Candidate Comparison Chart

(h/t Kdoug)

This is emblematic of how much the McCain campaign has derailed in light of the economy that the GOP and their failed neocon policies coupled with complete deregulation have ushered in...

Economy Derails and McCain says: Slime Obama!

Red State Should Check Their Dictionary

Before they start a laughable attack on Joe Biden...

We know that Sarah Winky Palin's flub with the General's name was a minor one, the issue is more the fact that Winky Palin said the opposite of what the General said concerning a "Surge" (escalation) in Afghanistan not being useful in that country and, also, seemed to think reciting his statements on counter insurgency operations and other issues given by the mis-named General justified her lie.

But Red State thinks that the GOP giggle gaggle should be making fun of Joe Biden for dropping names:

"The Vice Presidential Debate
Posted by: Pejman Yousefzadeh
From what I heard, her worst gaffe was calling General McKiernan in Afghanistan "General McClellan," which appears to indicate that Sarah Palin was having a Civil War flashback. Of course, Joe Biden referred to "Bosniacs" so the gaffes were not one-sided and for a Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to refer to "Bosniacs" . . . well, it's kinda interesting, to say the least. I wonder if people will make an issue of it. They should and they most certainly would if Sarah Palin made that comment. Again, it is kind of silly that we are penalizing candidates for innocent verbal flubs that have little to nothing to do with how they would govern, but fair is fair and this gaffe deserves a fair amount of ridicule. Wonder what the Bosnians thought about this statement."

Now... I know that Winky Palin may have had you, the willingly uninformed right wingers, mesmerized with her non-answers to questions - How can you win a debate when you don't, NO, you REFUSE to even answer the questions? Anyways - but your entire right wing giggle gaggle of Grade 3ers that she winked at all night would do much better to check your dictionary before you get all falling over yourselves silly OR, at least, read up a bit on Bosnia and other foreign countries so you might actually have a world view worth commenting on:

Although the international community has done a laudable job in getting refugees and displaced persons back into their homes, the effort to find enough common ground amongst Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Serbs to run the country on their own, or to develop a sense of loyalty to their common state, has failed.
Davos man meets Homo Balcanicus by Bardos, Gordon N. / The National Interest

As the Bosniacs retreated, a plain-clothes policeman discharged a pistol in the air, and "at least two plain-clothes officers" then fired into the retreating marchers, killing 1 person and wounding 20.
Former Yugoslavia by UN Chronicle

That had resulted in another round of population movements along ethnic lines, further separating Bosnian Serbs and Bosniacs and delivering a "telling blow to the multicultural nature of Sarajevo society",
'Relatively stable military environment' established by collective ... by UN Chronicle

When you do finally learn to check your dictionaries, you might be well on your way to graduating 3rd grade and - one day, maybe 10 or 20 years down the road - you might even merit being a front page Blogger somewhere...

Some remedial homework for you Red State kids... Since you won't be getting extra credit... And don't spill your right wing koolaide on it at snack time!

And as a side note: Isn't it nice that we have a Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who actually knows what he is talking about? Imagine that kind of competence in the White House?

You Deserve A Break Today!

Go ahead and hide out here for a few minutes reading this laugher of a photo essay:

While most people will be watching Thursday's VP debate to find out whether Sarah Palin will start speaking in tongues, there's also the little matter of diarrhea-mouth hothead Joe Biden. The Obama camp is worried about the notoriously unpredictable Biden getting too aggressive (read: red-faced bellowing) while addressing Gov. Palin and losing the coveted "we hate people who aren't nice to the woefully underqualified" vote.

You've worked hard towards this moment too. Take a few minutes to laugh it up a little. Then get back to work ya slackers!

Debate - Obama was leading going in

And Obama was leading going out.
Even if there was no clear winner on debate points.

I wasn't too surprised with the snap poll results after the debate. Obama had the lead going in and all he had to do was look as credible as a candidate as the other guy on an issue that should have favored McCain. It was pretty much a tie on the issues, except for a few minor slams like Obama had on Iraq ("Wrong, wrong, wrong" - paraphrased).

Obama has clearly been head and shoulders above McCain.

McCain was behind going into the debate - trailing in the wake of his self propelled disaster filled campaign the last couple of weeks - and not hitting any homeruns when he needed at least a few didn't help him at all to get his flailing campaign back on track.

Obama Leads and McCain Attacks

I find the whole thing about Obama supposedly not attacking enough - some Bloggers complain - and conceding points to McCain occasionally was a bit of a non-issue for Obama and a tell on McCain.

What does a leader do in a race? He leads.
What does the trailer do in a race? He attacks.

That isn't to say that Obama shouldn't hit back when there is a big opening. But Obama sounds and acts like the leader and McCain sounds and acts like a VP attack dog on a witch hunt or campaign surrogate should.

Speaking of which...

The Palin Drinking Game

You can't make stuff like this up! Biden was out there doing the attack thing on the news shows after the debate... Where was Palin?

McCain Playing Hide The VP Candidate

John McCain's poorly devised campaign plan to keep Sarah Palin hidden from the press and out of the debates revealed:

John McCain, his stepping stone wife
and Chris Shays with their pet neocon and
foreign policy poodle Joe Lieberman

try to hide the new Palin crap here...

[update] Barack Obama really did something right... The independent voter numbers in every category are way beyond anyone's expectations in the Media Curves poll:

Media Curves found that 61% of Independents believed Obama won the debate, while 38.89% favored McCain as the winner. On each of the eight topics, Obama was a clear winner among Independents, with his highest score coming on the Iran issue - two-thirds of Independents thought he won this question. And, it's hard to argue with these three post-debate polls at RCP- they all have Obama outperforming McCain.

These immediate numbers must be alarming to the floundering McCain campaign even if nobody on the left expects McCain supporters to come out and admit publicly. Then again, we didn't expect McCain supporters to come out against Palin publicly but they did because they have realized that she was that bad a choice.

"What are you gonna do for this country, pal?"

Craig Ferguson wants to know from the candidates what they are going to do for this country. I do too. The media is failing us, yet again, in this important election with their tabloid coverage of everything. He talks about trying to sell the idea of voting to the younger generation:

"If you don't vote, you're a moron"

On the Sept. 10th edition of The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, a new American citizen preparing to vote in his first US election asks, "Are we so lost we have to be sold our own democratic right!?"

Watch it... Ferguson is correct in every aspect of what he talks about:

Connecticut GOP Vandals Afraid Of Obama Signs?

If John McCain's campaign is afraid of Obama signs, how can we expect their sorry criminal asses to deal with terrorists?

About a month ago I put an Obama campaign sign at the end of my driveway. I live in Connecticut, so I didn't expect anything to come of this. But, my sign disappeared after about a week. So, I went online, and I ordered 5 more. You know, to prepare for more disappearances and to qualify for the first quantity discount tier.

Feeling bold, I put two signs at the end of my driveway. A week later, they were gone as well. That was last Friday (before Labor Day). I was angry enough to report it to the police. They took my information, and were very professional. They treated me as if my complaint was legit - not just being an annoyance to them. I mean, I don't expect them to recover my stolen property, nor do I expect them to find the culprit(s) really. But I wanted it on record that this had happened, and I didn't like it. After the officer left, I put up a new sign (just one this time).

This morning, I saw this scene at the end of my driveway:



Don't these people realize that all they are accomplishing by doing this is forcing me to give the Obama campaign more money to send me more signs???

Another call to the police. Another cordial visit from the local police. Another new Obama sign now stands at the end of my driveway.

While the Connecticut GOP backers of John McCain are too busy peeing their pants over yard signs and vandalizing other Nutmeggers property using old style plays taken from the Karl Rove book on the dirty tricks school of politics...

Obama supporters from the Democratic party, and unaffiliated little "i" indies like myself are too busy working for real change to play these CT GOPers childish games.

The fact that the Republican party has absolutely nothing to offer anyone in Connecticut is scaring the crap out of their supporters. Joe Biden nailed it when he talked about the craptacular mass of mediocre quips as distractions that the GOP has resorted to in order to avoid the real problems that the incompetent GOP has created:

Obama Demolishes the Last Outlier Poll And New Ad

Don't know much about the science behind poll numbers but these numbers look pretty good for the Obama Campaign considering they are a pre-VP selection poll which would put them around the time the McCain's multiple housing hypocrisy started to break:

Obama holds a 47%-43% edge over McCain among registered voters and a 48%-45% edge among likely voters. Both leads are within the margin of error of +/—4 percentage points.

In the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll a month ago, Obama led McCain by 3 percentage points, but McCain held a 4-point lead among likely voters.

Most of the telephone survey of 1,023 adults was taken before Obama announced Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate Saturday.

This really does kill the media meme from the last outlier poll giving McCain a supposed lead. Also, I really think McCain's housing failure hasn't really set in completely yet. It broke big on Thursday, and stories like that really need to be out there for a while in order for everyone to get a clue on McCain's uncaring ignorance.

Oh yeah... As for tying bush to McCain: "66% say they're concerned he'll pursue President Bush's course. That includes 64% of independents and 35% of Republicans." An anchor issue sure to drag McCain down given bush having cemented his place in history as the worst president ever and McCain has shown no signs of changing things.

Barrack Obama has a huge double digit lead on handling the economy - the number one issue for voters, as per usual - as McCain has lost even more ground there. And 40% of those polled think McCain is just too old to be president.

And wouldn't you know that 80% say the country is in bad shape and 70% say it is getting worse. I guess they have been paying attention to what the GOP policies have done to their bank accounts over the years? Never mind that they can't be too happy at the prospect of paying for endless wars, in lives and treasure, if McCain wins.

I do know that CNN is using old polls to ignore their own most recent poll numbers:

PS: If Anyone is concerned about the CNN Poll that they're pimping today, read Nate @ 538.com

There is a little bit of sleight-of-hand here. The analysis begins by comparing Obama's performance in this new poll to CNN's next-most-recent one, which had been conducted in late July. However, CNN then switches to discussing a different poll, one which was conducted in late June, and pulls several pieces of information about the preferences of Hillary Clinton supporters from that June version of its survey.

The other possibility, of course, is that CNN did identify Clinton supporters in its July poll, but chose not to cite those results because they didn't fit with its storyline. The number of Clinton-supporting Democrats will be fairly small in any given survey (probably about one-sixth of the total sample), and results from that subgroup will therefore shift around a lot, with or without reason.

Keep in mind, in a poll of the larger voting universe, Hillary supporters are 50% at best of the Democratic population - 35%, and further, of the active Democratic Population, probably closer to 16% (110M Voters in 2004; 18M for Hillary). They're looking at a sample of literally 15-18% of the poll, and from that, extrapolating in ways that do not hold up statistically. The MOE on a sample this small is 10%... CNN is garbage

And I do know that there is new Obama campaign ad:

Obama Picks Joe Biden as Vice President

Looks like it may very well be Joe Biden as Barack Obama's running mate. Via ABC's Political Punch:

U.S. Secret Service on Way to Biden's House; Kaine and Bayh Told Nope on Veep

August 22, 2008 10:50 PM

The United States Secret Service has dispatched a protective detail to assume the immediate protection of Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., a source tells ABC News, indicating in all likelihood that Biden has been officially notified that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, has selected him to be his running mate.

Watcha think about that?

[update] And all hell breaks loose in the Blogosphere...

Patrick Edaburn / The Moderate Voice: VP Rumors and Rumblings (AKA Obama/Biden)

Taylor Marsh: BREAKING... CNN: Joe Biden, Obama's Wingman

Brian A. Howey / Howey Politics Indiana: Not Time for Bayh — For the third time, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh …

PoliticalBase.com Blog: All Signs Point To Biden

Booman Tribune: If It's Biden — Jake Tapper of ABC News is reporting …

Justin Gardner / Donklephant: Secret Service Are Now Protecting Biden

Chris Cillizza / Washington Post: Veepstakes: Process of Elimination

Lambert / Corrente: It's after 5:00 EDT on a Friday — Shouldn't we know the VP choice now?

DownWithTyranny!: American Prayer — The whole world is praying— and they don't …

Pamela Leavey / The Democratic Daily: Secret Service on Their Way to Biden's House

Mark Impomeni / Political Machine: Obama Chooses Biden

Eric Kleefeld / TPM Election Central: ABC: Secret Service Headed To Biden's House

DFA Dem Presidential Candidate Poll

Via Democracy For America:

Total Votes: 135268 as of Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:37:45 -0500

Candidate	Votes	%
Dennis Kucinich	41941	31.01%
Al Gore (write in)	36590	27.05%
Barack Obama	19586	14.48%
John Edwards	18090	13.37%
Bill Richardson	6010	4.44%
Hillary Clinton	5355	3.96%
Other	2951	2.18%
Christopher Dodd	2370	1.75%
Joe Biden	1307	0.97%
Mike Gravel	1068	0.79%

VOTING IS STILL OPEN!! Polls close at midnight on November 5th, 2007. Cast your vote now at http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/PulsePoll

Vote Now - Time Is Almost Up

The final DFA Presidential Pulse Poll ends tonight at midnight Eastern Standard Time. That means you only have a few hours left to vote and make sure your voice is heard.

Today is a big day. With over 130,000 votes cast, the poll is already the largest presidential poll of progressive activists this year. Yet this isn't even close to over. Traditionally, tens of thousands of votes come in on the last day.

That means the winner is still very much up for grabs.

It is pretty obvious that my Blog (Drinking Liberally in New Milford) likes Dennis Kucinich because he is really the only liberal on that list, and a moderate liberal like myself, but you might be surprised that my second choice as a candidate would be Christopher Dodd because of the many strong stances he has taken on pet issues of mine. As a Senator, I have very little to quibble about concerning his votes. As a presidential candidate he has been responsive to the people's (and the Bloggers') serious concerns about the path this country has followed under the disastrous policies of the criminal bush administration.

I am not a Democratic party member, nor a huge supporter of that party overall either (much to the chagrin of some progressive Bloggers... heh), because there is no way in hell that they can afford to keep throwing conservative candidates on to their ballot (the ones that play the triangulation-faux-centrist games) and ever hope to fix what is wrong with this country. But that is only the Democratic party problem side of it.

Fixing it really starts by kicking every single GOP candidate out of office. The corrupt ones. The ones that hate the Constitution. The ones that trample on the Bill of Rights. The ones that have desecrated the principles of this country with torture, illegal invasions, lies and illegally spied on Americans. The ones that have been the embodiment of hatred, racism and done everything they can to divide this country in any way they can.

We, all of We the People, need to unite against these GOP atrocities.

I have said my little piece on this subject... But now it is your tun to go there, vote, and try to make a difference, because even little polls like this make a difference in shaping America's perception (sadly, this is true) of what the heart beat of America is drumming on about.

The MSM is the Lunatic Fringe

What is the problem with the MSM?

"Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own online 'Who won the Democratic debate' survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website."

But reduced prominence apparently wasn't sufficient. By Monday afternoon Kucinich was winning handily, so ABC replaced the original survey with a second one, perhaps hoping the candidates the network is hawking would be more successful.

For a time, they were - U.S. Senator Barack Obama took the lead in early voting Monday afternoon and evening - but by late Monday / early Tuesday, Kucinich regained the lead by a large margin in this second survey.

Both Ron Kaul and Denis Kucinich can't get a fair shake in this game for the simple reason that the establishment media and their favourite candidates in both the Democratic party and the Republican won't allow them.

'George, I've been standing here for the last 45 minutes, praying to God you were going to call on me," joked Rep. Dennis Kucinich, in answer to a question on prayer.

The crowd, and the moderator, erupted with laughter.

"You have a direct pipeline, Congressman,' joked Stephanopoulos.

Unfortunately for America the media is the biggest joke in American politics...

There is a very simple reason that the corporate owned and controlled media won't give guys like Kucinich a shot:

Many of us are familiar with the Political Compass. Some at MLN even had their compass score in their signatures for a while, and even took the time to chart some of their own personal scores in March. But do you know where the 2008 Presidential Candidates sit on this political chart?

You should:

My kingdom for a real progressive candidate!

Perhaps you've heard of the Political Compass website, where you can take a test that places you on a grid based on the degree to which you are "left" or "right" on the economic scale as well as how socially libertarian or authoritarian you are.

I'm damn near as moonbatty as it gets: -6.50, -6.67, which puts me in, for lack of a better term, the "deep Southwest" of the grid.

Anyway, thanks to a recent article on London's TimesOnline, we can see how the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates fit on the grid.

This should worry those on the left, and I know that many at MLN scored even further left than I did (I am a Liberal, but I am a moderate Liberal), as they watch the next candidate chosen for the Democratic party who is nothing less than a conservative. That is, if they chose anyone other than Kucinich or Gravel. And right now they aren't even counted in the top 3 contenders.

This is where the Democratic party is failing miserably. They are not really providing any different ideology than the GOP, just a moderate version of it, if they choose any of those conservative candidates on that chart.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden... They are all conservatives, as moderate as some of them may be, they are conservatives nonetheless.

Welcome to America! Where the government is considered a tool for corporations to rob the citizens of the world for the benefit of the few in the establishment.

How Does Your Candidate Measure Up?

Many of us are familiar with the Political Compass. Some at MLN even had their compass score in their signatures for a while, and even took the time to chart some of their own personal scores in March. But do you know where the 2008 Presidential Candidates sit on this political chart?

You should:

My kingdom for a real progressive candidate!

Perhaps you've heard of the Political Compass website, where you can take a test that places you on a grid based on the degree to which you are "left" or "right" on the economic scale as well as how socially libertarian or authoritarian you are.

I'm damn near as moonbatty as it gets: -6.50, -6.67, which puts me in, for lack of a better term, the "deep Southwest" of the grid.

Anyway, thanks to a recent article on London's TimesOnline, we can see how the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates fit on the grid.

This should worry those on the left, and I know that many at MLN scored even further left than I did (I am a Liberal, but I am a moderate Liberal), as they watch the next candidate chosen for the Democratic party who is nothing less than a conservative. That is, if they chose anyone other than Kucinich or Gravel. And right now they aren't even counted in the top 3 contenders.

This is where the Democratic party is failing miserably. They are not really providing any different ideology than the GOP, just a moderate version of it, if they choose any of those conservative candidates on that chart.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden... They are all conservatives, as moderate as some of them may be, they are conservatives nonetheless.

Democratic Myths on Ending the War

Video and comments via David Sirota:

Watch Democratic presidential candidates pass the buck and pretend they have no power to end the Iraq War.

If you are not part of the solution,
then you are part of the problem.