John McCain's acceptance speech got off to a rocky start on Thursday night when, on three separate occasions, he was interrupted by protesters, twice by the liberal group Code Pink and again by a Ron Paul supporter with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The shouts from the rafters - "McCain Votes Against Vets" and "Ask McCain about his voting record" - were drowned out by chants of "U.S.A," "U.S.A," but they seemed to throw McCain slightly off his game despite his ample experience being interrupted on the campaign trail. At any rate, he veered off his address to implore the crowd to ignore the "static" and explain that "Americans want us to stop shouting at each other."
Outside the hall, Dana Goldstein with the American Prospect caught up to one of the hecklers, a 26-year-old veteran named Adam Kokesh, who is upset with McCain's veterans record.
UPDATE: Goldstein has an interview with Kokesh -- read it here.
http://vt71443.com/materials/taxes.html
here comes 911
I know this is damn near impossible, but here's what we need: three consecutive unanswered field goals by the Redskins. That'll send the game into overtime on the night of John McCain's big speech.
If I were James Dobson, I might even suggest we pray...
"According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don't care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace -- in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough's show -- the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin's scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads. Here's the exchange:"
Video:
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/no_questions_please_were.html
And one of the colleges she said she went..said she didn't
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) -- Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin seems to have switched colleges at least six times in six years, including two stints at the University of Idaho before graduating from there in 1987.
Federal privacy laws prohibit the schools from disclosing her grades, and none of the schools contacted by The Associated Press could say why she transferred. There was no indication any were contacted as part of the background investigation of Palin by presidential candidate John McCain's campaign.
"Our office was not contacted by anyone," said Tania Thompson, spokeswoman for the University of Idaho in Moscow.
Palin, the governor of Alaska, was born in Idaho. Her family moved when she was only a few months old to Alaska, where she was raised.
According to a biography - "Sarah" by Kaylene Johnson - Palin and three friends went to the University of Hawaii at Hilo after graduation from high school in Alaska in 1982. But they left after a few weeks because of the constant rain there, the book said.
The registrar at Hawaii-Hilo has no record that she ever enrolled, school officials said Thursday.
Palin, then known as Sarah Louise Heath, and a friend then traveled to Honolulu and enrolled at Hawaii Pacific University, a private, nonsectarian school. She attended only as a freshman during the fall of 1982, school spokeswoman Crystale Lopez said.
She was in the business administration program as a full-time student, Lopez said Thursday.
"We're trying to track down someone who knew her," Lopez added.
From Hawaii Pacific, Palin transferred to North Idaho College, a two-year school in Coeur d'Alene, about 30 miles east of Spokane. She attended the college as a general studies major for two semesters, in spring 1983 and fall 1983, spokeswoman Stacy Hudson said.
"We were not able to track down club affiliations or anything," Hudson said.
The school identified one of her professors but he did not remember her, Hudson said.
Prior to her selection by McCain, the North Idaho College Alumni Association notified Palin in June she would be the recipient of its 2008-2009 Distinguished Alumni of the Year Award.
From North Idaho College, Palin transferred 70 miles south to the University of Idaho, the state's flagship institution. She majored in journalism with an emphasis in broadcast news. She attended Idaho, whose mascot is the Vandals, from fall 1984 to spring 1985.
She then returned to Alaska to attend Matanuska-Susitna College in Palmer in fall 1985.
Then she returned to Idaho, for spring 1986, fall 1986 and spring 1987, when she graduated. Despite her journalism degree, she does not appear to have worked for the college newspaper or campus television station, school officials said. She worked briefly as a sportscaster for KTUU in Anchorage after she graduated college.
The McCain campaign did not have an immediate comment on Palin's higher education record.
Palin's biography on her Alaska governor's website indicates only that she graduated from Idaho in 1987.
A recent profile of her in the school's alumni magazine, before her selection to run on the GOP ticket, listed only Hawaii Pacific, North Idaho and Idaho as schools she attended. She also explained in the profile that her curiosity and love of writing made journalism a natural choice.
"I was always asking everyone the questions, and I still am today," Palin told the magazine.
The University of Idaho is taking advantage of Palin's nomination. A prominent photograph of her is featured on the school's Web site."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CVN_PALIN_EDUCATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-09-04-20-03-52
We have seen a prelude of things to come and gutter politics that will be a major force in play until November 4th. Many people will see the GOP and swiftboat ads and not know they are not true. The meida will carry 30 second sound bites and again...our electorate will fall in line. We have seen this repeatedly in elections.
We can change all of that. A real phone call or knock at the door from someone like you could make the difference. Everything you need to organize from the grassroots level is available at BarackObama.com. All the tools you need to raise money, canvass and phone bank are there.
This Party Builder site has tools to find groups of like minded Democrats like you. Get involved if you aren't already.
Now if you want to carry this past the election and become a grassroots organizer for the Democratic Party just pick up the phone or goolge your local Party. They always need help and people just like you. Who knows....you may even be on a ballot someday.
You may be the one and only real live person that takes the time to speak to a voter. You can make a difference in who wins in November.
In the Obama campaign's first reaction (if you don't count Gibbs and Biden on the morning shows and the traveling staff's guffaws watching the speech last night) David Axelrod came back on the plane and gaggled with us about Palin’s speech before taking off to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Obama watched part, but not all of Palin’s speech. The candidate was unsurprised by the attacks, as he wasn’t expecting “gingerly treatment,” Axlerod said.
Axelrod said they remain unwilling to directly attack Palin’s experience, simply saying, “We respect her, she’s a skilled politician as she proved last night... She’s the governor of a state, we’re not arguing about that.” Although he then went on to say: "She’s deft at going on the attack. For someone who makes the point that she’s not from Washington, she looks very much like she’d fit in well there." And in subtle ways he suggested she’s a little naïve. When talking about Palin’s attacks on Obama’s thin legislative record, for example, Axelrod said: “Maybe that’s what she was told, but she should talk to Senator Lugar, talk to Senator Coburn, talk to the people across the aisle in Illinois where he passed dozens of major laws... I think that she had an assignment and she went out and she discharged it.”
Axelrod discounted Giuliani and Palin’s attacks on Obama’s community service. “This is what politicians do when they don’t have a record to run on but in terms of the community organizing thing,” he said, “I think that was lost on a lot of people and secondly they can demean service in the community but I think most people appreciate it.”
He did his best to focus on the issues, or what he called a lack thereof on the Republican side. “Ultimately, the question is: where are you going to lead this country? Barack Obama has been very specific on where he’s going to lead and how he’s going to change the policies that are in place and Governor Palin has made it clear she wants to keep those policies in place. So if you believe the Rick Davis notion that it’s not about anything substantive, it’s all about personality, and maybe they do believe that, then I’m sure they’re happy,” he said.
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/axelrod_on_palin.html
Bush
Cheney
Republican
Wages
Mortgage
Housing
Poverty
Afghanistan
Bin Laden
Torture
Guantanamo
Veteran
Environment
Global
Warming
Health
Care
Abortion
Abstinence
Moose
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2008/09/but-dont-worry-she-mentioned-hockey.html
...The Democratic presidential nominee described his mother's efforts to finish school and earn money after she gave birth to him at age 18.
"There were times that she didn't have enough money for groceries. And even though she was very proud and very independent, there were a couple of times growing up where she accepted food stamps to make sure we had enough food on the table," Obama said. "It was tough. And it was pretty much tough all the way through my teenage years."
…Eight hundred miles away from the Republican National Convention, in the rolling hills of eastern Ohio, Obama held a "women's economic event" to highlight the struggles of working mothers.
During his first campaign stop in two days, Obama talked at length about his grandmother, who he said had worked her way up from the secretarial pool to become a vice president at a bank after World War II.
"I think about my grandmother and what she could have done if she had been treated equal, if she had been treated fairly," he said.
...Obama, however, is not relying solely on his biography. Last week, the his campaign began running a radio ad featuring a Planned Parenthood nurse practitioner who says McCain is "out of touch with women today."
"McCain wants to take away our right to choose," she says in the ad, which is airing in swing states. "That's what women need to understand. That's how high the stakes are."
The Obama campaign also is reaching out to women through house parties, phone banks and online organizing. A campaign official said that on Women's Equality Day, which is commemorated annually on Aug. 26, female Obama supporters held nearly 200 events nationwide in an effort to recruit women.
Lst was an evening of anger, hate, and spite. The speakers were downright mean, as was the crowd.
It reminded me of Pat Buchanan's culture war speech which helped define the GOP in 1992
Ironically, despite being a new face, Sarah Palin delivered the message of a tired, old Republican Party. Neither she nor Rudy Giuliani had anything new to say.
Palin's speech wasn't just bitter and caustic, it was also riddled with falsehoods, starting -- but not ending -- with her claim to have been against the bridge to nowhere from the beginning.
For all the sarcastic personal attacks and hyperfocus on terrorism, they failed to offer a single solution for our economic problems. Beyond keeping him at arm's length, they failed to distingish themselves from the calamity that has been the Bush Presidency.
I'll conclude with a few thoughts about tonight. This evening, John McCain is going to try and present himself as a bipartisan moderate. His speech won't be nearly as strident as the ones from tonight.
The problem for McCain is that nobody is going to pay attention to what he has to say tonight.
Last night was where the action was. Tonight is just meaningless fluff.
We should keep the focus on the angry, mean speeches from tonight, including the blatant falsehoods of Palin's speech.
Okay she's a working mom with 5 kids one of them being special needs. She's a hockey mom. So what? I know a lot of working mothers that sure have no right to be on the ticket.
This is how I see Sarah Palin... based on facts. She is wrong on the issues. She is wrong on woman's rights. She attempted to have the town librarian ban books. She wants creationism taught in schools. She does not want to fund teeenage pregnancy prevention. She was for the bridge to nowhere before she was against it. She hired a lobbyist for her town to get all the earmarks she could. Troopergate...trying to fire a public servant because of a messy family divorce. She gave a speech that was full of outright lies last night with a smile on her face and mockery in her voice.
Sarah Palin is taking the GOP back to the hard core right of the party.
I am 100% against everything that Sarah Palin stands for politcally. I am 100% against a woman with Plain's experience being a heart beat away from the presidency.
Sarah Palin will set woman and the country back 50 years if given the chance.
I'm a woman and I approve this message.
September 4, 2008 » Discuss Article Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.
This could be huge.
Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama. "
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-steinem4-2008sep04,0,7915118.story
"One last cautionary note to conservative serum-drinkers, or to liberals terrified now that she's impossibly formidable. Remember how things change in 24 or 48 hours. We're still sitting on a powder keg of Palin administration and family potential scandals. One could break Friday, and suddenly, the speech would be forgotten instantly. Or one might not. But whatever the case, the speech will fade. She will also soon face the reality that she will have to endure a tough interview or two, without a teleprompter and without an adoring crowd. And, since she opened up a can of whup-ass on the Democrats, it entitles them to open up a can on her. One can be sure they will."
This is an exert from a very good article. Read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2008/sep/04/sarahpalin.uselections2008
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