Month: July 2008
Arianna: Crist ‘Made a Downpayment’ on the Vice Presidency by Announcing He’s Getting Married
The subject of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s impending nuptials drew snickers from the crew at “Left, Right and Center,” my favorite weekly political chat show, which is produced by KCRW-FM, in Santa Monica.
The topic was “veep stakes,” and the moment of mirth came after guest host Lawrence O’Donnell, who represents the political center, asked Tony Blankley, the former editor of the Washington Times and the show’s token rightwinger, whether Mitt Romney had made a “downpayment” on the vice presidency by opting to eat his $45 million campaign debt.
Arianna Huffington, who represents the “independent progressive blogosphere” on the show, noted, “Well Gov. Crist also made a downpayment by announcing he’s getting married … So there are downpayments all around being made.”
Republicans really do think people are stupid. Honestly, who really thought this would work — a sudden announcement of marriage that appears to be, because it is, hastily arranged to make Crist a palatable candidate for vice president? It reminds me of George Bush Sr. saying he picked Dan Quayle to be his running mate because Quayle was good-looking and so would get the female vote.
A rough transcript of the exchange follows…
Bush 2007: ‘If [the Iraqis] Were To Say Leave, We Would Leave’ – McCain 2004: ‘It’s Obvious We Would Have To Leave’
Does anything that George Bush and John McCain say matter? Based on this colloquy between Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on “Countdown” last night, apparently not:
“We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.”
— George Bush
OLBERMANN: …The Iraqi government is saying, “Get out,†and President Bush swore, you know, “Some day if they say ‘get out,‘ we‘ll get out.â€
MADDOW: That‘s right. May 2007 in the Rose Garden, Bush said—and I went back and checked the quote directly so I could be sure to directly quote him — “If they were to say leave, we would leave.†Also, for what it‘s worth, in April of 2004, John McCain at the Council on Foreign Relation said, “It is obvious we would have to leave if they asked to us leave.â€
I mean, they told us that the point of invading Iraq was to topple Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was toppled; they told us that the point of staying there after, was to set up a sovereign Iraqi government. Well now, the sovereign Iraqi government is standing up on its hind legs enough to tell us to leave, and we‘re left with this situation where they need another explanation of why we can‘t leave. That‘s the real headline here.
Here’s the question Bush was asked in May 2007, as well as a bit of preamble to the money quote:
Quote du Jour
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of mis-government.
— Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American writer, editor
Of T. Boone Pickens, Al Franken, and Hope for the Planet
T. Boone Pickens has done the impossible. The billionaire Texas oil man changed my father, a man who listens to entirely too much talk radio, from saying that oil alternatives are so much flooey and we should get real and drill in Alaska, to saying we must look beyond oil for our energy future. This commercial did it.
Al Franken was right when he said the Bush Administration is to global warming what Herbert Hoover was to the Great Depression
Pickens is one of many people who believe in the concept of “peak oil.” They state that at some very recent point, like 2005, we reached the top of the bell curve of potential oil reserves on the planet, and it’s downhill from here. They believe we have already used, therefore, more than half of the earth’s oil, and the finite resource will grow only rarer in the years ahead. I — like you probably — think they’re right. And even if we haven’t peaked yet, it’s only a question of when.
T. Boone’s “Pickens Plan” proposes using wind energy to power homes and businesses, and calls the Great Plains, “the Saudi Arabia of wind power.”
A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.
Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.
That’s a lot of money, but it’s a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it’s a bargain.
True that. He also calls for cleaner burning and more efficient natural gas to fuel our cars. Bush’s beloved corn-based ethanol? Puh-lease!
The funny thing is that Pickens isn’t even trying to get through to George W. Bush. He knows a lost cause when he sees it.
Obama’s New Plane: The Real Straight Talk Express
The Obama Campaign Plane (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)
The repainted plane is likely to become a familiar backdrop for the remainder of the campaign. Previously, the campaign plane did not have a distinctive paint scheme.
The front cabin, where Obama travels, has been fitted out with luxury recliner seating. Obama 08 is embroidered on one seat, presumably to be normally occupied by the candidate.
The press cabin is still the normal 3-seats-to-a-row economy class seating.
Oh boo-hoo, you members of the press assigned to the Obama campaign. I suppose you’d rather be with John McCain, eating barbecue, attending meaningless closed “town hall” pep rallies, and taking weekends off. Wait, don’t answer that.
Predictably, Obama is already getting flack over the paint job, which uses his logo and no American flag. It’s like not wearing a lapel pin, critics say.
Except that if he did paint an American flag on his plane, these same idiots would accuse him of undermining the Current Occupant, something he’s quite rightly refused to do in meeting with foreign leaders.
“I think it is very important to recognize that I’m going over there as a U.S. senator. We have one president at a time…” Obama said.
No doubt Obama will remind us of that when he’s in the Oval Office.
Monuments for W: Every American City Should Follow San Francisco’s Lead And Name a Sewage Plant After George Bush
On Election Day this November, voters in San Francisco will vote on a local initiative to rename one of the city’s largest waste treatment plants in honor of George W. Bush.
A national George W. Bush Legacy Project to rename American sewage plants after Bush over the next decade could provide a perfect foil to the surely coming efforts by Bush dead-enders like Karl Rove to rewrite the failed history of the Bush era into a series of triumphs for their Dear Leader.
If the initiative passes — and since the number of Republicans in the city is statistically zero, it very well might — the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant will be forever known as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. It is as fitting a monument to the eight years of the Bush presidency as we can think of, with the possible exception of a naming a garbage dump after him.
The San Francisco effort is the work-product of local activists who came up with the idea in the most grassroots of all settings: over beers. Subsequently, the group set up the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, which handled promotion for the petition drive. On Thursday, the city’s Department of Elections certified that the 7,168 signatures the commission submitted were valid and approved the initiative for the November ballot.
Although the organizers in San Francisco are clear that their effort is satire, this is a cause that grassroots organizers in other cities should consider seriously. This nationwide effort could be similar to, but hopefully more successful than, the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was the brainchild of the anti-government lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is best known for his close associations with corrupt Bush cronies like (now-imprisoned) Jack Abramoff and (perhaps incarcerated one day) Karl Rove.
Florida’s Charlie Crist “Prepared to Accept” Being Gov. if McCain Doesn’t Pick Him for VP
Poor Charlie Crist. The governor of Florida is whining (somebody call Phil Gramm!) to the foreign press about his station in life. At the end of an interview with the Financial Times of London, where Charlie and his girlfriend were celebrating their recent engagement, uh, undertaking a trade mission, he threw in this:
Charlie has shown he’d rather take credit for looking like he cares than actually doing anything meaningful, which makes him the perfect running mate for John McCain
Mr Crist would not be drawn on whether he would accept a White House job. Asked if he had been vetted for the vice-presidency, he said: “No. I can’t talk about it. Since [the post] has not been offered I’m prepared to accept being governor of Florida.”
Hear that? Charlie is manning up and preparing to accept the bitter disappointment of only being governor of the fourth largest state — due to overtake New York in third place by 2010 — if he must.
This guy is showing the GOP stuff of which he is made more and more lately. Earlier in the same interview, Crist said that even though the drilling he welcomes off the Florida coasts would be out in federal waters, only Florida should decide whether to allow it. Because Floridians are, you know, hurting.
“[The current price of gas] is a significant crunch on Florida families,” he said. “And I think the difficult decision that I have to make, as somebody who cares about the environment, is to realise that my fellow Floridians are hurting financially right now.”
And we’ll still be hurting if we drill, we’ll just be hurting and cleaning up oil spills.
The big lie in all this drilling discussion is that it will do anything but benefit oil companies. Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and all the rest will be selling that Florida oil in the world market, most likely to China and India.
But hey, Charlie has shown he’d rather take credit for looking like he cares than actually doing anything meaningful, which makes him the perfect running mate for John McCain. The two of them can enjoy fleecing their contributors right up to November…when Barack Obama wins.
Rice Refuses to Say She’ll Vote for McCain
Hmmm. I thought it was a given she was voting a straight Republican ticket this fall. Evidently not, and the fact that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice isn’t willing to say she will vote for McCain speaks volumes about her party’s candidate.
“Have you decided who to vote for?†CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked in an interview that aired Sunday on “Late Edition.â€
“Wolf, uh, yes,†Rice said.
Asked if she wanted to share her decision, Rice simply responded, “No.â€
In the wide-ranging interview, Rice praised Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign and said having him as the Democratic presidential nominee has been “great for our country.â€
“I do think it says that we’ve come a long way,†she said when asked to respond to comments from her predecessor Colin Powell, who congratulated Obama for knocking down barriers for African Americans.
And as she declined to admit she’s voting for Obama (I assume), Rice made it clear she would never want to be McCain’s number two.
“I tell everybody who will listen … look, I’ve done my part, and I’ve got six months to sprint to the finish, and then I have other things that I want to do,†she said.
Firefighters Appalled at 9/11 Billboards
Firefighters are asking for offensive billboards in the Orlando area, that promote a web site selling a CD, to be taken down. The billboards blame the 9/11 attacks on Democrats while the inane song advertised doesn’t even mention the attacks. Instead, you get little bon mots like this:
Mike Meehan himself — this explains a lot.The Democrat secular progressive move,
political correctness is killing us too.
They want to take the money from the hard workin’ man,
and give it to the lazy folks that don’t give a damn.
And this:
Republicans, we’re not perfect but we know the truth
We uphold the Constitution and the Golden Rule.
We believe a man’s freedom is a God given right,
the USA is the beacon to the whole world in sight.
Just flows, doesn’t it? The songwriter/billboard leaser, Mike Meehan, doesn’t get why people, including fellow Republicans, would be upset over his masterpiece.
“It’s just a silly little billboard,” he said.
The one that features smoke coming out of the building where more than 2,700 people died?
“Well, maybe not silly,” Meehan responded. “But I never thought it would go this far.”
But the International Association of Firefighters doesn’t see it the same way as Meehan and said so in a press release.
Firefighters: “The individual who designed and paid for these billboards deserves scorn. The company that agreed to run them should be ashamed.”
“There’s a big difference between honoring and remembering the fallen – fire fighters and civilians – and shamelessly plastering the image of the burning Twin Towers on a purely political billboard with an offensive statement currying favor for or against a political party. It is offensive to those who died on 9/11. It’s offensive to their families. It’s offensive to those of us in the fire service.
“Debilitating illnesses have stricken fire fighters and others among the 40,000 people – police, building trades, sanitation workers, victims, witnesses and others – who inhaled Ground Zero’s toxic soup of 400 chemicals. Thousands of New York fire fighters have suffered enormously and labor just to breathe. They are living victims who battle violent symptoms of respiratory illness each day.
“A study in 2006 found that more than 12,000 of our members in the International Association of Fire Fighters who work in New York lost 12 years’ worth of lung function in a year following the attacks.
“The individual who designed and paid for these billboards deserves scorn. The company that agreed to run them should be ashamed.”
If you would like to second that emotion, send an email to Mike Meehan at pleasedontvoteforademocrat@yahoo.com and Beech Outdoor Advertising via tricia@beechoutdoor.com.
