Year: 2008

Obama’s New Plane: The Real Straight Talk Express

Trish

The Obama Campaign Plane (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

Pretty sharp.

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

Jon Ponder

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.

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Florida’s Charlie Crist “Prepared to Accept” Being Gov. if McCain Doesn’t Pick Him for VP

Trish

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

Trish

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.”

“Wolf, uh, yes,” Rice said.

Asked if she wanted to share her decision, Rice simply responded, “No.”

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.”

“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

Trish

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.

Quote du Jour

Jon Ponder

Well, you know, God bless [George Bush], bless his heart, the president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject. And for him to be challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again… At the end of the day, Congress will have passed — honored its responsibility to pass legislation starting with our Department of Defense bill. The president knows it. He needs something to talk about because he has no ideas.

— Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940) on Friday, July 18, 2008

Jane Mayer, Author of ‘The Dark Side,’ on Terror Politics And War Crimes

Jon Ponder

A Former Condi Adviser Told Mayer That After 9/11 ‘Fear And Anxiety Were Exploited by Zealots And Fools’

In this interview with Steve Clemons, editor of The Washington Note, Jane Mayer discusses David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, whom she profiled in the New Yorker last year and who plays a central role in her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, which Trish wrote about this week.
Any efforts to charge Bush officials with war crimes will become moot later this year when Bush issues blanket pardons to all his henchmen, probably on Christmas Eve, just as his father did in 1992.
The fact that hardly anyone has heard of David Addington is no accident. He shares his boss’s fetish for secrecy as well as his belief in the imperial presidency.

The excerpt in the following transcript comes about 11 minutes into the interview. The quote mentioned by Mayer and Clemens is the last line in Mayer’s book. It comes from Phillip Zelikow, a former counselor to Condoleeza Rice, who attempted to explain what went wrong within the administration after the attacks on September 11 this way: “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

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Poll: Homophobia Lobby’s Anti-Marriage Amendment Lags in California

Jon Ponder

51% Oppose; 42% in Favor – Only 7% Are Undecided

A new Field Poll shows that 42 percent of California voters say they will vote for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative sponsored by the national anti-gay lobby that would amend the California Constitution to revoke the right of gay people to marry, while 51 percent say they plan to vote against it, according to a report in the Mercury News:With the state GOP nearly bankrupt and without Schwarzenegger or McCain available for campaigning, supporters of Prop 8 will have to rely on the fatcats at the national homophobia organizations to fork over millions for television advertising in California.

The poll showed a California sharply divided over a constitutional ban — along the lines of geography, gender, race, age, religious belief and political affiliation. But it’s also a California where Proposition 8 supporters may have a hard time winning in November. Just 7 percent of voters were undecided, a strikingly small amount so long before Election Day, leaving relatively few voters to sway.

“Very few initiatives in the history of the Field Poll have started out behind and come from behind to be approved,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. “The fact that (Proposition 8) is behind does not bode well for its chances.”

Mercury News also reports that “[women], older baby boomers and residents of coastal California — particularly the Bay Area — were among those most hostile to the proposed ban. Protestants, Latinos, residents of inland counties and people in their 40s and over age 65 were the most likely to favor it.”

At least one professional advocate of bigotry toward gays was quick to downplay the poll results. “Historically, the Field Poll has understated the support for upholding the definition of marriage,” Jennifer Kerns, a spokeswoman for ProtectMarriage.com, told the Mecurty News. “The reality is that the vast majority of Californians support the definition of marriage as between a man and woman.”

One factor that may help quash Prop 8 is the fervor in California to elected a Democratic president this year. Yesterday, a Field Poll found that Barack Obama leads John McCain in California 54 to 30 percent. Obama also holds a 46 point lead over McCain (64 percent to 18 percent) among independents, the fastest growing voter group in the state.

McCain — whose authority on “protecting marriage” should be tarnished because he left his first wife Carol to marry an heiress worth $100 million after Carol became disabled in an accident — has come out in favor of Prop 8. But unless his poll numbers improve exponentially, it is unlikely he will spend much time in California campaigning for the initiative. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has announced that he is against the amendment.

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