Comedian Sarah Silverman is the foul-mouthed spokeswoman for a grass-roots movement to have Jews travel to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama for president. Named “The Great Schlep,” the “movement” gets started with a funny, irreverent four-minute video hosted by Silverman. (Note: some profanity — you’ve been warned)
The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.
John McCain might be wishing he hadn’t stood up David Letterman as the first visible act of his “campaign suspension.”
After establishing in detail McCain’s history as a war hero and his lack of animosity toward him, Dave asks, “What happened to that guy?” From there, it just gets better and better, with Letterman filling the time he would have spent interviewing McCain instead wondering what’s going on inside McCain headquarters. He even gets a little help toward the end from Keith Olbermann.
Letterman: It makes me believe something’s going haywire with the campaign…Here’s what you do when you’re running, ah, for campaign in the middle of an economic crisis and it’s about to crater…Here’s what you do. You’re a senator. You handle what you need to handle. Don’t suspend your campaign. You let your campaign go on, shouldered by your vice presidential nominee. That’s what you do. You don’t quit. Or is that really, is that really a good thing to do?
Paul Schaeffer: We don’t know.
Letterman: See what I’m saying? This is a guy who doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him. So all of a sudden we’re suspending the campaign? …You say I gotta get back to Washington to save this country — good for you — and while I’m gone, campaigning in my stead is my great running mate from the state of Alaska, Sarah Palin. And she comes out and campaigns. What happened there? What’s the problem? Where is she? Why isn’t she doing that?
Paul Schaeffer: She is a good looking babe. You gotta admit that.
Letterman: (laughing) Exactly! That’s the point I’m trying to make. So I don’t know, but you heard it here first: this just doesn’t smell right. This is not the way a tested hero behaves.
Transcript from the Sept. 19 edition of “Countdown” on MSNBC:
Earlier, we speculated that John McCain had suspended his campaign in order to postpone, perhaps indefinitely, the debate between his vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, and the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, because Palin was not ready.
Another possibility is that the McCain campaign is trying to deflect attention from a new report in the National Enquirer that appears to confirm that Palin had an affair 12 years ago with her husband’s business partner:
No less than three members of the man’s family including one by sworn affidavit have claimed that Sarah Palin engaged in an extramarital affair with husÂband Todd’s former business partner, Brad Hanson.
These sources have named Hanson as Palin’s secret love, and say their affair nearly wrecked both their marriages.
Hanson owned a snowmobile dealership with Palin’s husband Todd, who immediately dissolved the partnership after he heard stories about the affair, which occurred around 1996, according to the sources. At the time, Palin was mayor of Wasilla.
Palin has vehemently deÂnied cheating on her husÂband, and Hanson insisted to The NATIONAL ENQUIRER that he was never romantically inÂvolved with the 44-year-old Republican vice presidenÂtial candidate.
However, Hanson family insider, Jim Burdett, has gone on the record and passed a rigorous polygraph test, revealing deÂtails of the affair to The NATIONAL ENQUIRER in a world exclusive interview.
Burdett is a former brother-in-law of Hanson’s estranged wife Carolyn’s brother, Craig Batton, and still speaks with many family members.
Of course, no one takes the the Enquirer seriously, but their recent track record does include a report that John Edwards had an affair that appeared dubious at first but then proved to be accurate.
Diageo/Hotline tracking poll:
Obama/Biden 47%
McCain/Palin 43%
Undec 8%
– Obama’s closed the gap among white women. The candidates are now tied 45-45%; one week ago (in the survey completed 9/17), McCain led this group by 10 points (49-39%).
– The enthusiasm gap has grown in Obama’s favor: 59% of Obama supporters are enthusiastic about their ticket, while just 47% of McCain supporters say the same. Yesterday, the poll showed a 10% Obama lead.
– McCain captures 23% of RVs who disapprove of Pres. Bush.
Is the real intent of the suspension of the McCain campaign yesterday a ploy to delay or even cancel Sarah Palin’s vice presidential debate with Joe Biden next week? Why else would the campaign suddenly start negotiating the debate schedule, which has been set for months, by asserting that McCain will unilaterally cancel the first presidential debate tomorrow unless Congress and the Bush administration reach a deal on the Wall Street bailout plan?
If Palin is not ready to debate Joe Biden now, how can she be ready to be vice president in 40 days?
Late yesterday, after John McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to work on a deal to resolve the Wall Street crisis — despite the fact that he’d been absent from Congress for the 10 days or so since the crisis broke, and despite the fact that Capitol Hill negotiators were close to working out a deal without his input — his campaign operatives announced that McCain would skip the debate with Barack Obama tomorrow night if a deal had not been reached on the bailout plan.
Within hours, if not minutes, McCain aides then floated the idea of re-scheduling the debates around their own artificial delay by postponing the vice presidential debates, which had been scheduled for a week from today:
I knew there was a great joke in all this McCain stuff somewhere.
“As of today, I am officially bailing out of the debate,” Sen. McCain told reporters in Washington today. “And I invite Sen. Obama to join me in this bailout effort.”
Sen. McCain said he would be putting together what he called “a comprehensive debate bailout package,” which could include bailing out of the other two scheduled debates as well…
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said that she would join in her running mate’s bailout effort by bailing out of her debate with Delaware senator Joseph Biden.
In a campaign stop in Michigan, Gov. Palin detailed a series of bold initiatives, including building a twenty-foot-high fence between her and the press.
Failure of leadership: Telegraphing panic over the economic crisis to his fear-addicted followers, John McCain has announced he is suspending his campaign and that he wants to delay the debate Friday night:
If John McCain can’t juggle a debate with Barack Obama while simultaneously working on these economic issues, how can he possibly handle the multiple world crises that inevitably come with the presidency?
Republican presidential nominee John McCain this afternoon said he would suspend his presidential campaign tomorrow to return to Washington and help reach agreement on a plan to solve the financial crisis on Wall Street, and called for a delay of Friday night’s presidential debate.
“It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration’s proposal,” McCain said in a brief statement to reporters. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”
It’s not as if John McCain has announced any sort of definitive measure to resolve the crisis that he needs to be in Washington to push — or that he has a record of providing leadership on the economy in the past. (Quite the opposite, in fact. He was an advocate of the deregulation that underlies the failures.)
More importantly, if John McCain can’t juggle a debate with Barack Obama while simultaneously working on these economic issues, how can he possibly handle the multiple world crises that inevitably come with the presidency?
It’s likely that what’s really going on here is that the campaign has seen some dire polling numbers and they want to push the debate forward, with the hope that the issues that are dragging him down have turned around.
Let’s hope the Obama campaign pushes back hard on this one.
With his approval rating as low as 19 percent, and with the exception of Dick Cheney, George Bush is the person least likely to reassure the nation about the current economic crisis.He will nonetheless address the nation tonight about the crisis, but it is questionable how yet another stumbling, incoherent poorly read lecture from him is useful just now:
White House officials said Bush’s speech would dwell on the financial crisis. Press secretary Dana Perino said the president wants to tell the American people how the crisis affects them and help them understand the depth of the problem.
Those of us on the West Coast are lucky that his address will be live at 6 p.m. here, so that it won’t preempt anything really important — like “America’s Got Talent” on NBC, “90210” on Fox or, especially, and aptly, “David Blaine Dive of Death” on ABC.
Besides, the content of the address is so predictable that there’s no need to tune in. In a nutshell, here is what he’ll say: “It’s not my fault. In fact, it’s everyone’s fault but mine, especially including you ‘borrowers.'” No doubt, he’ll even throw his base — fatcat CEOs overboard — since he’s not running again and no longer needs them.
What a farce.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
