Politico’s whack job on Palin

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m completely in the tank for Obama. I’ve phone banked for him and I’m heading to Roanoke later this week to work as a volunteer to get the vote out. If you’ve read any of the other entries on this blog, you know that I’m a flaming liberal.

I don’t support John McCain for many reasons, chief among them his decision to add the incredibly unqualified Sarah Palin to the ticket. Well, the truth is I wouldn’t have supported McCain no matter who he named as a running mate, but his decision to tap Palin made me feel a lot better about it.

It’s late and I don’t have the energy to go off on Sarah’s shortcomings — her fake reformer credentials, her questionable ethics, her lack of intellectual curiosity, her inability to form complete sentences, her eagerness to incite the fear, hate and insecurities of the mob. Shit, there’s really not anything I like about her.

Which is why what I’m about to write feels sort of weird: I’m bothered by this whole “whack job” blowup.

Read more at Another Dead Canary

Why McCain will have to wear Ashley Todd’s scarlett letter

Here’s the question of the day: How did the entire blogosphere and twitterverse know intuitively that Ashley Todd was some imbalanced attention-seeker almost immediately after the story broke but John McCain, Sarah Palin and their top staff did not?

Predictably, the liberal bloggers and tweeters were calling bullshit as soon as they heard Todd’s tale of getting mugged and having a backwards “B” carved scratched into her cheek while she was somewhere on the “wrong side” of Pittsburgh. The B, presumably, was for “Barack.” The mugger, a tallish, thinnish black man (apparently dyslexic) became enraged after he noticed that Todd, a McCain campaign worker, had a McCain bumper sticker on her car.

Of course, everyone knew it was a lie just by looking at the picture of her “disfigured” face posted at Smoking Gun. Why would the mugger carve a backwards B? And why did he take extra care not to break her skin with his knife after violently punching, kicking and throwing her to the ground?

Read more at Another Dead Canary

Hey McCain, how do you like your boy genius now?

Can it really be less than two months since the New York Times told the world how political strategist Steve Schmidt had transformed the McCain campaign into “an elbows-out, risk-taking, disciplined machine”? At the time, I remember having a visceral reaction to its description of Schmidt’s “brillilance.”

It bothered me that McCain’s surge in the polls was being credited to Schmidt’s attacking style and his penchant for hard-hitting, negative campaigning. What would you expect from a Karl Rove protege? Were Swift Boat politics going to be validated once again?

Now, with McCain’s campaign in a stuttering, discombobulated, mob-powered free fall, I wonder if Schmidt is still wearing the genius tag? If he gets credit for McCain pulling the race even over the summer, then does he get the blame for the looming electoral-college rout on the horizon?

Read more at Another Dead Canary

The billionaire bailout

I wanted to do a “man on the street” piece for this video because I thought it was important to capture some of the grassroots anger toward the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Our intern shot the video and I edited it.

What do we want?

She was leading the chant, “What do we want?” during the Bailout for Billionaire’s protest / street performance near Farragut Park in D.C.

Posted at Cosmic Smudge