Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/13/2008

• • McCain’s Attack on Science: Decrepit Old Fool

    Remember McCain harping on the “3 million dollar projector” Obama supposedly funded as “pork-barrel earmarks” etc in the second debate? Decrepit Old Fool points out that it was A PLANETARIUM PROJECTOR!

    And I read elsewhere that it cost 300,000, not 3 million. I fact-checked myself. It was indeed a 3 million dollar planetarium projector. It looked like this:

• 

–and, contrary to McCain’s debate language, it did not look like this:

• Planetariums are important for educating the young. If I’d had the good fortune to visit one in my youth, maybe I would have cared more about my science classes.

  tags: mccain, science, elections08, politics

  • John McCain’s trying to score political points; I understand that.  But on more than one occasion, he’s done so by showing that, after all, science doesn’t really matter to him.  He’s mocked the bear genetics study and just last week dismissed a planetarium projector as “an overhead projector”.  It’s not just a political fib, it’s a destructive lie.  Here, take a look at an example of what the candidate called “an overhead projector”.

    Planetarium projectors are marvels of engineering and science in themselves, and over their approximately 40-year lifespan they can introduce hundreds of thousands of people to scientific wonders of our cosmos.  In our country, slipping as we are in so many areas of education, we need to let children know that something lies over the horizon.  And since most of our nation’s children live in brightly-lit urban areas, they may never truly see the night sky in its immensity, any other way.

• Nation & World | Report: Palin didn’t fear for safety | Seattle Times Newspaper

  Who is Sarah Palin?

  tags: palin

  • In a report released Friday on the so-called “Troopergate” scandal, the investigator, Stephen Branchflower, said evidence, such as the governor’s decision to reduce the manpower of her security detail, showed that “such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Wooten fired for personal family related reasons.”

• Save us, Lord, from a Palin White House – Nova Scotia News – TheChronicleHerald.ca – Annotated

  Nice overview of the ironies of Palin as an icon of the religious right, and the terrors of Palin as head of state and commander-in-chief.

  tags: palin, elections08, politics, usa

  • Rich calls her “preposterously unprepared to run the country.” Her only claim to fame, says Joseph A. Palermo of the Huffington Post website is that “she has five kids, one with Down syndrome, and one that is underage and pregnant, which would be no biggie if she didn’t so vociferously and self-righteously oppose sex education or contraceptives in favour of ‘abstinence’ only . . . .

    “So there you have it. The Republican masters of the universe . . . decided that a female Christian fundamentalist, who is anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-stem cell research, who hunts and wears furs and is a former beauty queen with no gravitas at all is just as qualified as Dick Cheney to be vice-president.”

    Palin says her lack of international experience is no big deal because Americans just aren’t interested in “somebody’s big fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

    Now that’s terrifying.

    It suggests Palin believes that a U. S. president — while dealing with al-Qaida terrorists, the worst financial crisis in eight decades, the rise of China, and with poverty, fratricidal warfare and AIDS epidemics in the third world — requires no experience, knowledge or thoughtfulness.

  • “This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as Taliban and al-Qaida regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.”

    And now, McCain has selected as a president-in waiting this hockey mom and female Joe Sixpack who appears to be an impossibility: a version of George W. Bush, who is even stupider than the real thing. “Not since Gaius Caesar Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate has there been such a bonehead choice,” says blogger John de Groot.

    If McCain wins, and his illness drives him from office, the horse will be not just a senator but the Empress of America, with supreme power to wreck the entire world.

    Let us pray.

    • –more stylistic prose-gold from the lead of this tragicomedy. I love the ending. – post by cburell

• John McCain rally in Iowa marked by partisan prayer | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times

  So if America elects professed Christian Barrack Obama, this prayer-leader at a McCain rally says it makes the Christian God lose his “reputation,” because “Hindu [gods], Buddha, and Allah” will look “bigger than” the Christian god?

  Why is this preacher unwilling to acknowledge Obama as a Christian? Is it his Arabic name?

  tags: politics, religion, mccain, christianity, usa

  • Rev. Arnold Conrad, in delivering an invocation at a rally today for John McCain in Davenport, Iowa, apparently didn’t get the word from the candidate about elevating the tone at such gatherings.

  • The Times’ Maeve Reston was at the event, and she passed along the key passage from Conrad’s words:

    I would also pray Lord that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their God — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his [McCain’s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons.

    And Lord I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day.

    Oh Lord, we just commit this time to you, move among us, make your presence very well felt as we are gathered here today in Jesus’s name I pray.

    Some in the crowd greeted the prayer with applause.

• McCain-Palin Supporters Gone Wild – NYTimes.com

  So a video-blogger gets featured on the NYTimes, and who knows, may have a decisive effect on the election of the next president of the United States.

  Nice to see. Amazing.

  tags: elections08, politics, racism, usa, mccain, palin, obama

  • A video titled The McCain-Palin Mob is the No. 3 most-discussed video on YouTube today, with more than 675,000 views since it was posted Wednesday. In the clip, Ohio rally-goers tell blogger Tim Russo (who’s behind the camera) they have reason to believe Obama is a terrorist. Russo’s questioning is clearly aimed at putting his subjects on the defensive, but they take it to another level, in particular one woman who keeps pushing her way back on camera.

  • Another, separate video from a Pennsylvania rally has McCain supporters calling Obama a “commie faggot” among other epithets, and is the No. 25 most-discussed YouTube clip today.

    In a campaign where off-hand remarks by candidates regularly become leading nightly news items, citizens with video cameras wield a lot of journalistic power. And so it’s a bit hard to take Russo’s point of view, in that his disdain for his subjects is so clear (see some unprintable, for us, comments he makes about them on his blog). But at the same time, the mocking response he evokes from the woman at the McCain rally, which would have never aired at length (or at all) on TV, made its way out into the world. We live in interesting times!

• Arianna Huffington: McCain’s Desperate Claim: Obama is Dangerous. Vote for Me If You Want to Live!

  tags: no_tag

  • “Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or you’re not ready to articulate it.”

    That was John McCain in 2000, commenting on the disgusting attacks against him by Karl Rove, George Bush, and a few of the people now doing their very dirty work for him.

• The Bilerico Project | The War on Intellectualism

  A nice commentary on the “Joe Six-pack in the White House is good” phenomenon. Made the front page of Digg.

  tags: elections08, palin, mccain, obama

  • It is also constantly being said that both Obama and Biden are too “professorial”, as if being an intelligent leader is a weakness. Professors are people who KNOW THINGS and can lead and teach others. How is that an insult? They simply know too much to be the leaders of the free world? All those pesky details floating around in their heads makes it impossible for them to lead? Huh?

    How did we get here? I certainly don’t want just any old Average Joe to lead our country. I want someone who knows facts and issues. And if they don’t know something, I want someone with the intellectual curiosity to learn and find out! Pick up a newspaper, get online, and surround yourself with other intelligent people. Yet McCain can’t use the internet and Palin can’t name a paper she reads. Where is the intellectualism to be a true leader in this time of trouble in our country?

    Let me be clear- I don’t care if politicians don’t seem “fun” or “folksy”- I don’t want to have a beer with them. I want them to lead. “Going with your gut” is not a viable option for this level of leadership. Quick sound bites or catch phrases don’t make you a good leader. I don’t care if you can hunt, were in the PTA, or wink at me- I want you to be educated about the issues facing our country.

• Thousands cheer Obama at four Phila. stops | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/11/2008

  This history teacher is proud of America for coming this close to having a non-white president. Thinking of all the African-Americans alive and watching this race, I can only smile.

  Now let’s all pray (or better, do something) to prevent some Lee Harvey Oswald type from plunging us into nightmare and grief.

  tags: obama, elections08, racism, history, USA

  • At Vernon Park, David Wilcots, 46, an environmental engineer, contemplated the prospect of an Obama victory, which he and other African Americans now believe is a probability.

    On the one hand, Wilcots said, the venom expressed by the crowds at Republican rallies last week makes him fear for Obama’s safety. On the other, he marvels at what might transpire on Nov. 4.

    “It wouldn’t resolve everything in race relations, but it would mean we’d reached a milestone in this country thought to be impossible a few short years ago,” he said.

    “America would be embracing as president a black person, a person of mixed-race background, and a person one generation removed from Africa. Those are three pretty big embraces.”

• White House Overhauling Rescue Plan – NYTimes.com

  Bush embraces socialism with a partial nationalization of the US banking industry. Now let’s watch the free market defenders contort the English language in the best Orwellian fashion by saying that this is not socialism.

  tags: economics, usa, bush, politics

  • Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

    As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

    The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

1. Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/18/2008
2. Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/15/2008
3. Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/19/2008
4. Edublog Suspended: Politics (and Publishing) Around the Web 10/16/2008

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