You really were born too late. You would have loved the McCarthy era.

Nothing wrong with a little flag burning. Well I guess a fascist wouldn’t like it…

Hillary & McCain both admitted they didn’t read their CIA briefings on Iraq, and instead believed the rosy Bush scenarios.
Right now FOX news and the GOP are crapping their pants about the DNC ad which has McCain saying himself, “Why not 100 more years in Iraq?” The DNC did a study with this ad and a sample group proportional to the political stripes of the USA (Republicans, Independents, and Democrats) and saw McCain’s positive ratings go down 10 points.
At one point recently, and it’s on film, Liberman had to remind McCain (in the middle of a press conference Liberman actually had to get out of his chair and whisper into McCain’s ear) that al Qaeda is not in Iran.
Anyone with a brain knows that Iraq was a profit generating scheme for multi-national corporations like Dick Cheney’s Haliburton (& Haliburton is HQed in the Caymens to avoid paying US taxes) and Blackwater (a private corporate army above the law).
NO WMDs
NO Democracy (We’re now fighting on behalf of Iraq’s supreme Islamic Council)
The economy and Iraq will be the albatross around McCain’s neck.

No one really cares about Iraq. But they do care about the economy and McCain had better come up with something good.

“Anyone with a brain knows that Iraq was a profit generating scheme for multi-national corporations ”
Spouting insane conspiracy theories doesn’t even merit a response. If Bush’s whole aim in launching the war was just to make payoffs to his eeeeevil corporate masters, there are a thousand easier and more profitable ways to do it.
“No one really cares about Iraq. But they do care about the economy and McCain had better come up with something good”
“They” are idiots then. The office of president has virtually NO influence over the economy. Even the most egregious regulatory over-reaches (like price controls) barely make a dent and cause more problems than they solve.

This is the same party that has managed to win numerous national, state, and local election by telling voters that the gays will destroy the fabric of America if Democrats win, regardless of the economy or our lack of defense. So don’t put aside the power of ads like this.

“No one really cares about Iraq. But they do care about the economy and McCain had better come up with something good.”
So far this seems true and strikes me as really sad. The economy will likely heal itself (as it generally does), but the situation in Iraq won’t. So Iraq will be a big challenge to the next president and really that should be the top issue.
I also never understood why Kerry took such flack for wind surfing. It’s actually fun, relatively inexpensive, and you have to be in pretty good shape to do it. It’s much less snooty than fly fishing which probably would have went over better with everyone except PETA.
Before I’m flamed by a fly fisherman I’ll add that I own a fly rod, vest, and fly boxes.

Well, Michele, you should be happy about this particular article.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2a50425a-1f86-11dd-9216-000077b07658,s01=1.html?nclick_check=1
“Like most people in Mingo County, West Virginia, Leonard Simpson is a lifelong Democrat. But given a choice between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, the 67-year-old retired coalminer would vote Republican.
“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.”
The mud is sticking, Michele. Keep it up! You and Fox are doing God’s work this year.

Larry Johnson posting on Huffington Post is still Larry C. Johnson. You can trust what Johnson says regarding Obama as much as you can trust what Ahmadinejad says about Israel.
This statement is funny:
“He was on the verge of challenging longtime state Senator Alice Palmer for her job. When Barack decided to run, it is no surprise that he turned to William Ayers…”
Palmer had decided to not to run again and she took him to Ayers home to meet people and to endorse him as her successor. Palmer changed her mind later and decided to run again so he did run against her, but not then. That’s hardly Ayers launching Obama’s political career! Or would that be the whole $200 he donated 5 years later Chicago campaign?
Btw Alice Palmer was campaigning with Hillary in the last primaries. Gee, maybe Hillary doesn’t know she might be dangerous due to Ayers.
You say “this is a Democrat”. I see more vile spewing from some Clinton supporters about Obama that I see from the right wing. Ayers is the latest push at smearing. Where do I start? “Obama Under the Weather” goes into it a little including the Woods Fund where they sat on a board together for a couple of years (and also notes the New World Foundation Hillary sat on, far to the left of Woods, more political and much more controversial.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/berman
Then the “spooky” big role on the Annenberg Challenge. Look this one up:
The Chicago School Blog notes this on March 07, 2007
“…story claims, somewhat mysteriously to me, that Barack Obama was deeply involved in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — something I never heard of when I was researching a long report on the CAC in 2001, and never heard since. How involved was he, really? (And, BTW, how much of a claim to fame is CAC, anyway?)
He links to the long article he wrote in 2000 about the Chicago Challenge. Perhaps he should have taken a larger role in it but education was one of his concerns but not his specialty, he was more for bringing people in. He was hardly a nobody. He was a bit of a star in his small neck of the woods upon returning to Chicago after being Editor of Law Review and coming back to serve the community rather than going on to a high paying prestigious job as most do. He got a lot of media attention from the start, that’s why I was able to find so much info about him going back 25 years when I was researching candidates.
About the whole connection…Stanley Fish who was a long time defender of Clinton during this campaign has finally wearied. In his piece “Much Ado” he talks about it.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/much-ado/index.html
He quotes Justice William O. Douglas about “guilt by association” about tactics “repugnant to our society” because, despite the absence of any overt wrongdoing, the pasts of those attacked were “combed for signs of disloyalty” and for utterances that might be read as “clues to dangerous thoughts.”
He gives his own opinion
“Now, in 2008, after a primary season increasingly marked by dirty pool and low blows, “McCarthyism” and “Swiftboating” have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized.”
He makes his own confession: He knew Ayers! He had dinner with him at Ayers home and his own many times, Ayers recruited them to work there, they served on committees together, he guest lectured in his classes, helped persuade Ayers to turn down Harvard offer and stay at UIC.
Oh my. He said in all the time they spent together politics — present or past — never came up.
He writes about Ayers and wife today and adds ““Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it.”
He lists the tings he’d taken Clinton’s side on regarding Obama but says
“But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized….” and then goes into what is in it. He adds
“I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions”
There are so many more articles offering information, even one by Robert Parry listing in December listing the smears they planned to use on Obama and so far Rezko, Wright and Ayers have come to pass, though they are still pushed behind the scenes. The last one was oppo” about his dead mother, let;s see how they balance the harm they can do Obama by her being too leftist with the good they might do Obama because she is so white.
“Smearing Obama” http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/berman goes into the way falsities and innuendos gain validity.
You know Hillary said about accepting Scaife’s endorsement “But I do believe in redemption.” That’s nice
Butt the “Christian thing to do” for Obama to do would be to walk off boards, refuse to be civil to a neighbor, not take part in any community service with Ayers because of what he was involved with 40 years ago despite the good he’d done since? Seriously?
When does one qualify for redemption?
You don’t like Obama, fine. But this king of baseless crap is more than tasteless. He’s far from perfect but he is in no way sinister. unpatriotic or someone America should be fearful of.
Did you read this? A link from it brought me here
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/232/story_23282_1.html
The Rev. Caldwell, bush’s pastor who just performed his daughters wedding ceremony has endorsed Obama, even told bush. I’m not happy about bush links but this Reverend has given his first ever political contribution and it’s to Obama. It is about Obama’s politics but largely about his character. That matches what I hear going back all of those years. He might be politically expedient like all politicians but his character really isn’t in question. He is decent and the further and wider you go in research the less you can doubt it.
I don’t support Clinton but I don’t smear her even with true post presidency things, let alone with innuendo and articles from hate sites. (Johnson posted that first on his blog)
I didn’t start out supporting him, I thought it would be Clinton but research sure changed that. Later I heard him speak for the first time.
I am a middle aged white woman, pretty much a skeptic and so I research everything.
I have this funny hang up with truth.

Ah, it gets even better. Now the right is concerned about Obama’s “conversion” from Islam to Christianity, and how that might make him a target for assassination.
With one lie having been disproven, the right now comes up with some crocodile tears in fear of a possible Presidential assassination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12luttwak.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
“Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).
With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)”
Gotta love it when God’s Own Party does God’s work!

Even the Moonie Times is getting in on the act!
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080507/NATION/163936309/1028/ELECTION
“Mr. Obama continues to have trouble with voters’ preconceived notions about him, including one man eating breakfast at an Indiana restaurant who waved him away when the candidate approached him.
“I can’t stand him,” the man told a reporter trailing Mr. Obama. “He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”
Mr. Obama is in fact a Christian and regular church-goer, although polls show a minority of Americans mistakenly believe him to be a Muslim.”
According to the Moonie Times, the last sentence was added “as a clarification” the day after the article was published. On the website it is listed at the top of the page, nice and bold. Of course, all the print copies went out with the original story, which did not include any kind of “clarification.”
A number of other papers picked up this story (via AP) and added a clarification that the story about Obama being Muslim is an Internet rumor.
The Moonie Times, with its ties to the GOP, didn’t see fit to report on that aspect of the rumor.

Um, that piece is in the NEW YORK TIMES. Which is the offical party organ of the DEMOCRATS. Even his own people are admitting that the Muslim world will consider him a joke, if not an outright enemy.

ZZ, I think you had best check that link again. It goes to an article written by Stephen Dinan in THE WASHINGTON TIMES, which is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
You remember Moon, don’t you? The fellow that the GOP helped crown messiah in a ceremony at the Senate Office Building a few years back.

“wife stealing Jeremiah Wright”
Jayzus H. Kryst, Michele, ENOUGH with the Wright nonsense. Wright is NOT running to be the president.
And hey, unless you’re gonna blog with equal fervour about McCain’s ‘wife abandoning’, continued screeching about ONE candidate’s ex-pastor not only does not behoove you, (nor does it add to your ‘believability’), it also doesn’t make it seem like you have anything of value to say.
Can anyone hear even NAME either McCain’s pastor (and no, I’m NOT referring to HAGEE) or Clinton’s pastor? Or the substance of ANY of their sermons??? Selected pull-quotes would even be accepted.

Pardon my typing: “here” not “hear”. (Although it would be kind of nice to “hear” the name of either McCain’s or Clinton’s pastor uttered even ONCE as if it had anything to do with either candidate’s actual position on issues.)

No the article revealing that he actually IS a muslim (to other muslims) is in the NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12luttwak.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

ZZ,
Obama is a Muslim the same way disaffected Catholics who haven’t worshipped as a Catholic in decades are still Catholics to the Vatican unless they get a notarized lawyers letter with at least 2 witnesses testifying that they no longer wish to be considered a Catholic (a neighbour once asked me to be one of his witnesses). Otherwise, they’re kept on the rolls.
Not only has Obama renounced his birth religion, his father did too. Same schyte, different day, I guess, if you’re an Obama hater. You’re not convincing anyone here.
AND, in a country that “promises ” freedom of religion, the logical question would be, “So what if he IS Muslim?” I always had been taught America likewise “promised” there weren’t to BE any religious tests to hold public office.
Gosh, ZZ, was Kennedy too Catholic for ya?