with a reckless VP choice, expect these numbers, as bad as they are, to only get worse for McCain.

Palin On Russia

Sarah Palin defends her statement that Alaska’s proximity to Canada and Russia gives her foreign policy experience. And she expresses her annoyance that she was, what’s the word, “mocked” by the press.

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In all honesty this is the worst interview I have ever seen a politician give. Congressman Westmoreland’s used to have the prize. However, in this case, Katie Couric did not try to play “gotcha”, and then edited the footage to make Palin look bad, the way that Colbert did with Westmoreland. In fact, Couric seems to be trying to her hardest not to embarrass Palin.

Economy Implodes, McCain Praises Deregulation

So, currently, the economy hasn’t collapsed in on itself completely. Its just that the banking and financial systems are so screwed up the federal government is considering injecting them with a trillion dollars to avoid a financial panic.

Teresa and I disagree on this point strongly: she thinks something should be done to keep the banking industry from collapsing. I say, that every single person who either sold a subprime mortgage, or packaged one as a “security”, should be thrown in jail for excessive stupidity. I know that sounds like I’m joking, but I’m not. Subprime mortgages, by DEFINITION, were bad ideas. Anybody who made money off them deserves to lose every penny they made. And the Bush administration should face charges of criminal neglect, for deregulating to the point where that created a system that allowed people to gamble with our economy.

John McCain came out this week demanding the SEC Chairman’s head. I guess he didn’t read the article he wrote a month ago, which was published this week, in which he praises banking deregulation and suggests we do the same for the health care industry.

But here’s the bottom line, REPUBLICANS presided over a disastrous war in Iraq, and the completely implosion of our economy. Why on earth would we want to keep them in power? Anybody?

P.S. In order to keep from being hypocritical, given the choice I would make it against the law for ANYONE who held elected office between 2000 and 2008 to ever hold elected office again. With the exception of Senator Dick Durbin (R) and Senator Barack Obama, who spent most of the past few years securing loose nukes, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has impotently spent the past eight years screaming at the top of his lungs what most of the country only realized this past week: that George W. Bush has been a pretty lousy President.

McCain Asks Palin To Be His VP - Dramatic Re-enactment

It may have looked something like this.

Palin Addresses The Alaskan Indepence Party

Youtube is awesome.

Quote from the founder:

“The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.

“And I won’t be buried under their damn flag,” Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system. “I’ll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home.”

Will Palin Drop Out?

Intrade, the fantasy prediction stock market, started taking bets today on whether or not Sarah Palin will withdraw from the VP slot. The market opened at 3% and climbed as high as 18%. It currently stands at 12% as of this writing. McCain just dispatched a team of lawyers to Alaska to vet Palin. Normally this is the type of thing you do BEFORE you pick a VP, but McCain’s is too awesome for that. Shoot first, ask questions later.

Well, if nothing else, John McCain has shifted the focus off Barack Obama’s speech.

Palin Pick Reveals McCain’s Bushlike Tendencies

For someone who claims to be such a maverick, John McCain is starting to look at lot like George W. Bush. His choice of the underwhelming, mediocre Sarah Palin to be his Vice President without a thorough vetting process showed a reckless lack of judgment and — more importantly — utter contempt for the highly qualified people he might have chosen.

Contempt for well-educated, accomplished people has become an unfortunate pattern in some conservative circles of late. It seems that the only qualifications that matter to them involve fanatical adherence to supposedly Christian values. It’s not about competence, it’s about belief.

The National Review’s E.J. Dionne, Jr. had this to say:

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week’s Republican convention against John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate–for the very same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers’ fate.

The results of McCain’s half-assed vetting process are already making themselves abundantly clear. Scandal after scandal has plagued Palin in the days since she was nominated, and now we learn that she was was nearly recalled as the mayor of Wasilla, AK due to political firings.

Does this remind anyone of the Bush-Gonzales Department of Justice?

And he says he’s a maverick…

Sarah Who?

I still can’t get over how poor of a choice I feel this is. As globalization makes understanding the nuances of such foreign policy details as the difference between Shia and Sunni, or which countries Pakistan and Azerbaijan border, the difference between war and peace, I cannot imagine a worse choice. Obama is extremely well versed in these details. Forget saying no to Iraq. Any hippie could have gotten that right. He also suggested sending two more brigades to Afghanistan six months ago, and talking to Iran, the former of which the Joint Chiefs of Staff now recommends, and the latter of which the Bush administration recently acknowledge is necessary.

Biden is also extremely well versed. McCain, although he makes frequent errors in this arena (he has missed the two I referenced above), is well versed in foreign policy. Palin is not.

Hey, Are There Any White Chicks In Our Party?

As far as I can tell, that pretty much sums up McCain’s decision to pick Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. I don’t say that with the intent to belittle Mrs. Palin’s accomplishments, but I honestly can’t find any. At least none that would qualify her to be President. Because that’s what the Vice-President is picked for. It is John McCain, and Barack Obama’s respective choice for who they would want running the country if something happened to them.

Do the Republicans really have so little respect for Obama that they think he is this unqualified? As recently as a month ago, Palin was quoted as saying she didn’t even know what the Vice-President DOES. She had met McCain ONCE before this past week. She has been Governor of a State with a population of 600,000 for 2 years, and before that was mayor of a town of 6,000. I know Obama has only served as a Senator for a few years, but he has demonstrated his qualifications, if, through nothing else, running one of the best organized campaign in history, which defeated the powerful Clinton machine.

Over the past 18 months he has tried to convince us he is ready, and nearly 20 million people have cast votes in agreement. He has written speeches and position papers on foreign policy, energy, trade, the economy, gay rights, etc. He has been correct on the strategies we need for dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Is a few months time really enough to get Palin up to speed on the domestic and geopolitical issues that a President would have to deal with? Does the oldest man to ever be the nominee of a major political party, one who has had cancer, been tortured for years, and will not release his medical records to the public, even care what would happen to the United States if something happened to him?

Lastly, I know that many of our readers support McCain. I am curious of any of you are not bothered or anxious by the idea of Sarah Palin being sworn in as President.

I Made This!

About five months, I took on a challenge. Extremely frustrated at the time with my job as a teacher, and having some very disheartening informational interviews with project managers and developers at the major tech and software companies in the area, I decided that I needed to take some serious action if I was going to have a job I enjoyed when the school year ended. So I offered to build this website on the cheap. The site required the use of xml, php, and some highly complex aspects of Flash and ActionScript. I worked on it while teaching at two schools, building another, much less challenging site, and working for a local design company. It took me about a combined total of over 200 hours, but it helped me get me current job, which I enjoy very much. And I’m very glad that I’ve finished it. The link goes to the landing page, click on the logo to check out the full site.

Clinton Says All The Right Things

Hillary Clinton spoke tonight at the Democratic National Convention, and the verdict came in that she gave a damn good one. Pundits from the left and right said that she did an excellent job making the case for Barack Obama to her supporters, and she showed poise and class.

Personally, I thought it was boring, and at times, forced. The seemed, for me, to be a lack of sincerity. But maybe I’m wrong, and there may be some genuine desire from the Clintons to see Barack win; Obama picked someone, in Joe Biden, who seems an unlikely successor in 2016, leaving the field wide open for a potential Hillary resurgence eight years down the line.

China, Phelps Take The Gold

Well, the games are over, and Olympic host China showed its new status as a major world power by taking home the most gold medals. This marked the first time since 1936 that a country other than the two major world superpowers, the United States and Russia, have won the most gold medals at the Olympics. In 1936, the victor was Germany, who arguably at the time was also a major world superpower. This was also the first time since 1992 that the US did not won the most gold medals. The question is, will this cause the Chinese government to open up and become more receptive to Western style Democracy, more freedom of press, and a relaxation in their attitude towards Tibet and Taiwan?

More importantly, however, is the question of whether Michael Phelps is human, superhuman, or dolphin. The merman dominated this Olympic games with a record-setting 8 gold medals, winning every event he competed in, including ones where he was forced to compete on a team with non-superhuman swimmers. Phelps now holds the record for most gold medals won ever with fourteen, five more than anyone else in history. While I’m normally quite far from an avid swim fan, I was amazed at just how much better he was than anyone else. And unlike some other record-setting athletes these days (Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa), Phelps has undergone rigorous steroid and doping tests.

McCain Can’t Remember How Many Houses He Has

This has been the big issue over the past few days.

Apparently, John McCain is rich as hell. Let me list for you now, in chronological order, the President’s we’ve had so far who were poor.
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Honestly, I don’t really care that McCain owns seven homes. What I do care about, is that he has no clue about what has happened in Iraq over the past few years. For example, the Anbar Awakening started BEFORE the extra troops from the surge arrived. But, McCain seemed to think otherwise on CBS.

However, the media, the Dems, and Obama have been focused on criticizing McCain for owning a ton of houses.

This election was supposed to be out the issues, and it has gone into a contest over who’s more like Joe Sixpack. Obama’s a celebrity, McCain’s rich as hell. Who cares? What should matter is who has a better understanding of the world we live in. McCain doesn’t know how to use a computer and has a poor understanding of the situation in Iraq. Obama runs the most web-savvy campaign in history and understood that Iraq would be a quagmire from the beginning. Slam-dunk victory for Obama.

But if Obama lets McCain, the media, or his advisers and fellow dems make this into a contest of who is more like the average, half-drunk, patriotic American, then I’m sorry but the old white guy named John is going to beat the young, half-black guy named Barack. It’s no wonder that McCain is closing the gap in the polls.

Wilshire & Washington: Heading Right’s Media Lizzy and the Upcoming Conventions

I’m really sad that I had to miss this great conversation with Ted, Maegan and Lizzy, but I was having massive back pain and 7:30 a.m was the only time my chiropractor could see me.

Scrabulous Disabled For US and Canadian Users

1998:
RCA VP: Hey, millions of people are downloading songs through Napster, generating an entirely new medium of distribution of music, television, and movies that is way more efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly than the purchase of CD’s and DVD’s at stores.
RCA CEO: Holy Shit! We need to shut this down right away!

2008:
Hasbro VP: Hey, millions are playing Scrabulous on facebook, causing a whole new generation of ADD-inflicted young people who normally can’t sit still long enough to get through a game of checkers to fall in love with Scrabble.
Hasbro CEO: Holy Shit! We need to shut this down right away!

Where Am I?

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks. First I injured my arms rock climbing, then started a new job, which coupled with my sore arms, caused some carpal tunnel issues as my job involved 8 hours a day on a computer. Fortunately that got better with some ergonomic gloves. Then I had to move from the Eastside to the Westside, so I haven’t had my home computer setup, and I’ve been spending most of the time I haven’t been working getting my apartment setup. Then I caught Teresa’s bug, and now my throat feels like its on fire, all I’m eating is ice cream, and I’ve been sleeping about 14 hours a day.

I’ve been dying to blog, although I will have to keep this short, as I have a Flash website I need to get back to for my job with the few hours I currently have where I have enough energy to actually do something productive. At my new job I get to listen to music/talk radio all day, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the recent Presidential campaign. My thoughts in short:

Maliki’s recent statement that the US should give a timetable for withdrawl from Iraq pretty much kills McCain’s angle on that issue politically.

McCain’s campaign has decided that reality is irrelevant, and they are going to campaign solely based on perception, hence the recent Barack Obama = Britney Spears commercials. And seriously, is their new slogan “Obama is popular and everybody loves him” really going to help McCain win?

McCain has made so many gaffe’s over the past few weeks (for instance, he claimed the Anbar Awakening was caused by the surge even though it occurred before the troops arrived), he’s very fortunate he can’t get any press coverage.

This campaign has quickly evolved into a referrendum on whether people think Obama is either “a visionary leader for change who will make are country great again” vs. whether people think Obama is “an argula eating pot-smoking community hippie who thinks rainbows can fight terrorism.”

Sorry if this post seems rambling or incoherent. My throat hurts and I’m dizzying. I’ll post more when I feel better.

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