Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/25/2008
Saturday, 25 October 2008 Clay Burell 
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kdka.com – McCain Campaign Worker Confessed To Making Up Story Of Attack
BAM. Can things get any worse for the GOP?
It will be interesting to read the comment threads full of racist anger over this “assault,” with nary a hint of skepticism. Will there be any reflection?
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A Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Ashley Todd confessed to making up the story & is facing charges
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter “B” in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.
Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.
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The Busman’s Holiday: UPDATE 3 — Questions Raised About McCain Volunteer’s Alleged Knife Mutilation
EXCELLENT example of CITIZEN JOURNALISM: this blogspot blogger used Google Maps to embed images of the site of the crime, got comments from people familiar with the crime scene, and linked to updates that add more evidence this is a WILLIE HORTON-style deception.
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Ashley Todd Photo: ATM Video Proves Assault Lies Hoax? – Original News: The Post Chronicle
The B, backward _or_ forward, is _not_ something an “angry big black assailant” would carve in somebody’s face WITH A KNIFE. There is not a single knife-slice on her cheek. The B looks _rubbed_.
And rubbing takes a longer time to do, and hurts less, than using the knife to cut.
The sad thing? I”ve seen many comments believe this hoax _without question_ – which means, as usual, _without thinking_.
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Police say inconsistencies in McCain staffer’s story
If this 20-year-old McCain volunteer from Texas is lying about this, serious charges should be brought against her. She’s doing it in a battleground state, first of all.
Second of all, many reporters are reporting her _allegations_ as _facts_, despite the lack of corroboration. And many people are reacting with “white rage” in the comments to those reports.
Her TWITTER page is a key piece of evidence, btw.
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Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a “B” on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.
Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn’t mention in the initial report.
Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn’t show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera’s range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.
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Teaching “controversial” topics | Get Schooled – Annotated
If a kid cries in a Psychology class because it disagrees with her belief in Astrology as an explanation of human behavior, should we “teach _that_ controversy” too?
Prayer didn’t work during the Bubonic Plague as well as Science would have. Why do religious people insist on resisting Science? Why do schools let them?
It kills me that the most powerful and influential nation on the planet is among the most extreme in this respect.
How can Americans go through 12 years of basic education, and exit without a _basic_ understanding science and its method?
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I spent Thursday at Emory University attending a workshop on teaching evolution. Every high school biology teacher is required to teach evolution, but the topic has faced challenges.
Back in 2004, State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed striking references to evolution and other related concepts from the state curriculum. She changed her mind after a public backlash.
Cobb County schools faced its own battles over placing stickers in textbooks questioning evolution.
At the Emory conference teachers shared stories about students crying in class when the evolution unit started. Others said some students received training on what questions they could ask to challenge and disrupt the lessons. A few admitted they dread the unit because of the number of complaints they get from parents and others in the community.
I don’t want us to get into a debate over evolution vs. creationism vs. intelligent design. Instead, I’m curious as to what teachers and schools do with lessons considered controversial.
For example, do you send notes home to give parents a heads-up? Do you address the controversy with students in class or do you go about your lessons like it’s any other activity?
Is there a way to remove the controversy – whether real or perceived – from our classrooms?
- Why not simply say, “Evolution is science, and as ‘true’ as Gravitation. Creationism and I.D. are not. End of discussion.” ? – post by cburell
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McCain’s Warning on Voter Fraud Gets Details Wrong: Ann Woolner
ACORN is a red herring. Here’s what really threatens democracy (although it doesn’t mention the DIEBOLD and other electronic voting machines).
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Phantom Voters
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
or ACORN, has a nasty habit of hiring day workers who register
thousands of phantom voters, often in swing states. ACORN denies
responsibility, insisting it culls for bogus names, fires whoever
turned them in and flags any irregularities to authorities.If you doubt ACORN’s story and worry that fake registrations
can lead to false voting, I don’t blame you. But you will
probably strike out if you try to find phony votes that were
actually cast. Officials verify registrations before accepting
them.Whatever you make of ACORN, don’t let its misdeeds blind you
to the rest of the picture.Consider Nathan Sproul, former Republican Party chief for
Arizona, who ran a multistate voter drive in 2004. Some of his
former employees have told reporters that his group destroyed
registration forms filled out by Democrats, fired canvassers who
turned them in and submitted to state authorities only the
registrations of those who said they were Republicans. Sproul
denied the allegations.Oregon Probe
An Oregon investigation into Sproul’s 2004 operation there
confirmed “instances of wrongdoing” but found insufficient
evidence to prosecute, according to the state’s Justice
Department.Bad as it is to submit fake registrations, no harm is done
unless one of those made-up registrants gets approved by the
state and then shows up at the polls and votes.“Keep in mind with these stories about potentially bad
registrations, they don’t equal bad votes,” says Terri Enns, a
senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, out of Ohio State
University.But if you register voters and then shred their registration
forms because they support the wrong candidate, you rob
legitimate voters of their ballots in an attempt to tilt the
election result.Ancient history, you say? This year Sproul has a new group
which the Republican Party and the McCain campaign have hired for
voter drives.
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John McCain Implodes: Dead Cat Bounces, Making Excuses & Uppity Negro Voters
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The excuses for McCain’s great unraveling are flying fast and furious, and most of them lead back to Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, his tone-deaf campaign managers, because of their obsession with tactics over substance, notably Schmidt’s snap selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate without even a cursory examination of who she was.
If McCain has been in the thrall of his handlers, then he is even more befuddled than I have feared. If that is false, then McCain is even less prepared for that 3 a.m. phone call than I have feared.
Pick one. Nah, go ahead and pick both, kind of like McCain having more than one position on so many issues.
Yes, it’s that bad.
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Freddie Mac Money Trail Catches Up With McCain | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com
Rick Davis again.
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Few advisers in John McCain‘s inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis’s high-powered consulting firm. “Rick is a friend, and I trust him,” McCain told NEWSWEEK last year.
Last week, though, McCain’s trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager’s firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008.
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The punditocracy’s Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election | Salon News – Annotated
A great review of how wrong the media bobble-heads are when they play expert on teevee.
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But that’s Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
- God, I wish I’d written that line. – post by cburell
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Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad – Politico.com Print View
Great title for a devastating article. Epic disarray in the McCain campaign team.
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Leslie Harris: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Try To Fix It
Webheads and techies who think politics are unimportant should read this series.
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[The Internet is at a crossroads. Down one path lies a future where digital technology enhances constitutional freedoms; spurs innovations in expression and entrepreneurship; and fulfills its ultimate promise of connecting and empowering the world. Down the other? A future where the Internet is turned against users; where government spying runs unchecked, and where innovation is stifled by a closed and locked system, controlled by a handful of entrenched players. The next president will play a key role in determining which path we take. This is the fourth in a series of entries over the next couple weeks about the critical technology and civil liberties choices facing the next president of the United States. You can read more on our complete transition guide for next president.]
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Edward Lifson: Studs (Terkel) for Obama
Terkel is still amazing, after all these years. He gives Obama advice I hope is heard, and faults Obama for not being Progressive ENOUGH.
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When even the venomous Michelle Malkin says Obama supporters are innocent, surely you’ll believe it.
Like me, she smelled a fish in the “WILLIE HORTON PLOY” of the Texas girl “MUTILATED” by a “6’4″ BLACK MAN” in Philadelphia yesterday.
Really interesting role of Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter here – along with Drudge Report wearing egg on the face for swallowing this one, and fellow traveller Malkin calling him on it.
The nice thing is the circus, thanks to netizens, seems to be over before the media had a chance to run too far with this HOAX.
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Scroll down for updates…”Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said”…and more below on following her MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook trails…
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Does McCain think America is too ignorant to know theft? – Annotated
Good facts to refute the silly (but still effective) “SOCIALIST” label the desperate McCain/Schmidt/Davis camp is throwing at Obama, and which the least intelligent are parroting.
Since these people don’t seem to read basic facts, maybe you can read the following from the Congressional Budget Office to them:
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Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.
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I’m guessing the latter, because the evidence is so overwhelming.
In the last eight years, we the little people have been forced to provide more and more of the taxes fueling America’s redistribution machine. As the Congressional Budget Office reports, the $715 billion in tax breaks that President Bush gave to those making more than $342,000 a year began dramatically shifting the overall tax burden from the rich onto the rest of us. Meanwhile, because of lobbyist-crafted loopholes, most corporations pay zero federal income taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The result is what Warren Buffett admits: When counting all taxes (income, payroll, property, etc.), billionaires and Big Business often pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.
The output of the redistribution machine is becoming just as regressive. In the age of Halliburton fraud and ExxonMobil subsidies, our government spends $93 billion a year on corporate welfare. (For comparison, that’s roughly three times what it spends on a traditional welfare program such as food stamps.) That doesn’t include the recent bailout giving $700 billion to the same banks doling out $70 billion in executive pay and bonuses – a scheme the Financial Times says “amounts to a large transfer of resources from lower to higher income earners.”
Thanks to these redistributive policies – policies McCain championed in Congress – the richest 1 percent today owns a larger share of America’s wealth than at any time since before the Great Depression.
The Republican standard-bearer likely knows all this, but his fetish is fact-free fairy tales – the kind presenting seven houses, a beer-industry fortune and lockstep conservatism as mavericky Joe-the-Plumber populism. When it comes to economics, McCain is banking on Americans believing similarly inane myths – specifically, those portraying obscene affluence as the commonplace achievement under royalist rule.
- –the rest is worth a read. – post by cburell
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Spending rose in Palin’s Alaska administrations – USATODAY.com
Oh, those pesky facts. So much for “Palin the reformer and fiscal conservative.”
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WASHINGTON — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin calls herself a fiscal conservative who wants to “rein in government spending.” She says she “reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state.” Republican John McCain said during the last debate that his running mate has “cut the size of government.”
But Palin didn’t cut the size of government as mayor of Wasilla, and she hasn’t done so as Alaska’s governor, city and state budget records show. Spending in fast-growing Wasilla increased by 55% during her tenure from 1996-2002, records show. In nearly two years as governor, she has presided over a 31% spending hike by a state government that sought earmarks from Washington even as it reaped billions from higher oil prices and Palin-backed tax increases on oil companies.
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Jeffrey Feldman: Drudge Puts Dangerous Spin on Mugging, Implies Violence Targeting McCain Volunteers
A GREAT ARTICLE FOR CLASSROOM USE about HOW HEADLINES, FRAMES, AND OMISSIONS OF FACTS CAN CHANGE A NEWS STORY.
This is dangerous stuff.
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Will Ferrell Back As Bush With Tina Fey’s Palin On Thursday’s “Saturday Night Live” (VIDEO)
Hilarious and smart. So good to see Will Farrell doing Dubya again.
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E. J. Dionne Jr. – Civil War on the Right – washingtonpost.com – Annotated
This really is one of the most interesting, and most potentially historical, side-stories of the election: the possible fall of the GOP and rise of an INTELLECTUAL conservative party to take its place.
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Conservatives are at each other’s throats, and here’s what’s revealing about how divided they are: The critics of John McCain and the critics of Sarah Palin represent entirely different camps.
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Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party” (David Brooks), as someone who “doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin” (Kathleen Parker), as “a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics” (Peggy Noonan).
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For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.
- I’ve been noting this all week. The originally intellectual Conservative movement has campaigned itself over the decades into an anti-intellectual party. The crows have come home to roost.
It would be nice to see a new party of philoophical, not brand-name, conservatism replace the GOP. Those debates can only enrich the political discourse by debating the liberal point of view, instead of demonizing it. – post by cburell
- I’ve been noting this all week. The originally intellectual Conservative movement has campaigned itself over the decades into an anti-intellectual party. The crows have come home to roost.
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Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.
It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.
- We can only hope.
But schools have apparently done a horrible job of teaching blue-collar white people to think clearly enough to see through demagoguery and propaganda. I fully expect millions of white Americans to vote against their own interests because of their trust in FOX. – post by cburell
- We can only hope.
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Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.
It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.
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Op-Ed Columnist – Rebranding the U.S. With Obama – NYTimes.com – Annotated
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The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
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She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.
She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.
[Long pause.]
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.
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Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
“It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
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As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
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Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.
In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
- Wonderful reality-check on the fact that other countries are better at religious and racial tolerance than the USA. – post by cburell
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Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
- Well-said. Brains, not race, should decide our vote.
Race is no reason to vote for a candidate. BUT IT’S ALSO NO REASON NOT TO. – post by cburell
- Well-said. Brains, not race, should decide our vote.
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McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4 | ajc.com
Two words Krauthammer fails to mention in his ode to McCain: SARAH PALIN.
Next.
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McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4
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Salon.com Books | Stephen King’s God trip – Annotated
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Beyond the pop culture feast, at the novel’s heart resides a much older myth, our founding myth, you might say, the tale of a manifest destiny, steeped in Jesus and gone horribly wrong. In the age of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, faced with the prospect of another Great Depression, I can’t think of a more relevant fantasy with which to chase away — or embrace — the gloom.
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I just finished reading a book called “Nixonland,” and the parallels to the Nixon campaigns and McCain campaigns are just depressing. He’s doing a lot of events that are supposed to be populist but are in reality completely managed. He’s got a vice president who’s Joe Six-Pack. The parallels just go on and on. You’ve got the unpopular war, economic problems, gasoline problems. Whatever goes around, comes around. “The Stand” even says that. Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
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Questions of politics are never very far away in “The Stand.” Once the plague has come and gone, society has to be reformed. Do you think of it as a political novel, in any sense?
I did see it that way. I’ve always been a political novelist, and those things have always interested me. “Firestarter” is a political novel. “The Dead Zone” is a political novel. There’s that scene in “The Dead Zone” where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war. Around my house we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, “That’s Greg Stillson as a woman.”
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I was the guy who wrote best-selling books who had also marched in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I brought that sensibility first, whether it was foremost in my mind first. A lot of people reacted to that, the idea that here was somebody who was writing about pop music that they knew, for instance.
Earlier in my career, I was just excoriated by the critics. I was just drubbed unmercifully, and I think I got more of it because the books were successful, and they were just horrified because they sensed it was something that was working in the popular context. It was different than what had gone before. And the thing they settled on was all the brand names. There was review after review that said this can’t be up to anything serious because it’s so ephemeral, because he’s talking about Excedrin, he’s talking about Prestone antifreeze, whatever it was. What they never took into consideration was that there was a whole generation, a huge generation, suckled on television.
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What did you learn while writing “The Stand”?
I wrote the book in Colorado for the most part, and at that time, there was a lot of discussion on the news, and on local TV stations about chemical dumps and chemical weapons in Nevada, and so that played a constant background in my thoughts while I was writing it, and at the same time, that’s the edge of the Bible Belt, and there were a lot of radio preachers, and one night I heard this guy raving about once in every generation, a plague will fall among them, and I started to think about that dichotomy between the spiritual and the technological, and that became the great subject of the book.
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In the introduction to the expanded edition of “The Stand,” you also called the novel a work of “dark Christianity.” What did you mean by that?
I was raised Christian, and I was raised to believe in the idea of the Antichrist. My wife said that — she was raised a Catholic — the attitude of the Catholic Church is, give them to me when they’re young, and they’ll be mine forever. It isn’t really true. A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
I’m interested in the concepts. I’m particularly interested in the idea that in the New Testament, you’re suggesting a moral code that’s actually enlightened. Basically what Christ preached: get along with your neighbor and give everything away and follow me. So we’re talking pretty much about communism or socialism, all the things that the good Christian Republicans in the House of Representatives today are railing about in light of this bailout bill.
- Oh, the anti-Chrstian capitalist Church-goers. Good for you, King.
As Max von Sydow says in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “If Jesus were to come back to America today, he would vomit over what’s being said and done in his name.” – post by cburell
- Oh, the anti-Chrstian capitalist Church-goers. Good for you, King.
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I was able to use all those things in “The Stand.” It’s an effort to say, let’s give God his due here. Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite, and that’s about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where someone dumps a crucifix in Count Dracula’s face, and he pulls away and runs back into his house. That’s not religion. That’s some kind of juju, like a talisman. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to explore what that means to be able to rise above adversity by faith, because it’s something most of us do every day. We may not call it Christianity. I wanted to do that. I wanted it to be a God trip.
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Running throughout your body of work, there is this thread, a running internal argument about God. I’m thinking, in particular, of the story “Ayana” in the new collection.
It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously. I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I’m very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we’re living in, it’s very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that’s running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause.
The other thing that’s interested me ever since I was a kid was the idea that’s baldly articulated in “Desperation,” and that is that God is cruel. I always in my mind equated Mother Abigail with Moses, and the story of Moses taking credit for the water coming from the rock and being forbidden to get to the Promised Land because of that one thing, that one slip, where God is cruel, and I wanted to use those things and say two things. First, that the myths are difficult and suggest a difficult moral path through life, and second, that they are ultimately more fruitful and more earth-friendly than the god of technology, the god of the microchip, the god of the cellphone.
- Interesting. – post by cburell
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A personal question about the apocalypse. If you had to handicap which major catastrophe will take down human civilization in your lifetime, where would you put your money?
Nuclear weapons. No doubt about it. There are days when I get up and say, I cannot believe, I cannot fucking believe that it’s been more than 50 years since one of those things got popped on an actual population. There are too many out there. One will get away, or someone will make one from spare parts and put it in a knapsack or blow it in Bombay or New York or San Francisco.
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McCain volunteer claims attacker cut ‘B’ into face | AP Texas News | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – Annotated
We have to ask if this is a Willie Horton variation. See below for the annotations of the fishy details.
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PITTSBURGH
— A campaign volunteer for John McCain told police she was robbed at knifepoint at an ATM and knocked down by a man who then carved a “B” in her face after noticing a sticker for the presidential candidate on her car.- Question 1: CNN also covered this story, and said “after noticing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, the thief _punched her in back of the head._”
This implies the assailant was _behind_ the Texas girl, since he punched her from behind. So: HOW COULD SHE KNOW HE “NOTICED HER BUMPER STICKER”?
Did he preface his punch to the back of her head with a narrative statement – “Excuse me, miss, but I notice a McCain bumper sticker on your car.” – BAM.
For that matter, how did he know the alleged car was hers?
We don’t have details so far. – post by cburell
- Question 1: CNN also covered this story, and said “after noticing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, the thief _punched her in back of the head._”
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Police said the woman, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of College Station, Texas, refused medical attention.
- Why would she refuse medical attention? – post by cburell
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Todd told police she was withdrawing money just before 9 p.m. Wednesday when a man approached her from behind, put a knife to her neck and demanded money, police said. She said she gave him $60.
- Okay, I live in Asia, where stuff like this doesn’t happen often at all.
So is a 9pm attack on a city street so easy to believe in Pittsburgh? – post by cburell
- Okay, I live in Asia, where stuff like this doesn’t happen often at all.
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The robber then noticed the bumper sticker, punched her in the back of the head, knocked her down and used the knife to carve a “B” on the right side of her face, the woman told police.
- See question 1. – post by cburell
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It was unclear what the “B” was meant to symbolize, Richard said.
- CNN adds: “Richard said the woman described her alleged attacker as a dark-skinned African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.”
Hello, Willie Horton. A tall one, at that. Big black man – perfect. – post by cburell
- But we’re all supposed to infer “Barack,” surely?
Or “Bigot”? – post by cburell
- CNN adds: “Richard said the woman described her alleged attacker as a dark-skinned African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.”
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McCain spokesman Peter Feldman confirmed that the woman is a campaign volunteer but declined to comment further.
- What will the investigation of this woman reveal about her background? Here the whole DIGITAL FOOTPRINT angle becomes fascinating. She’s going to be so scrutinized. – post by cburell
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The Republican candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, called Todd on Thursday afternoon to express their concern, the campaign confirmed.
- So McCain and Palin decide with this call to connect their campaign with what, if true, is a street crime, and make it a campaign issue.
Now they’ve got a red herring to bring up when people mention the “kill him,” “traitor,” “Muslim,” “socialist,” “off with his head,” “Arab,” and other comments coming out of their supporters’ mouths at rallies. – post by cburell
- So McCain and Palin decide with this call to connect their campaign with what, if true, is a street crime, and make it a campaign issue.
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Police said no police photo had been taken of the woman Wednesday, but by Thursday afternoon a purported picture of a woman with a “B” scratched into her cheek was circulating on the Internet.
- So the police take no photo, but a photo is circulating on the internet.
Then who took the photo? Why didn’t the police take one? Who decided to put it on the internet? Why?
And why was the “B” scratched backwards? – post by cburell
- So the police take no photo, but a photo is circulating on the internet.
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Editorial – Barack Obama – Editorial Board – Endorsement – NYTimes.com – Annotated
A fine analysis of the issues, how the candidates compare on them, and an evaluation of them.
I usually hated teaching editorial writing to high school classrooms, because either the subjects were lame – freaking school uniforms – or the kids were too dumb to know about real-world issues (which is the usually the fault of schools, which don’t require them to know about current events, and thus looses a herd of ignoramus graduates into the adult world annually).
Editorials like this and so many other this election year, though (and ESQUIRE MAGAZINE’S is my favorite so far), remind us what a noble form the editorial can be.
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In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.
Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.
Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.
- Nice metaphor in that last paragraph. – post by cburell
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In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”
Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.
- No, no, no. He’s a socialist. We need to trust Wall Street and the Free Market to correct themselves and save us all. – post by cburell
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The Economy
The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain — a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” — is still a believer.
Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.
Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.
Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.
Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.
- Please, Joe the (non-)Plumber fans, read that last paragraph. Don’t be taken by the promises of the plutocrats. – post by cburell
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Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible.
- I disagree. McCain knows that if his 72-year-old body gave out, THERE IS NO PERSON MORE FIT TO ASSUME THE PRESIDENCY AND LEAD THE WORLD THAN SARAH PALIN.
I trust John McCain’s honor. He chose her because he knew it was right for America.
(If you are irony-deaf, please ask a friend whether I mean this.) – post by cburell
- I disagree. McCain knows that if his 72-year-old body gave out, THERE IS NO PERSON MORE FIT TO ASSUME THE PRESIDENCY AND LEAD THE WORLD THAN SARAH PALIN.
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Both presidential candidates talk about strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia, including NATO, and strongly support Israel. Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that — and not just because the first black president would present a new American face to the world.
Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.
Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives.
Both candidates talk tough on terrorism, and neither has ruled out military action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Obama has called for a serious effort to try to wean Tehran from its nuclear ambitions with more credible diplomatic overtures and tougher sanctions. Mr. McCain’s willingness to joke about bombing Iran was frightening.
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The Constitution and the Rule of Law
Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.
- And shame on you, New York Times, for betraying your duty to democracy by withholding information that would have exposed Bush’s lies until after the 2004 elections.
This would be a good place for you to endorse a change in your own lowered standards of jouranalistic integrity as well. – post by cburell
- And shame on you, New York Times, for betraying your duty to democracy by withholding information that would have exposed Bush’s lies until after the 2004 elections.
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The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
- I disagree. Back-room abortions are good for America. More pregnant teens due to abstinence-only sex education is good for America too.
And if we’re really lucky, McCain/Palin will appoint judges who favor the teaching of the book of Genesis as a science textbook. Fossils and genetics are just tricks of Satan. – post by cburell
- I disagree. Back-room abortions are good for America. More pregnant teens due to abstinence-only sex education is good for America too.
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Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.
He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.
Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”
- McCain, seriously, must be saddened to realize what he’s done to his reputation for posterity – and all for a cynical cause that lost anyway. – post by cburell
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Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”
This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.
- Deservedly scathing.
Will anybody hire Bush/McCain/Palin’s campaign team in future elections? Let’s hope this is end of days for Rick Davis and company. – post by cburell
- Deservedly scathing.
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The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.
- –the end.
So why do I fear the election might still go to McCain/Palin? – post by cburell
- –the end.
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Polls Show Obama Gaining Among Bush Voters – NYTimes.com
I’ve been thinking about PRAYER more lately. While it still seems as effective as throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, I’ll do it in asking Whatever Is Out There to save the 21st century from DOOM due to the SWING VOTES OF BIGOTS.
God save us all if Americans vote based on a COLOR instead of a BRAIN.
And the funny thing? It seems the CHURCHGOERS – a certain type, anyway – are the ones most likely to be the RACISTS. Don’t you see that too? Mainly poor, uneducated white people.
I’m on my knees, Jesus. Tell them AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE GOD’S CHILDREN TOO.
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Of potential concern for Mr. Obama’s strategists, however, a third of voters surveyed say they know someone who does not support Mr. Obama because he is black.
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Elana Schor: Sarah Palin won’t be the Republican nominee in 2012 | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
A laundry list of reasons Palin 2012 is not as realistic as the pundits make it sound. Nice analysis. Possibly because it’s from the UK instead of the FOX or CNN.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
- Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/24/2008
- Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/29/2008
- Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/27/2008
- Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/26/2008
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