that Martha Coakley did not win tonite! disappointed that that "Sarah Palin in jockey shorts" took over the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's renowned seat. Hard to believe!! Now there really is no reason to live here. The great state of Massachusetts has gone Red!!! Hard to believe!!
This has had me upset since last week when i read it on the front page of the paper Sunday morning. I just hate the fact that we have home-grown terrorists to worry about too.
Secret Service under strain as leaders face more threats - The Boston Globe
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Rep. Joe Wilson- when he yelled out "you lie" when Obama was obviously telling the truth that illegal aliens would Not be covered in this plan. What was he thinking, or not thinking - the dumb ass. Unbelievable! I couldn't believe it - 1st time ever that a president was demeaned like that. but then he is the first black president, so why am I surprised by the knee jerk reaction(racist) such as was displayed by the rep. of S.C.
And as always, Obama kept his cool and continued on with his speech and an exceptionally good one i might add; tho i thought there were a couple of remarks that could have been edited out that left him open for ridicule - like when he said it needed some work and there were the ensuing snickers. But all in all I think he defended this bill and the need for this bill very well. Especially when he brought up "moral principles" and the character of our country. well i'll let you watch it yourselves, if you missed it.
What I found interesting as he spoke was watching who stood up and who didn't, those applauding and those who frowned or had forced mocking smiles. And especially hard was watching Vicki Kennedy holding back tears as Obama spoke of Ted Kennedy.
Now go call your Congressmen, what are you waiting for - we need health care reform and we need it Now!
And for Much better coverage of all this go over to Keith Olbermanns Countdown.
Keith you're my hero.
Go read this great story in the rolling stone about the self proclaimed maverick.
And read in the Anchorage Times about the maverick's lying side kick.
(Gov. Palin, read the report. It says you violated the ethics law.)
And from over at Crockheads : The Cranky Old Man Report: McCain's Transition Chief Lobbied for Hussein. The ineptness of the McCain campaign is unbelievable. Now it comes out that the head of his transition team, William Timmons, headed up a lobbying team for Saddam Hussein right after the first Iraq war. The same guy who vetted Governor Barracuda must have been in charge of vetting Timmons for his job.
by Christopher Buckley
Christopher Buckley’s books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. His journalism, satire, and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI.
The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November.
As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
Obama-supporting nun, 106, shocked by fame.
American based in Rome is ‘startled and a bit anguished’ by the attention.
ROME - A 106-year-old American nun who became a minor celebrity after she appeared on television saying she is voting for Barack Obama is "startled and a bit anguished" by all the attention she is getting, her order said on Monday.
Sister Cecilia Gaudette, born on March 25, 1902, has decided to step out of the limelight and back into the comfortable obscurity that characterized her life before the media discovered that she will be one of the oldest Americans to vote.
"Sister Cecilia is tired, she is startled and she is even a bit anguished by all the attention," Sister Carmen Aymar, a deputy superior general at the convent in Rome where the voting nun lives, told Reuters by phone.
Now she wants to be left alone," Aymar said.
After Gaudette appeared on CBS News in the United States and on BBC radio saying she was voting for the first time since 1952 and that it would be for Obama, the convent was besieged by calls from reporters and media outlets across the world.
"I'm encouraged by Senator Obama," she told the BBC. "I've never met him, but he seems to be a good man with a good private life. That's the first thing. Then he must be able to govern."
'Very proud to be an American'The story of Sister Cecilia, who was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and voting by absentee ballot over the Internet, was picked up by Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, and other media.
"She is very proud to be an American," Sister Aymar told Reuters. "She keeps an American flag in her office."
Aymar said Gaudette, a retired teacher of music and art, has been living in Rome for the past 50 years and before that taught in France and the United States.
"She didn't know she could vote by mail or internet and after someone told her she could, she decided to do it," Aymar said.
Gaudette said the last time she voted in an American presidential election was in 1952 and she cast her ballot for President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican.
Gaudette is hard of hearing and her questions are relayed by another nun. She wears thick glasses and still uses a large, upright black enamel typewriter.
"But she is a very determined woman and still very lucid," said Aymar, who like Gaudette, is a member of the Religious Sisters of Jesus and Mary.
Gaudette said her hope for the future included peace in the world and an end to the war in Iraq.
(and I plagerized - blatently stolen from Crockhead.)
The Republican legislature in Alaska has released its investigator's report on Sarah Palin's actions in trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired and can be read in its entirety here. In short, the investigation concludes that Governor Barracuda acted unethically in abusing her power, and that she lied about being afraid of the ex-brother-in-law. Specifically with the claims of fear, the report states:
"I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins' real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family related reasons."
Obviously, the wingnuts who have been showing up at McCain/Palin rallies and yelling "shoot him" at the mention of Obama's name are not going to be deterred from continuing to support Palin over some little technicality like abuse of power, unethical behavior and lying. I doubt, however, that the release of this report is going to convince many undecided or Obama-leaning voters that they should now support McCain/Palin.
It is amazing how the wheels have come off of the McCain campaign over the last two weeks; caused not only by the economic news but by McCain's own impulsive mis-judgment. It has gotten so bad that reliable conservatives like Chris Buckley, son of Mr. Conservative, William F. Buckley, and still a columnist for the Buckley magazine, The National Review has announced that for the first time in his life, he's voting for a Democrat. This by a former McCain supporter, by the way.
On September 9, I wrote in a blog post "Slowly, slowly, the Palin balloon will deflate as the vetting McCain did not do before his impulsive selection gets done by the press. Don't panic Obama supporters." I'm not always right, but this time I was.
It's not over until all the votes are counted. But it is certainly looking good if you are an Obama supporter.
No handshake from McCain; but what was worse is when he referred to Obama as "that one"!!! that one??? that one what? shades of racism/prejudice. incredible/unbelievable! He most certainly is out of touch/erratic- not who i want in the room talking to world leaders. I want the smartest guy in the room to be our next Presidant - Barack Obama!
YES!!!
(Now I hope that the Republican swiftboating doesn't change things - I hope Americans are smarter than that and I hope we start fighting back and expose the real(not imagined) scandals that McCain has been involved in.)
Unbelievable!
I watched the speeches last night after the landslide victory of Barack Obama.
His speech was spot on - inspirational and telling it like it is.
The Clinton's speech - well, it was more of the same - posturing. Don't get me wrong; I actually like them. Was undecided between her and Barack for awhile and I liked Bill (liked him as president(economy good, no war), liked his personality - he is a Leo and he plays a mean saxophone).
But last night I made up my mind.
I'm just a little nervous because I'm not sure the Democrats can "bring it". Why are the Republicans so savvy/masters at disguise/i mean marketing. They get the moral majority bandwagon going there in the middle lands and it's all over for us idealists.
But then sometimes I can't even believe that we actually have a woman and a black man running. So who knows maybe the unbelievable can happen if you dream.; maybe things can happen if you dream.
(1/29/05 Footnote: Matt over at Nova Dad has a great post up on his Republican take on Obama, please go read. )
Subject: Reagan on Bush (aka "Shrub")
This is a direct quote from the just-published REAGAN DIARIES
It is dated May 17, 1986.
'A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around
this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who
lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking
shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real
job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll
hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.'
