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Darrel wrote:And, where are the media?
All these months gone by and I still don't know a damn thing
about Obama except that he can give a good speech."

DOUG
Obama's ENTIRE pitch is that he did not vote for the authorization of the war at at time when he was not able to vote for the authorization of the war.

Once in the Senate, he voted along with Hillary.

The GOP will tear him apart.

Gotta love the random things you find around the internets:

<Guillotine>: The problem with being Democrat is that if you vote for Obama, you're sexist. And if you vote for Hilary, you're racist. Its easy being a Republican. No matter what you're retarded.

Another quote from Republican rep. Mark Davis (quoted above saying "The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they'd take it off the shelf"):

"It's no mystery," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). "You have a very unhappy electorate, which is no surprise, with oil at $108 a barrel, stocks down a few thousand points, a war in Iraq with no end in sight and a president who is still very, very unpopular. He's just killed the Republican brand."

Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst of congressional politics, said: "The math is against them. The environment is against them. The money is against them. This is one of those cycles that if you're a Republican strategist, you just want to go into the bomb shelter." LINK

Darrel wrote:Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst of congressional politics, said: "The math is against them. The environment is against them. The money is against them. This is one of those cycles that if you're a Republican strategist, you just want to go into the bomb shelter."

That's the incredible thing, though. The November election should be a landslide. It should be a formality. There should be nobody stupid enough to vote to continue this self-mutilation. Yet I'm convinced it'll be a slugfest.

CNN’s Kyra Phillips spoke to some Iraqi soldiers (not American troops) about whether they were following U.S. politics.

“Just to be perfectly clear here, I did ask them are you following any of the republican candidates?…Do you want to talk about John McCain? Within that whole group, not one wanted a republican in the US presidential seat. They were all for a democrat. They were all for that type of change because they said they were living a republican war.”

See here.

"In his first visit to the Wall Street Journal’s D.C. bureau, Rupert Murdoch told staffers Friday that he would put more resources into Washington coverage and take on the New York Times, while reassuring them that he is not a "conservative” pushing an agenda in the news pages. –snip-

Doesn’t everyone feel better? After all, Murdoch had also stated that FOX News would be “Fair and Balanced” and would be, in fact, the ONLY non-biased news channel in America. And that turned out to be TOTALLY true." LINK

Stephen Colbert on our economic situation:

"Nation, it’s tempting to say that our economy is in the crapper. But I think that’s unfair. It is past the crapper, down the tubes, out the illegal runoff pipe into the ocean where lobsters are feeding on it."

LINK

"President George W. Bush said on Wednesday he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the "high cost in lives and treasure" and declared that the United States was on track for a major victory there." --WASHINGTON (Reuters)

"In his Economic Club of New York speech, Bush urged the businessmen and women in the audience not to overreact. And if you've ever seen the footage of him reading to the children on 9/11, you know one thing this guy doesn't do is overreact.'"
-- Jimmy Kimmel

FAUX NEWS Headquarters Has Bedbugs


In an interview on Monday, Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee "caught a bug and showed it to us." An exterminator determined that the incursion was limited to a "very small area in the newsroom." But the source of the bugs was not determined until the exterminator inspected the homes of about 20 employees. Mr. Vandeveer said the exterminator later described one employee's home as having "the worst infestation he had seen in 25 years in the business."

See here.

Bill O’Reilly has one of his “producers” confront Arianna Huffington over cherry-picked comments left by an anonymous person on HuffPo.

see clip here

Arianna responds:

"I find it laughable to be lectured on hate speech by Bill O’Reilly, who has done as much if not more than anyone else in the media to debase the public dialogue. He spews hate as readily as he breathes. It’s his lifeblood."

Bill Maher

New Rule:

"Old soldiers never die, they get young soldiers killed. This week John McCain said for the third time in two days, that Iran, a Shi’ite stronghold was training al Qaeda a militant Sunni organization. That the Hatfields of the Muslim world would be working with the McCoys is so not true even Dick Cheney hasn’t said it. Now the press, which loves McCain because he feeds them BBQ, dismissed this as just one of those senior moments. Not to worry, he’s only going to have his finger on the nuclear trigger. But it’s not just a ‘gaffe,’ it’s what McCain really thinks. And therein lies the paradox of this campaign: McCain’s strength is really his weakness. He’s a warrior who’s dumb about war. Whoever read The Art of War, chapter three of The Art of War says, “Know thy enemy.” And John McCain plainly doesn’t. He thinks the solution is our presence in the Middle East. No, the problem is our presence in the Middle East. That’s why I don’t care if John McCain is better than Bush on global warming or torture or campaign finance, because he’s exactly the same as Bush on the war. They both don’t get the same thing. As long as we’re setting up shop in the heart of the Arab world, we’re not keeping America safer. Bin Laden goes ballistic over cartoons in Danish newspapers, and Goober and Grandpa want to put up a Hooters in Fallujah. They don’t “hate us for our freedom,” they hate us for our fiefdom. Winning the War on Terror comes down to this: what will make us safer from pissed off Arab teenagers who are willing to die? There are a number of good answers to that question, but occupying their land for the next 100 years is not one of them.

Some people look at McCain and see a tough guy who is going to protect us from the “Islamofascists.” I look at him and see a walking Tom Clancy action figure who is going to get us all killed. And yet a new poll shows that a majority of Americans believe John McCain is the candidate best qualified to answer when that red phone rings at 3:00 a.m., because he’d be up anyway, trying to pee. Yes, 55% of Americans think it’s McCain who should answer that phone, because they know John McCain is a warrior. He will not waver or hesitate. He will answer that phone and give the order that sends men to die and it will turn out to be a recording asking him if he’s happy with his mortgage."

LINK

WASHINGTON — President Bush contended that Iran has "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people" and that the Islamic Republic could be hiding a secret program.

Iran, however, has never publicly proclaimed a desire for nuclear weapons and has repeatedly insisted that the uranium enrichment program it's operating in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads. ...

"The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. link

Last summer, in an excellent FDL thread about Iraq by Christina Siun, we were joined by an Iraqi pediatrician named Dr. Maryam who showed up in the comments at Christina’s invitation. I wrote about the experience here:

It was sort of heartbreaking to watch our earnest, sincere readers come rushing into the fray insisting that they’re (we’re) nice Americans who want to stop the war, but to a woman like Maryam, who has been dealing with the consequences of American imperialism since the first round of American bombings in 1991, there are no nice Americans. Democrats or Republicans, we are all complicit in what has amounted to genocide.

Maryam:

"As I am an Iraki and as my job is to treat children maimed and deformed by the weapons your country uses and then prevented me from getting the medicines used to treat those cancers you will forgive me if I tell you that you too are telling lies to yourself. What we know is that when it comes murdering Iraki civilians that there is no difference between the cynical and corrupt party called the Democrats and the cynical and corrupt party called the Republicans. Both are infected with the belief that America has the right to behave as it wishes especially when the people being killed are not white."

link

Zbigniew Brzezinski On Getting Out Of a Foolish War

"The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for “staying the course” draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush’s and Sen. John McCain’s forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of “falling dominoes” that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.

Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush’s obsession with the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars — not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States’ world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing — the answer almost certainly would have been an unequivocal “no.”

Nor do the costs of this fiasco end there. The war has inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East and South Asia while fragmenting Iraqi society and increasing the influence of Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Baghdad offers ample testimony that even the U.S.-installed government in Iraq is becoming susceptible to Iranian blandishments.

In brief, the war has become a national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States. Ending it is thus in the highest national interest."

LINK

"One day he (Inhofe) walked into the office and said, "I just rode up the elevator with Barney Frank (an openly gay congressman). And I told him that I've never met a real queer before. I hope I didn't catch AIDS."

--Mike Miller, who worked for Inhofe in the early Nineties.

Religious leader James Dobson on John McCain early last month:

"Should Sen. McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life."

Dobson’s. Focus on the Family action just sent a “special alert” to its backers, with the subject line: “Dr. Dobson: ‘I Will Certainly Vote’.” The alert says:

"Dr. James Dobson told Sean Hannity on Sunday night he is going to vote in the November election – ending weeks of speculation that he would sit on the sidelines over his policy disagreements with the two major parties’ candidates for the White House." --LINK

DAR
"Speculation?!"

From Bill Maher's HBO show Real Time (paraphrased from memory):

"If I'm going to pay $4.00 a gallon for gas, I want the TV at the pump to show porn. That way I won't be the only one at the pump taking it in the ass."

"If any good can come out of this [pain at the pump] mess, it would be an understanding — by corporations, consumers and government — that the era of cheap oil is truly over. With that, the country could finally focus on developing clean alternative energy sources and reducing oil consumption, a strategy that has served other countries well."

-- New York Times editorial

Reminds me of this exchange:

Q Is one of the problems with this, and the entire energy field, American lifestyles? Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

MR. FLEISCHER: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country....

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one historian. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst