Political Hippo Circle Jerk - America, farg YEAH!

[MDS]

damn i thought that was great. they could probably stand to take a week or two off from it, but thats about the funniest thing snl has done since that will ferrell skit where he played the wierd guy and at the gay clothing store.

[Munson]

[Cerevant]

What I don't get, is why someone like McCain can stand up and say, "Those nasty liberals, they want to spend your money and run up the debt.  We want to cut your taxes - that will be so much better for the economy"

...and people don't go, "huh?"  It is the sounds like the old dot-com joke, "we lose money on evey sale, but we'll make it up with volume"

[Diomedes]

some of these are funny

[ice grillin you]

At this point I can't even stomach this shtein.

"We're getting killed on the issues, so we'd better MAKE SH|T UP about Obama to distract people from talking about the issues."

Have some farging respect for yourselves and for the people you're asking to vote for you. fargers.

the great thing about total fiction is that the possibilities are endless

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

Wait, so the Eagles are going to the playoffs?

[PhillyGirl]

Gotta love those Viriginians

Frank talk of Obama and race in Virginia

WHITEWOOD, VA. -- The isolated towns of Virginia's Appalachian coal region are home to strong labor unions and Democratic political machines that date back generations. Yet voters here who eagerly pushed Democrats into the Senate and the governor's office are resisting Barack Obama.

Some Americans say Obama's race and uncommon background make them uncomfortable -- here those people include Democratic precinct chairmen and get-out-the-vote workers. Many Americans receive e-mails falsely calling Obama a Muslim -- here a local newspaper columnist has joked in print that Obama would have the White House painted black and would put Islamic symbols on the U.S. flag.


When Cecil E. Roberts, president of the coal miners union that shapes politics in much of this mountain region, talks to voters, he tells them that their choice is to have "a black friend in the White House or a white enemy." When Charlie Cox, an Obama supporter, hears friends fretting about Obama's race, he reminds them that they pull for the nearby University of Tennessee football team, "and they're black."

Union organizer Jerry Stallard asks fellow coal workers what's more important: improving their work conditions or holding onto their skepticism of Obama's race, culture or religion. "We're all black in the mines," he tells them.

The presidential campaign, in the almost all-white counties of southwestern Virginia, has produced an outcome that few people expected: a frank discussion of race. Voters sometimes sound as if they are reasoning with themselves and working through their own complex views as they talk through the choice they face this November.

"I've never been prejudiced in my life," said Sharon Fleming, 69, the wife of a retired coal miner, who spends hours at the union hall calling voters on behalf of Obama. "My niece married a black, and I don't have a problem with it. Now, I wouldn't want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I'm voting for Obama."

Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton convincingly in the Virginia Democratic primary, but his supporters have known they face a challenge in this part of the state, just as Obama has faced challenges elsewhere among white voters from rural and working-class households.

He took 64% of the primary vote statewide but just 9% here in coal-rich Buchanan County, for instance, and 12% in neighboring Dickenson County. Though he is now the Democratic nominee, many voters are cool to him -- even some of the party's own leaders and precinct captains.

"I haven't found in my precinct one out of five that will vote for Obama," said Tommy Street, the party's vice chairman in Buchanan (pronounced buck-AN-in) County.

Street, 78, counts himself among the doubters, citing Obama's alliance with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He has always voted Democratic, he said, but this year plans to leave the presidential ballot blank.

Some here blame Obama's troubles on his mixed-race background (his mother was a white Kansan, his father a black Kenyan). Others say his journey from Hawaii and Indonesia to Harvard and big-city Chicago politics makes him an oddity.

The challenge facing Obama was on display at a recent Democratic Party dinner at Twin Valley High School in Buchanan County, deep in the mountains, about a two-hour drive from Bristol, the nearest city.

Looking out at about 70 local Democrats as they ate turkey, ham and mashed potatoes from school cafeteria trays, Phil Puckett, a local state senator who backed Clinton in the primary, said he knew that nearly everyone present had voted for Clinton and that many were not necessarily excited about Obama. But he pleaded with them not to believe everything they were hearing about the Illinois senator, and to seize the chance to boot the GOP from the White House.

"Don't miss this opportunity because someone says to you, 'I'm not voting for him because he's Muslim,' " said Puckett. "If there's a word of truth in my body, this guy is a Christian who believes in Jesus Christ."

Ben and Beth Bailey sat in the back and clapped politely, but they remained unpersuaded. They said they were likely to break from their tradition of voting Democratic and might well not vote at all.

Obama "just doesn't seem like he's from America," said Beth Bailey, 25. Ben Bailey, 32, noted that Obama's middle name is Hussein, "and we know what that means."

Beth's father, Josh Viers, is the party's Whitewood precinct chairman, responsible for working the polls and urging Democrats to vote the party line. He came around to backing Obama only recently, and reluctantly.

"Am I racial? Am I prejudiced? No, I'm not," said Viers. Still, he is frustrated that his job is to persuade other Democrats to back a black man.

"Somebody in Buchanan County or in the United States can look at him and say, 'He's not my color,' " said Viers. "Why put yourself in that position? We had a shot four years ago, and the people listened to lies, rumors, negative ads and got us beat. Bush got him a second term, and look what it got us."

Viers said he will do his best to help Obama on election day. But local Democratic leaders said they could not rely on all of their precinct chairs to follow suit.

That is why party officials are relieved that they can rely on another local organization: the United Mine Workers of America.

Virginia, which has not chosen a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Ohio are so close in polls this year that no one can say whether Obama or Republican John McCain is ahead. Both states are central to each campaign's national strategy.

Often, union officials show up at coal mine bathhouses during shift changes, when dozens of workers are getting dressed, to make the case for Obama.

The union portrays him as a friend of the coal industry, and argues that Obama is culturally in step with local workers. Union literature tells them that the Democratic nominee supports gun rights, and the literature attacks McCain for opposing legislation that would make union organizing easier.

"Barack Obama Won't Take Away Your Gun," says one flier. "But John McCain Will Take Away Your Union."

A new 18-minute video that the union is distributing in coal states features Roberts, the union president, talking directly about race as he addresses white workers, many them clad in jeans or denim overalls.

"I could just ignore the fact that Barack Obama is African American," says Roberts, "but I'm not."

Roberts challenges the notion that a believing Christian could base a voting decision on a candidate's ethnicity.

"We go to church, sing our songs, pray, come out and talk about, 'I can't be for an African American, because of the color of his skin,' " Roberts says in the video. His voice rising, he then scolds the crowd: "Can't do that if you believe in the Bible."

Republicans say that they also are aggressively courting coal miners and other union voters in southwest Virginia, but that race is not part of their conversation.

Instead, said McCain spokeswoman Gail Gitcho, voters in the region are being told that Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, are not true friends of the coal industry. That has been the theme of campaign ads that have seized on a recent Biden gaffe in Ohio, when he appeared to oppose the construction of any new coal-fired power plants.

"We certainly don't believe that race has any part in the political discourse," Gitcho said.

But here in Buchanan County, it is unavoidable.

A local newspaper columnist, in a spoof of Obama's platform, wrote in one recent piece that the Democrat would hire the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black (a reference to a pro-Obama song by Ludacris), and divert more foreign aid to Africa so "the Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream."He joked that Obama would replace the 50 stars on the U.S. flag "with a star and crescent logo," an Islamic symbol, and that his policy on drugs would be to "raise taxes to pay for Obama's inner-city political base."

The columnist, Bobby May, is also treasurer of the Buchanan County Republican Party and was listed in a July news release as the county's representative on McCain's Virginia leadership team, though he said his column reflected his views alone, and he denied it was racist.

History suggests that a black candidate could win support here. In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder carried Buchanan and other nearby counties as he became the country's first black elected governor since Reconstruction. Many here recall that Wilder kicked off his campaign in the region and aggressively courted whites.

Obama is expected to do well in Virginia's urban areas and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But to win the state, strategists say, he needs to improve his performance in the southwest counties. For that to happen, volunteers such as Ruby Hale have to strike the right tone with their neighbors.

On some nights, Hale, a retired jewelry store owner, shows up at her Pentecostal church in tiny Rowe with her Toyota truck stacked full of Obama signs and bumper stickers.

"I'll tell them, 'You can't judge a man this way,' that he couldn't help who his father was, and he didn't name himself -- that I am convinced he is a Christian."

Then she tells the potential voter to think it over for a few days. And the conversation often begins again.

peter.wallsten@latimes.com

[Seabiscuit36]

The Real John McCain

[Phanatic]

Obama widens lead in national poll
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/06/poll.of.polls/index.html

Looks like the negative attacks and gutter politics aren't working.

[Phanatic]

Wow...

"Bush has now tied Richard Nixon's worst rating ever, taken in a poll just before he resigned in 1975, and is only 2 points higher than the worst presidential approval rating in history, Harry Truman's 22 percent mark in February 1952," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

[Geowhizzer]

Wow...

"Bush has now tied Richard Nixon's worst rating ever, taken in a poll just before he resigned in 1975, and is only 2 points higher than the worst presidential approval rating in history, Harry Truman's 22 percent mark in February 1952," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Not arguing Bush's lack of popularity, but Nixon resigned in 1974.

[Cerevant]

So, McCain is going to attack Obama for his past associations?
Palin is going to attack Obama for his relationship with an incendiary pastor?


Its going to get ugly folks...

[PhillyPhreak54]

Rolling Stone doing a little bit of Swiftboating?

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

That article, while long, is a scathing indictment of McCain. Some powerful quotes in there.

[Phanatic]

Wow...

"Bush has now tied Richard Nixon's worst rating ever, taken in a poll just before he resigned in 1975, and is only 2 points higher than the worst presidential approval rating in history, Harry Truman's 22 percent mark in February 1952," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Not arguing Bush's lack of popularity, but Nixon resigned in 1974.

Wonder which thing CNN messed up. Maybe just the year.

[Father Demon]

Rolling Stone doing a little bit of Swiftboating?

The thing is, Phreak, when someone wants to paint a picture, all you need to find is "someone" or a couple "someones" that are willing to say some nasty things about a politician.  Anyone that goes on the record with some sort of incredible dirt about a politician has an agenda, whether they are attacking the Dem or the Pub.  You really can't put much faith in what these sources say, because at sometime, they were wronged, and they think this is payback.  It happens to both sides.

Unfortunately, as we saw in the Swiftboating, when you say something enough times, the general moronic public thinks that the sound bits are more important than actually understanding the issues, let alone vote with or against them.