Unlimited McCain Roast

[tmiller51]

McCain was supposed to have appeared on David Letterman tonight but canceled at the last minute because of his "suspended campaign". This didn't seem to go over too well with Dave who spends several minutes tearing into McCain: YouTube Video

Oh and he also called in Olbermann to substitute for McCain.

Tim

[Betsy]

We watched this last night and it was fantastic. About halfway through the show, Dave finds out that McCain, who called him personally to cancel saying he had to hurry back to Washington, was actually down the hall doing an interview with Katie Couric at the same time Olbermann was filling in. He was PISSED. They showed a feed of McCain with Couric and Letterman shouted "I've got a question for you! Need a ride to the airport?!"

[Doug]

DOUG
The Letterman-McCain thing was all over the TV news shows this morning. A lot of people are thinking McCain is just being hypocritical about this. WE know he is, but his poor handling of his cancellation with Letterman is making people think it is all just PR moves.

[L.Wood]

.

[Dardedar]

Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal:

"Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to “find out what went wrong” on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.

And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation — many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin."

LINK

[Dardedar]

DAR
Wow.

McCain's Miserable Record of Not Supporting America's Troops and Veterans

by: Brandon Friedman
Wed Oct 01, 2008 at 11:13:26 AM EDT

On Friday, September September 26, 2008, John McCain said the following:

"I know the veterans, I know them well, and I know that they know that I'll take care of them, and I have been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans, and I love them, and I'll take care of them, and they know that I'll take care of them."

This statement--made near the end of Friday's debate--immediately infuriated veterans across America and overseas. In fact, Senator John McCain has a very clear, long, and illustrious history of not supporting troops and veterans one bit.

Now, I've seen legislative examples, I've watched the YouTubes, and I've lived this lack of support in more ways than one. But now, for the first time, I've tried to compile as much of this non-support as possible into a single document--from a variety of sources--complete with links, quotes, and video clips. It's something that readers often ask me about, so I hope this helps. I'm sure there's a lot missing, so feel free to add more in the comments. But for now, I think this should give us a good start in exposing John McCain's abysmal of record of supporting troops and veterans.

See it all, exquisitely referenced, HERE.

[Dardedar]

DAR
Interesting background on the word "Maverick," from The New York Times:

Who You Callin’ a Maverick?

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: October 4, 2008

There’s that word again: maverick. In Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican candidate, used it to describe herself and her running mate, Senator John McCain, no fewer than six times, at one point calling him “the consummate maverick.”

But to those who know the history of the word, applying it to Mr. McCain is a bit of a stretch — and to one Texas family in particular it is even a bit offensive.

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

This Maverick’s son, Maury Jr., was a firebrand civil libertarian and lawyer who defended draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society. He served in the Texas Legislature during the McCarthy era and wrote fiery columns for The San Antonio Express-News. His final column, published on Feb. 2, 2003, just after he died at 82, was an attack on the coming war in Iraq.

Terrellita Maverick, sister of Maury Jr., is a member emeritus of the board of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

LINK

[Dardedar]

DAR
Everyone makes verbal gaffes. The bizarre part to me is that he didn't even notice. Even he doesn't listen to his own material:

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/jo ... my-fellow-

prisoners.

[Doug]

'Economists For McCain' Trash McCain's New Mortgage Plan

Many of the professional economists who formally endorsed John McCain's economic plan are expressing bewilderment with his most recent proposal to rectify the home mortgage crisis.

In interviews with the Huffington Post, roughly a dozen of McCain's economist supporters said they disagreed with the Senator's recent proposal -- for the government to buy distressed mortgages at face value from banks and renegotiate them with homeowners. Several viewed it as a gimmick, driven mostly by political circumstance. Only one pro-McCain economist spoke up in favor of the plan.

"This is just political gamesmanship," said Robert H. Heidt, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law. "The bill is wildly over-ambitious in trying to rescue home buyers from the downturn in real estate appreciation. It's costs would never end. I will end up voting for McCain but this is ridiculous."

Added George Viksnins, a retired professor of economics at Georgetown University: "Even though I support McCain I think this is an ill-considered program. This was something to get press time and face time, and that is the problem with our political system. This was done as a sound bite and without analysis."


See here.

[tmiller51]

Now McCain, being a member of the party of "personal responsibility", wants to give breaks to retirees who made boneheaded financial decisions:

Senator John McCain proposed on Friday that investors should be given a temporary reprieve from a rule forcing them to withdraw from their 401(k)’s and I.R.A.’s after the age of 70, so that they might be shielded from the devastating plunge of the stock market in recent weeks.

Nobody who has managed their retirement account wisely should be heavily invested in the stock market when they are 70 years old.

Tim

[Dardedar]

DAR
I didn't know McCain was such a klutz in the sky:

***
Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.

By Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

October 6, 2008

John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.

McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.

FOR THE RECORD:
The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.

The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.

In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.

After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.

LINK

[Dardedar]

[Dardedar]

Pro-McCain Group Dumping 28 Million Terror Scare DVDs in Swing States

70 newspapers in swing states have been paid to distribute Obsession this weekend and next, which means not all the DVDs have been delivered yet. Check the list at the end of this post to see if your newspaper is one of them, and let them know how you feel about their participation in this shameless propaganda campaign.)

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear.

The program was originally shown on Fox News in the days leading up to the 2006 mid-term elections, and far right-wing activist David Horowitz toured the country screening the film on college campuses during 2007. Mainstream religious groups have called Obsession biased and divisive. It cuts between scenes of Nazi rallies and footage of Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers.

...
(UPDATE 9/30 - On Sept. 26, four days after the Dayton Daily News in Ohio distributed Obsession to its subscribers, there was a cowardly attack on three hundred American Muslims at a Dayton mosque. Unknown assailants, described by a witness as two white men, sprayed a toxic substance through a window of the mosque into a room where infants and children were waiting as their parents conducted Ramadan prayers. Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has the full story, including excerpts from a graphic e-mail sent out by a family member of children who were gassed. Dayton police are refusing to treat the attack as a hate crime.

LINK


See also:

Who Put Hate in My Sunday Paper?

[Dardedar]

Debate Summary:

[Doug]

Joe the Plumber is: a) not a licensed plumber; b) not really named "Joe," although he does go by that name; and c) a long-time, well-connected Republican.
And McCain got his last name wrong during the debate.

=======================

Turns out that Joe Wurzelbacher from the Toledo event is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher of Milford, Ohio. Who’s Robert Wurzelbacher? Only Charles Keating’s son-in-law and the former senior vice president of American Continental, the parent company of the infamous Lincoln Savings and Loan. The now retired elder Wurzelbacher is also a major contributor to Republican causes giving well over $10,000 in the last few years.

See here.

[Dardedar]

DAR
The most emailed photo on yahoo right now. Note, this is an actual photo, it is not retouched:



There is looking presidential, and then there is this:

[Dardedar]

Joe the Plumber is: a) not a licensed plumber; b) not really named "Joe," although he does go by that name; and c) a long-time, well-connected Republican.
And McCain got his last name wrong during the debate.

DAR
That's all small potatoes. It gets better, much much better:

"According to Olberman, Joe the non-Plumber makes about $40,000 year, he wasn't trying to buy his boss's business, his boss's business isn't for sale, and it makes about $100,000/year not the $250-280,000/year JTP stated."

See the Olbermann clip here.

Bonus. Joe the plumber doesn't pay his taxes as it is. He has a $1,100 tax lean against him right now. Under Obama's plan, Joe the lying-full-of-shit plumber, would save about $500 a year.

D.

[Doug]

Under Obama's plan, Joe the lying-full-of-shit plumber, would save about $500 a year.

DOUG
It just keeps getting better! I saw a clip of Joe the Plumber (apparently his middle name is Joseph) admitting that Obama's plan would save him money on taxes.

And he's a registered Republican, of course. In addition, he is registered with Wurzelbacher misspelled by one letter. So if he were a new registrant, he would be ineligible to vote in several states in which Republicans are toughening the voting rules.

JTP also said:

In his interview with Ms. Couric, Mr. Wurzelbacher, who voted Republican in Ohio’s March primary, said that his encounter with Mr. Obama had been prompted by his desire “to ask one of these guys a question, and really corner them and get them to answer a question for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked the question, but I still got a tap dance.”

He added, “He was almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”

Racism, anyone?

[Betsy]

McCain can read the writing on the wall -- he's already making plans to avoid his own watch party and video in his concession speech.

see here

[Dardedar]

"Frankly, neither of your numbers adds up. But I’ve come to see a consistent pattern in Obama's. For the life of me, Senator Straight Talk, I see no such straight thing with yours...
You rail against big government, yet continue to push cockamamie spending plans that make a mockery of it. That's why you're losing right now, Senator McCain.
Not because you don't have the courage of your convictions. But because on economic matters, you have no convictions, period."

--Rightwing Fox News bobble head, Neil Cavuto. LINK