McCAIN POISON EMAIL

Okay, I have received a new piece of Obama hate mail today that has not been debunked by snopes.com. It really irritates me that there are still people out there that will believe everything they read in an email. Especially because most of them do not have progressive friends that they can rely on to effectively debunk the lies contained therein. Below is the text of the latest smear campaign. I just wish I knew how to submit this to snopes so that it could receive the thorough debunking needed.

Obama Directly Tied to Voting Fraud Group
By Sher Zieve


In case you — like most of us — have difficulty keeping up with Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama's ties to corrupt, terrorist and anti-American groups and individuals a new one has emerged.

The mainstream press — as with Obama's other associations — is working overtime to cover this latest one up. Obama is directly tied to a group that has been both accused of and its members convicted of National Voter Fraud, embezzlement and misuse of tax payer funds — ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).

What are Obama's direct ties to the voter-fraud group? Let's take a look. Obama was not only ACORN's attorney but, actually trained the group in "community activism!" And, while Obama was Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he arranged funding for the voter-fraud group through the CAC. McCauley's Wor ld reports: "In Philadelphia alone ACORN has raised over $800,000 Dollars for Barack Obama's Campaign." In politics, scratching each other's back is always the order of the day.
The voter-fraud group is working almost non-stop — except when its members are arrested and taken into custody — to get Obama elected POTUS.

If Obama is elected, we could actually have the least experienced, most corrupt and first Socialist/Communist POTUS in world history. And the other Obama direct ties to corruption and anti-Americanism? Let's take another look — shall we?.

William Ayers-former head of terrorist group the Weather Underground — was Obama's colleague at the Woods Fund of Chicago and Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Note: Ayers lobbied to have Obama named Chairman of the CAC. Ayers is also a major fundraiser for Obama.

Obama's acknowledged over 20 year minister and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, has made and continues to make anti-American, anti-white and anti-Semitic "sermons".
Obama has direct ties to Saudi Arabian funders and the Black Panthers.
Depending on one's sources, Obama was either the #2 or #3 Fannie Mae (Democrats' personal slush fund) funded politician.

Obama is directly ties to now-convicted felon Antoin Rezko.
Obama wants to work with the very leaders of countries who want to destroy us.
The evidence against this man Continues to mount. But, still Democrats and the Democrats' media want him as POTUS.

Corruption, Recognizes and Supports it's Own, folks.

This could Never Happen in a Sane World.

If you have time to waste, google Sher Zieve; you might get a big kick out of the stuff you find. Or you might be repulsed by it. But how many gullible people out there just forwarded this garbage on without checking into the source of the trash?

Herein lies the difference between the Obama hate mail that you will sometimes receive from well-meaning, uninformed friends and the type of emails that are sent between progressives about McCain. Most of what I receive about McCain is regarding POLICY. Occasionally I will receive an email with an unflattering picture or an unsubstantiated rumor about McCain calling his wife the "c" word. (I know it was in a book, but it is not independently confirmed)




I have never received a negative email from anyone I know full of lies about McCain or Palin. Apparently, Democrats and progressives (and your good old-fashioned liberals) don’t usually just believe everything they read in an email. They don’t send these things out to their friends without investigation. They and their friends tend to go to the source to get their information and don’t rely on emails from friends, Bill O’Reilly (or other FOX talking heads-not journalists), or the “entertainers” on talk radio to get their news.

Secondly, if you had the time, I truly suspect that you could trace some of this stuff all the way back to the Republican Party. I know that the Democrats are imperfect, capable of arrogance and stupidity and prone to excesses of their own. But we all know that it is the Republican Party that has embraced the notion of the ends justifying the means as a political and moral imperative. For me, this became apparent back in the Reagan administration and has been evident in every successive Republican campaign and/or administration.

Lastly, you don’t have to be creative to send a scathing email full of John McCain’s faults, character failings, ties to scandal and corruption or unsuitability to lead. There are plenty of facts and documentable examples of this in existence. All you have to do is READ, copy and paste. Progressives don’t need to send these sort of emails because they are INFORMED already, but maybe we should start sending them back to the people that send us the Obama hatemail. Perhaps it will make them think?

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Does McCain Have Control of his own Campaign?

The oft-asked question, answered daily, as McCain goes lower and lower: How low will he go? What would John McCain not do to achieve his goal of the Presidency?



Though he has pointed out Obama’s ambitions to become President, he ignores his own obvious ambitions and ignores the lengths that he has gone to in order to achieve those ambitions. His campaign has sunk SO low recently that even Republicans are complaining about the tactics he is using and the hate speech that the campaign is inspiring.

Check out this statement from an article on Yahoo News on Friday, Oct 10:

The raw emotions worry some in the party who believe the broader swath of swing voters are far more focused on their dwindling retirement accounts than on Obama’s background and associations and will be turned off by footage of the McCain events.
John Weaver, McCain’s former top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this behavior.
“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081010/pl_politico/14445;_ylt=Agc6EwS_vqq.dZJuGSW7yhJWr7sF

After three weeks of ever-heightening accusations, smears and outright lies about Barack Obama made by the campaign during these rallies and “town halls,” even other Republicans were disgusted by the tone and tenor of the statements and the visceral reactions that were occurring daily on the campaign trail. So much so that McCain was finally forced to say something himself to ratchet down the vitriol.

And I assume that we are supposed to be impressed by the fact that he was willing to finally stand up and be decent. But, of course, that ignores the fact that he is the one whose campaign started down this ugly path to begin with. And he only partially ratcheted down the innuendo and continues to lie about Obama. Also, I have yet to see any evidence that Palin is going to do the same. I guess we’ll wait and see whatever it is she has to say at whatever campaign stop she is making today.



Though they are trying to distance themselves now, they are doing so half-heartedly and are not being let off the hook so easily. This from cbsnews.com:

Palin, at a fundraiser in Ohio on Friday, told supporters "it's not negative and it's not mean-spirited" to scrutinize Obama's iffy associations.
But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.
"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/10/politics/main4514574.shtml


Having lead his followers down this road, how difficult will it be to turn them around? After all, they booed him when he corrected the folks at the Town Hall that were inferring that Obama was dangerous and an Arab. That is something that he might have considered before this whole mess began. (And perhaps, if any violence does ensue, his campaign and propagandists like Rush Limpballs should be charged with inciting a hate crime.)

Meanwhile, McCain is attempting to distance himself from this whole sordid affair. Déjà vu anyone-- McCain distancing himself?

And today we have a new smear, this time from the head of the republican party in Virginia. Check it out:

The chairman of the Virginia Republican Party has compared Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden because of the Illinois senator's past association with Bill Ayers, who has confessed to domestic bombings as a member of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground…
According to a report in this week's Time magazine, the Virginia party chairman, Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William), told Virginia volunteers working for GOP nominee John McCain that Obama and bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon."
That is scary," Frederick said while providing talking points to GOP volunteers in western Prince William County as they prepared for a door-to-door canvass.
Yesterday, Frederick said he stood by the comparison, even though bin Laden planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon that killed 184 people and Obama was a child and hadn't met Ayers when the Weather Underground planted a bomb at the Pentagon in 1972. No one was hurt in that blast, in which a bomb exploded in a restroom and caused flooding and damage to computer tapes containing classified information.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/12/AR2008101201956.html

Further along in the same article, we see the pattern that has been established by the campaign; people close to the campaign or members of the Republican party say something nasty, then the campaign “distances” itself from the comment.

Gail Gitcho, a McCain spokeswoman, also denounced Frederick's remarks, calling them "not appropriate."
"While Barack Obama is associated with domestic terrorist William Ayers, the McCain campaign disagrees with the comparison that Jeff Frederick made," Gitcho said.
It was the third time in a little more than a week that Gitcho repudiated something said or written by someone affiliated with McCain's Virginia leadership team. Last week, the head of the McCain campaign in Buchanan County in southwest Virginia was forced to resign after a column surfaced in which he made disparaging remarks about Obama, African Americans and gay people. Last weekend, the McCain campaign distanced itself from McCain's brother, Joe McCain, after he referred to Alexandria and Arlington County as "communist country."

How do you “distance yourself” from your own brother? And am I the only one that noticed the back-handed way that this Gitmo person (Gitcho, whatever) attempted to distance McCain from the Frederick comment? She managed to link Obama with terrorists while denouncing Frederick's linkage of Obama to...terrorists.

Here is the pattern: somebody associated with the campaign says something outrageous that McCain does not have the balls to say himself, but that will appeal to the blood-sucking, salivating mob of ultra-conservative dittoheads. Then the campaign comes out with a message that McCain does not agree with the statement. Then, the next day, or sometimes the same day, somebody else comes out and makes a new outrageous statement.

Is this McCain’s way of having his cake and eating it too? His campaign appeals to the base and he stays above the fray by supposedly repudiating the appeal (obviously with a wink and a nod)?

Or is this evidence that McCain has no control over his campaign?



Either way, it does not instill confidence in his ability to lead a nation.

Please click on the title of this blog to read a beautifully written essay on what the McCain campaign's hate speech has wrought.

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COUNTRY FIRST: PLAYING POLITICS WITH A FINANCIAL CRISIS

In a disgusting partisan display yesterday, when Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and President Bush had all gone on the record in the media as saying they were close to an accord on how the financial crisis could be managed, John McCain flew into town and injected himself and his campaign hopes into the mix, blowing up whatever agreements had been reached. Democrats were once again left on the hook when, while trying to fix a mess that was created by Republican policies, previous Republican control of the congress and a Republican administration, the Republicans first made it look like they would agree to a plan and then bailed out and pretended they never agreed in the first place. And their next step will surely be to label the Democrats as big spenders on the hook to Wall Street and make it look like they had the interests of the little guy at heart the whole time.

It became fairly obvious what the campaign was up to when Sarah Palin charged that Barack Obama was checking the political winds before taking action, but John McCain was supposedly taking the bull by the horn. The McCain campaign has set a pattern of transmitting the tact they they are about take by first accusing Obama of doing the exact same thing. So, McCain flew in to what was by most accounts a close-to-done deal to make it look like he was taking matters firmly in hand, so that he can take measure of the political winds. After polling showed the Americans had serious doubts and concerns about he bailout, he decided to pander to those fears (Hey, it worked before!). He carefully did not show support for any plan, or publicly propose his own plan. He poses for a smiling but fidgety photo op and the next thing we know, the whole thing suddenly blows up.

Since Democrats were begged not to disclose what happened when the cameras were turned off, the Republican party gets to spin the whole thing any way they want. And, since Obama had been summoned to witness this pathetic political theatre, the blame game will start today and he will somehow be in the thick of why things blew up. Look for the smears to be coming from Sarah Palin. If she deigns to make any kind of statement to the media today, watch what she says because it will tell you what new spin the campaign is trying to use to make it look like they are doing something and Obama is either not doing anything or is not doing the right thing.

From MSNBC this morning:

“..leading Democrats on Capitol Hill were shocked by the level of divisiveness that surfaced at Thursday’s extraordinary White House meeting, leaving six days of intensive efforts to agree on a bailout plan in tatters only hours after key congressional players of both parties had declared they were in accord on the outlines of a $700 billion bill.”

Then this morning Lindsey Graham sits on a morning show and pretends that he knew nothing about any agreement and found out only at lunchtime. He was busy meeting with Republican congress members. What the hell was he doing there if there was no deal yet? Let me guess; figuring out how to derail the whole thing so that they could use this financial crisis to McCain’s advantage somehow.

This also from MSNBC this morning:

“

Schumer said…’Before Sen. McCain made his announcement, we were making progress.’ Schumer was referring to McCain’s announcement earlier in the week that he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington for the negotiations on the financial industry crisis.

McCain met briefly Friday morning with House Republican Leader John Boehner.”

How strange that Boehner meets with McCain, while Lindsey Graham is busy meeting with Republican House Members then all of a sudden the whole plan is derailed. They pretend it was derailed by the House Republicans so that the Senate Republicans don’t appear to be going back on their word or as though they had anything to do with the shenanigans. And suddenly, McCain has his own ideas for how to solve the mess, which he supposedly put forth in the meeting at the White House, though NOBODY has reported on any details of that plan.

The new plan being advanced by Republicans this morning is RIFE with problems. I am no Wall Street insider, but anyone with a small amount of knowledge about the current problems there will tell you that part of the problem now is that those who are holding a lot of this bad debt are hesitant to step up and be known because their stock value and credit rating will drop immediately, to their possible ruin. This is part of what is freezing the market. The Republican plan put forth this morning would force these firms to show their hands, as it were, in the highest-stakes poker game in the world. That is no answer, but a recipe for disaster if you are really trying to constructively fix the problem. Yet, that does not seem to be the aim of the McCain campaign or the Republican party right now. Obviously, Party is coming before the needs of country.

This also from MSNBC this morning:

“The White House summit meeting had been called for the purpose of sealing the deal that Bush has argued is indispensable to stabilizing frenzied markets and reassuring the nervous American public. But it quickly revealed that Bush’s proposal had been suddenly sidetracked by fellow Republicans in the House, who refused to embrace a plan that appeared close to acceptance by the Senate and most House Democrats.

Paulson begged Democratic participants not to disclose how badly the meeting had gone, dropping to one knee in a teasing way to make his point according to witnesses.
And when Paulson hastily tried to revive talks in a nighttime meeting near the Senate chamber, the House’s top Republican refused to send a negotiator.”

Watch today for Sarah Palin to make the claim that it is the Democrats playing politics with the financial crisis. The spin will most likely be that she and John are the ones that are keeping the small-town people’s needs first, but the evil liberal Democrats are just trying to throw their money at Wall Street in a desperate bid for the White House. It is as predictable as it could possibly be.

Unfortunately, it is quite possible that an uninformed electorate will not see it coming and perhaps may even fall for it.

McCain’s new slogan should read:

JOHN MCCAIN: PARTY AND PRESIDENTIAL AMBITIONS FIRST LAST AND ALWAYS

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COMPARING HEALTHCARE "CHANGE"

There are a lot of politicians talking about change lately. However, there ARE stark differences between the changes that each party is offering in the upcoming election.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning radical changes for the nation’s health insurance system. An independent study to be released on Tuesday by scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain-Palin plan.

The McCain-Palin health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on. Your employer will estimate the value of the benefits that you currently receive and this will be reported as income on each paycheck and you will have payroll taxes withheld.

Senator McCain says that he will offset this missing income by offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit of $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family. (Of course, for those who are barely scraping by already, no tax credit will make up for missing money from a paycheck. And for some, the $2500 will not compensate for the value of the health insurance they will be taxed on.)

The philosophy behind the McCain-Palin plan is that, if families opt out of employer-paid health coverage and enter into the health insurance marketplace, free market forces will fix the problems we are currently facing in healthcare. This free market philosophy underscores all republican platforms and the economic policies that have been in place for the past eight to ten years have all been based on it. Unfortunately, we are seeing (and feeling) the ill-effects of the free-market philosophy in the current mortgage/banking/financial markets crisis.

Some foreseeable results of this plan are that younger, healthier workers will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage; some older, wealthier workers will opt out for financial reasons; leaving employers with a pool of older, (and poorer) less-healthy workers to cover. Their coverage will then be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all. This will also force those who can least afford it to pay more or drop their coverage completely, worsening the crisis of the uninsured.

These changes will leave millions more Americans on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace, because Senator McCain states that “the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.” Meanwhile the plan also undermines state regulation of the insurance industry because McCain says he is committed to ridding the market of these “needless and costly” insurance regulations.

The McCain-Palin campaign says that by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country, they are offering patients more “choices.” However, current requirements in your state that force insurers to cover vaccinations, annual physicals, regular testing, breast examinations, or prostate examinations would essentially be meaningless. Their offer of "choice" effectively destroys local control and supervision of insurance company policies by state insurance commissioners without replacing it with any kind of control or supervision, leaving us to trust the insurance companies to do the right thing.

The findings of the study being released on Tuesday (9-17-08) are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs. I urge you to read this and decide for yourself.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/index.dtl

Alternatively, the Obama-Biden plan moves in a different direction. Their plan aims to modernize and increase the efficiency of our current system of employer- and government-provided health care by use of technological advances that will identify the best providers, treatments and patient management strategies.

The Obama-Biden plan retains the current income-tax exclusion on benefits for those currently receiving employer-paid benefits and offers households (including those still unable to afford private coverage) a refundable tax credit.

Employers not offering coverage or making ‘meaningful’ contribution to the cost of insurance for their employees would be required to pay a 4 percent payroll tax to help subsidize coverage for low- and moderate-income families. However, the plan would also give small firms the option of joining large insurance pools, decreasing the cost for them to provide coverage. Larger patient pools spread risk over a larger group, keeping premiums can be kept down and controlling cost volatility.

The Obama-Biden plan would offer individuals the option to buy in to the federal government's benefits system, ensuring that all individuals have access to an affordable, portable alternative at a price they can afford. SCHIP and Medicaid would be expanded and insurance coverage would be mandated for children.

Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and doctors will be based on patient outcomes (lower cholesterol readings, made and kept follow-up appointments) in order to focus the entire payment system around better health, not just more care. Their plan will also guarantee patient access to preventive services, improving overall health and in turn saving money.

The reforms included in the Obama-Biden plan are intended to lower premiums by $2,500 for the typical family, allowing millions previously priced out of the market to afford insurance, motivate employers to provide affordable coverage, extend coverage to the working poor, alleviate the current cost burden on employers, and eliminate the crisis of uninsured and underinsured patients in the current system.

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A STAR IS BORN; INDEED.

The title of the famous movie was also the title of yesterday’s editorial by William Kristol. (If you choose, you can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/opinion/01kristol.html?th&emc=th) Unfortunately for Kristol, if one stops long enough to think (which I am sure that his readers do not) about the reference to the oft-remade award-winner, one will recall that the story was one of a movie star with a career in decline and his romance with a star on the rise. Hardly the sort of picture Kristol would want to paint of McCain/Palin.

I don’t know why the NY Times continues to value the opinion of someone with such an exceptional track record of being WRONG on just about every issue. Yet Kristol continues to opine in its employ, so someone must be reading him.
After giving short praise to an Obama speech that was viewed by more people in this country than almost any other televised event aside from the SuperBowl, Kristol joins the conservative love-fest of Sarah Palin, John McCain’s arm candy of a Vice Presidential nominee.

“It’s amazing what a bold vice-presidential pick who gives a sterling performance when she’s introduced will do for a party’s spirits.”

Because that’s what you want out of a Vice Presidential nominee- a performance. Like she’s a trained monkey. Or is he touching back on that movie reference again? But I think he’s right; the kind of person that is still entertaining the idea of voting Republican probably LOVES Palin. Isn’t she pretty?? She sure knows how to accessorize. Love those pearls! Former beauty queen, you know.

This was actually pointed out by Cokie Roberts on the Sunday morning pundit-fest, This Week with George Stephanopolis. She was literally giddy as she pointed out that Ms. Palin was a BONA FIDE Miss Congeniality. Of course, thinking people would perhaps be a little leery of putting their country in the hands of a former beauty pageant contestant—she didn’t even win the thing—but, not our conservative friends. All shallow appearance and no substance, that’s what they like. They still back George W. Bush, after all, the most vacuous leader a country was ever forced to endure.

Then, and this is my favorite thing, Kristol tries to pretend that experience is not that important when choosing a President.

“There are Republicans who are unhappy about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. Many are insiders who highly value — who overly value — ‘experience.’”

As if the whole neo-con assembly of the Republican Party has not been harping endlessly, about how UNEXPERIENCED Barack Obama is. But now that the pretty, shiny lady has stepped into the limelight, that all just floats effortlessly out the window. Experience is JUST not that important. After all, she’s just the No. 2, as Kristol, sounding reasonable enough for the less-analytical reader, goes on to point out.

“…Obama supporters can’t get too indignant about Palin’s inexperience. She’s only running for the No. 2 job, after all, while their inexperienced standard-bearer is the nominee for the top position.”

So, what is the definition of the word “experience,” as applied to any nominee for high office?

Sarah Palin’s glittering resume contains two terms on the city council of Wasilla, AK, and one term as mayor. Wasilla, AK has, according to its website, a population of 6,715 people (per the 2000 census). Maybe that seems like a lot of people where she comes from, but not from where most of us sit. Also on her resume is an unfinished term (less than two years) as Governor, which is not even enough to judge whether she could be considered a SUCCESSFUL governor. But, I am sure that does not bother anyone who voted for George W. Bush, who must stand out as the least-successful “businessman” to ever have been called a businessman.

None of the punditry is comparing Palin’s paltry experience to Joe Biden’s, the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee. THAT would be laughable. No, they are instead comparing her lack of experience to what they claim is Obama’s lack of experience. Here is a look at the new math:



Maybe the reason the Republicans are doing such an abysmal job of running the country is because they can’t even properly perform a simple equation.

And this line of reasoning totally ignores the fact that McCain is 72 years old and has a history of cancer. It is not outside the realm of possibility that he might not last out a full term. Does Kristol genuinely believe that Palin would qualify as a good President?

And the next little gem that Kristol tosses out is actually supposed to be some kind of dig against Obama.

“And McCain doesn’t need a foreign policy expert as vice president to help him out.”

Wasn’t it John McCain that didn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite Muslim? Wasn’t it John McCain who confused Iran with Iraq? Has said that he would consider maintaining a troop presence in Iraq for the next 100 years? Wants to “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”? McCain has stumbled on basic facts concerning foreign policy enough times in public that he probably SHOULD have been looking for someone to shore him up.

Kristol at least admits that this choice of Palin is a gamble.

“But of course McCain needs Palin to do well to prove he’s a shrewd and prescient gambler.”

Does William Kristol think that our next President should be a gambler? Because I think most people are of the opinion that this country can’t afford any more gambling at this point. But then again, Kristol has been wrong so many times, perhaps he believes that at some point the odds will catch up with him. More of that poor Republican math.

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