Reactions to story from Daily Kos: State of the Nation

• 

  CAN THEY TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYF**KINGTHING?

  http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=11240
  87 days ago in Balloon Juice · Authority: 1,011

  Jesus flipping christ. I get back from dinner, check memeorandum, and find out Palin and McCain are lying about the god damned jet. They never sold it on e-bay, and they sold if for a loss. These are such stupid things to lie about, so easy to check,
• 

  Getting Real

  http://www.mahablog.com/2008/09/05/getting-real-2/
  87 days ago in The Mahablog · Authority: 225

  Pulling back the curtain on the Republican fantasy machine. CBS News: On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience
• 

  Are they cheap, broke, or understaffed?

  http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/09/are_they_cheap_broke_o...
  87 days ago in A Blog Around The Clock · Authority: 472

  Are they cheap, broke, or understaffed? Category: Politics We know that the GOP has been incapable of and uninterested in governing for about half a century now. We know they have run on personality, not issues since at least 1980, since they have no
• 

  Republicans story engine creaking to a halt

  http://listics.com/200809054308
  87 days ago in Listics · Authority: 87

  McCains presentation at the RNC included the image of Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, CA on the big screen behind him. TPM offers speculation about the irrelevancy. A soldiers funeral flag folding ceremony was revealed by CBS to be stock
• 

  Contextless Links

  http://www.jordoncooper.com/2008/09/18/contextless-links-403...
  74 days ago in jordoncooper.com · Authority: 109

  Maybe it is time to play offense :: The Bush administration, the Fed and Congress, meanwhile, continue to focus on the immediate crises, with little attention to the underlying reasons that the economy has gotten into this mess — a stagnation of incomes, an explosion of debt and a decidedly outdated, and limp, approach to government oversight. Remarkably, the presidential campaign has gotten less serious, while the economy’s problems have become more so. The U.S. government is in a bailout mood (either that or the economy is about to free fall) :: The Big 3 was in Washington with their hands out for “loan guarantees” which means that the government is bailing out an industry that gambled wrong with SUVs and now doesn’t have enough collateral to get any more capital. The financial crisis keeps getting worse :: The dramatic events of the last year have called into question much of what policy makers, economists and investors once espoused about the financial system. As recently as the spring of 2007, many in Washington and New York continued to say housing prices could not fall across the board and that most of the bets made by Wall Street traders were inherently safe.  Now, there are signs that psychology is driving a reverse line of thinking. People are assuming that things will get worse and that any move by the Fed or the Treasury is a step down, not a step closer to improvement.  “There has been a tremendous amount of denial over the past two years, three years,” said Barry Ritholtz, chief executive of Fusion IQ, an investment firm, and author of The Big Picture blog. After years of being a big punching bag to Apple’s advertising, Microsoft finally decides to fight back :: Rapid response like this makes John Kerry look good. Correction of the Day Being a community organizer is a conservative notion :: Also, Jim Wallis has more about that here. Southern Baptists are more in favor of torture than the rest of the population Why Brian McLaren is voting for Barack Obama Complementarianism explained to the masses. The problem with emerging church leadership Ed Steltzer reviews that Church Basement Road Show You think your job is bad?  Try Anaconda hunting. When PowerPoint visuals go bad Also, if you are running for President and are looking for photos of supporters, it may not be a good idea to get them from iStockPhoto What’s up with Google’s stock price Michael Pollan teaches us how to eat Banksy in New Orleans and in the deep south Time for a Truth Commission to find out what is really going on? Quote of the day from Joe Biden :: "Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn’t run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain." Speaking of John McCain and the economy.  One of his advisors posted what is perhaps the worst timed op-ed in history "Jesus was a community organizer; Pilate was a governor."
• 

  Stop the presses

  http://sideshow.me.uk/ssep08.htm#09061422
  84 days ago in The Sideshow · Authority: 220

  One of the most amazing things about the Washington press corps is how little they seem to know about the two subjects they pretend to be most expert on - the political strategies of the parties, and The Media itself: "If Jay Carney is going to point to election results to assess the success of the GOP's assault on the media, he can't simply cherry-pick the elections the Republicans lost; they've been doing this every election cycle for 40 years." ¡El Gato Negro! is unimpressed with Gail Collins' performance as "hectoring p.r. mom for the GOP". At Crooks and Liars, "Four More Neoconservative Years? David Sanger at the NY Times is one of those top-level reporters who often willingly carries water for the Bush administration - promulgating "unofficially official" leaks, for instance - in order to preserve his precious access. It appears that he's willing to do the same for the McCain campaign." And Kelly O'Donnell wants you to know that McCain has been "hesitant" to use POW past until now. I suspect this video of being something that would fit here, but I can't seem to play it on my laptop and I keep forgetting about it when I go upstairs to my desktop. So maybe linking it here will remind me next time I'm at my actual desk. In the meantime, maybe you can tell me what's in it. (And I think what conservatives mean about reforming the Republican Party is really about putting down a new coat of paint, unless you mean the conservatives who mean get rid of the "moderates". They're trying to treat Palin as a fresh, uncorrupted face of the newly reformed RNC, when in fact she is typical of the last eight years - a spendthrift, right-wing repressive crackpot who is entirely corrupt.) McCain can rely on endorsements from stock photos of all kinds. Oh, yeah, Obama appeared on O'Reilly's show, and O'Reilly treated him a little differently than he treats his Republican guests. Meanwhile, Keith Olbermann gets upset during live coverage of the RNC.
• 
  http://thepurplestate.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-is-pretty-fu...
  83 days ago in The Purple State · Authority: 1

  This is pretty funny:Apparently, the Republicans couldn't find very many African American supporters to show on the Big Screen Of Triumph, when introducing McCain (see 6:45, 7:02)... so they simply put up stock photos of black people. You know, riding bicycles and appreciating their moms and stuff.
• 

  Pay No Attention to the Man in Front of the Giant Screen

  http://vagabondscholar.blogspot.com/2008/09/pay-no-attention...
  84 days ago in Vagabond Scholar · Authority: 59

  When watching McCain's speech last week, my strongest reaction was to the ending. It seemed to me that someone had hit an "applause" sign, the way the crowd got so loud for McCain, who was trying to be inspiring and forceful and just wasn't. There was a striking disconnect on the speech and the reaction. My suspicion was that the delegates were told to go crazy near the end, to try to trick the TV and web audiences into thinking they'd actually seen something exciting (much like late-night infomercials, actually). I've since heard something about fireworks on the screen behind McCain, but I don't know if those were near the end of speech or after it actually finished. Watching the end of the speech again, I had the same impression – ginned up applause. McCain looked tired and confused throughout, and that "fight for me," bit just wasn't anywhere close to Henry V on St. Crispin's Day. (Nor was it Mel Gibson in Braveheart - McCain was even more soporific and less convincing than Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves talking about freedom.) My favorite comment so far comes Rich Lowry (via Howard Kurtz). The National Review crowd was mostly for Romney earlier, but of course they've been shilling for their party's selection. Here's editor Lowry's "Quick Take" (emphasis added): Don't focus on the oratory. If Mark Salter wanted to, he could have written prose for the ages, but it wouldn't have seemed true to McCain. Don't focus on the delivery. The election isn't going to be decided on speech-making ability. Focus on the theme—a populist fighter for you. This is exactly where McCain needs to be. Just as Obama needed to ground his politics of hope last week, McCain needed to ground his politics of honor tonight. And he did. At least thematically. What's still lacking is the substance. He needs three simple, stark policy proposals to protect and ease the way of life of average Americans, and I think he already has two (on energy and health care) and can get another (a middle-class tax cut). Then, he needs to master them and talk about them wherever he goes. I'm not sure whether McCain will win this election, but I'm very confident his campaign will do the things necessary to win it. Over the last two months, it has been fearless and shrewd. The celeb ad, the Palin pick, and now this speech were steps in the right direction. So I wasn't bowled over by it, but I'm still encouraged. Yeah, see, McCain could have had a well-written speech if he really wanted to. And just ignore the crappy content, the lousy delivery, and lack of substance. Most critics weren't as scathing as Jeffrey Toobin, accurately calling McCain "shockingly bad," but nearly all commentators noted it was a both a weak speech and poorly delivered. When even McCain's cheerleaders are making such lame excuses for him, you know it didn't go over well. I suspect a TPM reader is correct – the A-team was working on re-tooling Palin's speech, and McCain's speech was given less attention. As with McCain's selection of Palin as his VP – he had roughly three months to find and vet candidates, and to start outlining a speech, and this last-minute, reckless, substance-less effort was the best he could muster? Add in the Walter Reed Middle School gaffe (it's a few miles from where I live, actually), and the other video issues (fake soldiers, using stock photos of African-Americans while less than 2% of the delegates were black), and it's not a pretty picture. McCain's actual performance, and the truth content of the Republican National Convention, were both abysmally low. We'll see how much the press actually cares, though, to delve into policy - and the character issues revealed by lying - especially when there's outlier polls, horse race questions and bullshit stories about Democrats throwing away American flags to cover. Yes sirree, that's news you can believe in. (Cross-posted at The Blue Herald) Labels: Elections

Advertise on Technorati

Advertise on Technorati