[Reefland]

Dozens of supporters, that was funny.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by Reefland

Dozens of supporters, that was funny.

Be sure to watch the video clip. It's hilarious. You can see just how small McCain's audience is compared to Obama's. And McCain's people have been planning this speech for the past three weeks.

The best part is watching the comments from all the Republican-leaning pundits, including Karl Rove. Karl Rove tried to put the best spin on it by saying that there was nothing wrong with the speech as written, it was just the delivery that was lacking. Many of the other pundits, including FOX News regulars, said it was the worst political speech they had ever heard.

I noticed that McCain used "change we can believe in" a couple dozen times in his speech. I guess this means that the GOP has given up on their first choice, "change you deserve."

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by Ninong

It Was Another Negative Number

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed in April (-20,000), following job losses that totaled 240,000 in the first 3 months of the year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.

We have now lost 260,000 jobs so far this year and April marks the fourth straight month of job losses. Don't forget that it takes a minimum of 150,000 new jobs created per month just to stay even with population expansion. Anything less than that amounts to negative job growth. That means that for the first four months of the year we are 860,000 jobs short of just staying even with population expansion.

John McCain says we're doing great. He's married to a woman nearly two decades younger than him who's worth $100 million, so he's doing really great.

GDP has grown at an annual rate of 0.6% for the past six months, meaning that technically we are not in recession but very close to it. Many economists are predicting a long and painful recession, worse than anything we have experienced since the Great Depression. I sure hope they're all wrong.

McCain Says Things Are Going Great: The number of unemployed persons increased by 861,000 to 8.5 million in May. A year earlier the number of unemployed persons was 6.9 million.


The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released the job numbers for May and they aren't pretty. Unemployment jumped from 5.0% in April to 5.5% in May. That's the largest one-month increase in the last 22 years!

The initial guesstimate on nonfarm payrolls shows a loss of 49,000 for May. Excuse my sarcasm in calling it a guesstimate. I'm getting tired of the Bush administration's employees giving us bad news that turns out to be even worse than originally announced. As you can see from my quoted post from a month ago, the government told us that we lost 20,000 jobs in April. That's the number that made headlines. A couple weeks later they quietly revised that number. Instead of 20,000, it seems we lost 35,000 jobs in April. They did the exact same thing in all of the previous months this year. In every month the revised number was worse than the initial number released to the press.

We have lost jobs every month this year but the number the government releases has been quietly revised later to a worse number. In my quoted post from last month, I pointed out that we had lost 260,000 jobs for the year through April. According to the Commissioner's Statement released this morning, we have lost 324,000 jobs so far in 2008, including the 49,000 lost in May.

Hey, wait a minute! That doesn't add up! 260,000 + 49,000 = 309,000. Where did that 324,000 figure come from??? Oh, glad you asked. That just means that they decided that their "initial estimate" of -20,000 in April was just a wee bit off. The revised figure for April is -35,000.

May marks the fifth straight month of job losses! Remember that it takes approximately 150,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with population expansion. During 2007, the Bush administration added an average of 91,000 new jobs per month. That means that they missed keeping up with population growth by 708,000 jobs in 2007. In just the first five months of 2008, they have missed keeping up with population expansion by 1,074,000 jobs.

Unemployment, according to the BLS, is now 5.5%. One year ago it was 4.5%. Not good! We're moving in the wrong direction. John McCain tells us that "overall," things are going great.

The number of unemployed persons increased by 861,000 to 8.5 million in May. A year earlier the number of unemployed persons was 6.9 million.

According to official government figures, GDP grew at an annual rate of 0.6% in the last quarter of 2007 and by the exact same rate in the first quarter of 2008. As Warren Buffett wisely pointed out, that means we're really in recession because the population is growing at an annual rate of 0.883%, so on a per-capita basis, GDP is falling.

P.S. -- It goes without saying that the true unemployment rate is much higher than the phony rate the government tells us because of the weird way they keep track of unemployment. The real number of unemployed and underemployed people is much greater than 8.5 million. They have been playing games with these numbers for decades now.

The number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons, at 5.2 million in May, was essentially unchanged over the month but was up by 764,000 over the past 12 months. These individuals indicated that they were working part time because their hours had been cut back or they were unable to find full-time jobs.
(See table A-5.)

Those 5.2 million people are counted as employed. In addition, there are millions of people who work part-time because they want to. So, in addition to the 8.5 million people who are unemployed, there are an additional 5.2 million people whose employment is part-time because that's the best they can get. And then there are millions of people who are chronically unemployed. The government doesn't count them as unemployed if they don't show up on a regular basis at the unemployment office and prove that they are really looking for work. The government says they don't count as unemployed because they aren't trying hard enough to find a job.

If you're wondering how the number of unemployed persons can jump by 861,000 if we only lost 49,000 jobs in May, it's because of population expansion of the work force: students graduating, etc.

P.P.S. -- In other "good" news for the McCain Campaign, crude oil is trading above $138/bbl $139/bbl and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped more than 300 370 400 points this morning today.

[Ninong]

British Media Running Story of McCain's First Marriage

The Mail on Sunday ran a piece on John McCain's first marriage and it's pretty devastating. This is nothing new, it's been detailed before in a book by one of McCain's former pals, but it's coming now at an inopportune time for McCain.

It will be interesting to see if the U.S. mainstream media touches this topic at all. It's a very important part of who John McCain really is but it's something they have avoided in the past. The media has always treated John McCain with kid gloves. They were amused by his former "maverick" ways.

Excerpts:

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’ she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.

‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.

[...]

It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house.

It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.

After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’

H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’

He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.

‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.

Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.

But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.

McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.

He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.

‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’

Another friend added: ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’

[...]

Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife.

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’

[...]

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

What was it they called him in his high school yearbook? Oh, yeah, now I remember: "The Punk."

[Ninong]

HaHaHaHaHa...............

Talk about the audacity of hope, check this out.

This one is almost as funny.

Here's another good one.

And what about this one?

Nobody can say the McCain Campaign doesn't have a sense of humor.


__________________________________________________

"McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory. After he came home (from Vietnam), Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history." -- H. Ross Perot, who paid all of Carol McCain's huge medical expenses while John McCain was a POW.

[Ninong]

More From McCain's Gift Shop


Notice how they have cleverly placed McCain's head next to Lincoln's. This could prove to be a bad move. McCain makes all the other stone faces on Mt. Rushmore look youthful in comparison.


__________________________________________________

"McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory. After he came home (from Vietnam), Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history." -- H. Ross Perot, who paid all of Carol McCain's huge medical expenses while John McCain was a POW.

[Ninong]

Check Out This McCain Gift Item

Here.

[Ninong]

Is McCain Really a Maverick?

No, not anymore. He used to be a maverick but he has flip-flopped on almost all of his previous maverick positions. As a matter of fact, in 2007 McCain voted with the Bush administration 95% of the time.

- McCain was one of only two Republicans to vote against the $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001.

- McCain was one of only two Republicans to twice vote against permanent repeal of the estate tax in 2002.

- McCain was one of only three Republicans to twice vote against the $350 billion tax cut in 2003.

McCain's current position is that he is now in favor of making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent. In 2001, McCain said the tax cuts favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. He said he was voting against them because they offended his conscience. Apparently his conscience is no longer offended.

What about prayer in public schools? McCain is in favor of prayer in public schools as long as participation is not mandatory.

What about same-sex marriage? McCain is against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He believes that this issue should be decided by the individual states. Vice President Cheney agrees with him on that. President Bush favors a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Where does McCain stand on gun control? That all depends on when you ask him. He has opposed restrictions on assault weapons and types of ammunition and he has supported a ban on certain types of assault weapons. In August 1999, McCain wanted to ban cheap guns, require safety locks and require background checks at gun shows. However, in 2004 McCain voted NO on gun show background checks. McCain says he doesn't own a gun.

McCain said "waterboarding is torture; we're not going to torture people." However, McCain voted against a bill that would have required the CIA to follow the interrogation techniques authorized in the Army field manual. In other words, waterboarding is torture and we're not going to do it but if the CIA wants to do it, that's OK with McCain.

Immigration reform. This is an issue where McCain has flip-flopped completely just within the past 12 months! He sponsored the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill that was strongly supported by President Bush. The Republicans in the Senate blocked it by filibuster. Now McCain says that if Harry Reid brings up the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill again, he will vote against it. He will vote AGAINST HIS OWN BILL.

What about Iran? McCain says Iran is a sponsor of terrorism and that we must strike them if they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. Keep military option open against Iran even if no nukes. No direct talks with Iran; talk is overrated. (Israel is presently engaged in direct talks with Syria. Don't tell McCain.)

What does McCain think of the Republican party? What does he think of the Democratic party? That depends on when you ask him. Back in 2004, McCain said: "I believe my party has gone astray. I think the Democratic party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy. But I feel the Republican party can be brought back to the principles I articulated before."

What else did McCain say back in 2004 besides saying that his party had gone astray and that the Democratic party was a fine party. Well, during the very same speech when he said those nice things about the Democrats, he said this about Bush's Iraq policy: "You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that." During that same speech, he also said that the U.S. should seek more U.N. involvement in Iraq. "Many people in this room question, legitimately, whether we should have gone in or not," he said, adding that that debate "will be part of this presidential campaign." Little did McCain know four years ago that it would also be part of the 2008 campaign.

[Ninong]

Does John McCain Want To Privatize Social Security?

Four years ago he was all in favor of privatizing social security but today he said that's not true. He was never in favor of privatizing social security even though he's on tape in November 2004 saying that privatization is necessary and the only way that young Americans would be able to receive social security benefits.

Both McCain and Bush have favored the elimination of social security as a government program by replacing it with what amounts to individual 401k type accounts. Bush campaigned on that platform back in 1978 when he was defeated in his first attempt at elected office. McCain now wants to introduce privatization gradually by starting with just young workers and just a portion of their social security payments. Eventually the entire social security program would be privatized. The problem is that whatever funds are diverted away from the social security program into individual accounts will have to be made up somehow, someway, meaning extra taxes.

You can't take money out of the program without the program itself suffering from the reduction in funds. The partial program that Bush wanted to push through would have cost at least $2 billion a year in lost funds to social security. Nobody is talking about extra funds being deducted from "younger workers," they're all talking about allowing younger workers to divert a portion of their social security deductions into private accounts. It's just a way of getting the privatization ball rolling.

November 18, 2004:

Question: "Will privatizing social security be a priority for you going forward?"

Sen. McCain: "Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly over time make sure that young Americans are able to receive social security benefits."


June 13, 2008:

Sen. McCain: "And I want to just mention on the issue of social security, 'McCain wants to, quote, privatize social security.' My friends, I do not and will not privatize social security, it is a government program and it's necessary, but it's broken... But my friends, I will not privatize social security and it's not true when I am accused of that but I would like for younger workers, younger workers only, to have an opportunity to take a few of their tax dollars, a few of theirs and maybe put it into an account with their name on it."

Video clip of McCain's comments in 2004 and 2008

In 2004 he said that privatization of social security was the only way to save the program. In 2008 he's pushing partial privatization but he refuses to call it that and goes even further, accusing anyone who claims that he wants to privatize social security of lying. He's the one who's lying. He said he wanted to privatize it in 2004 and he still wants to privatize it in 2008, he just doesn't want to call it privatization.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by Ninong

Bush-McCain Fundraiser Cancelled Because...

...not enough people wanted to come.

A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.

Convention Center personnel confirmed the event has been canceled at their venue.

Tickets to the event were to range from $1,000 to $25,000 for VIP treatment. Money was to go toward McCain's presidential bid and a number of Republican Party organs.

Poor ticket sales caused the cancellation of the mega-event originally planned and a much smaller event will be held at a private home in the Phoenix area. Let's hope it's a very small private home.

McCain Cancels Another Fundraiser

McCain was scheduled to appear Monday at a fundraiser at the home of Texas Republican Clayton Williams. Williams has already collected more than $300,000 in contributions for the McCain Campaign. The reason for this cancellation has to do with comments Williams made during his failed 1990 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Ann Richards.

The Texan, Republican Clayton "Claytie" Williams, made the joke during his failed 1990 campaign for governor against Democrat Ann Richards. Williams compared rape to the weather, saying, "As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." He also compared Richards to the cattle on his ranch, saying he would "head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt."

At first when the McCain Campaign was contacted by the Washington Post and ABC News about holding a fundraiser at the home of someone who made such outrageous comments, they responded that since the comments were made eight years ago and since Williams later apologized for them, they didn't see how this was newsworthy. After they learned that the Post and ABC were preparing stories on how McCain was going after Hillary Clinton's women supporters by appearing at a fundraiser at the home of a man who said women should "enjoy rape" and he would "head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt" about Ann Richards, they changed their minds and cancelled McCain's appearance. They won't be returning any of the money because "it was given by other people, not Williams himself."

P.S. -- Might be hard finding politically correct Republican fatcats in Texas.

[Ninong]

Two McCains: McCain Debates McCain

Excerpts from two different speeches:

McCain: The fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed.

McCain: Now, you'll hear from my opponent's campaign, in every speech, in every interview, in every press release that I'm running for President Bush's third term.

McCain: And on the transcendant issues, the most important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.

McCain: You'll hear, you'll hear every policy of the president described as the Bush-McCain policy...

McCain: So, have we had some disagreements on some issues, particularly domestic issues, yes...

McCain: Why does Senator Obama believe it's so important to repeat that idea over and over again?

McCain: ...but I will argue my conservative record of voting with anyone's and I will also submit that my support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people.

McCain: Because he knows it's very difficult to get Americans to believe something that they know is false.

McCain: And I am particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of our men and women in the military, uh, fiscal discipline, and a number of other issues; so I strongly disagree with any assertion that I've been more at odds with the President of the United States than I have been in agreement.

Video clip of McCain debating McCain.

P.S. -- McCain voted with the president 95% of the time in 2007.

[Ninong]

Texas Republicans Are So Funny

When they're not telling hilarious rape jokes...

...they manage to come up with hilarious buttons about uppity Negroes.

Stay classy, Texas GOP.

P.S. -- Update (6/19/08): This made the national news. MSNBC called some guy named Hans, who is supposedly the "manager" of the Texas GOP convention, and he said they weren't made aware of this button until Saturday, the last day of the convention. They claim they expelled the vendor and told him he was not welcome at any other Texas Republican events. Hans also said they donated the $1,500 vendor's booth fee the guy paid them to the Red Cross.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by Ninong

John McCain - Hero de la France!

John McCain made a stop in Paris to accept the thanks of a grateful nation for his help in landing the $35 billion Air Force Fuel Tanker contract for Airbus over their American rival, Boeing. For a while there the Airbus folks were worried that the Bush Administration might give this huge contract to Boeing just because Boeing is an American company and it would mean thousands of jobs, but John McCain saw to it that the necessary legislation was in place to assist Airbus in their quest for this really, really big deal.

Merci, Jean McCain - a grateful nation salutes you.

Quelle horreur!

Boeing wins a key round in tanker protest

Protest over $35 billion Air Force contract awarded to company

Looks like McCain's efforts on behalf of Airbus may be in peril.

C'est la vie, Jean McCain.

[Ninong]

"I Upped Halliburton's Income -- So Up Yours"

That's one of the titles Scott McClellan suggested would be appropriate for Dick Cheney's memoir. The other suggestion was "The Lies I Told."

Here are a few more tidbits from McClellan's address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco Tuesday:

Vice President Dick Cheney, he said, "had a terribly negative influence over this president ... and was shown too much deference" on major decisions, including Iraq.

During his speech and in a later sit-down with reporters, McClellan was particularly pointed with regard to the run-up to the Iraq war. He said Cheney - along with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - made up an insular and far-too-influential group that failed to provide the president with critical voices and views.

He said both candidates (McCain and Obama) need to offer "specific answers" to questions about their policies on the Iraq war, which he calls an unnecessary and ill-advised war that "has gone on for longer than it should have gone on - and it needs to be brought to an end."

[Ninong]

Trent Lott's Bro-in-Law Sentenced, Nephew to Be Sentenced Next Week

Dickie Scruggs received five years and a $250,000 fine for offering a $50,000 bribe to a judge to rule favorably in a case involving $26.5 million of attorneys' fees in Hurricane Katrina related insurance claims. Dickie's son will be sentenced next week. Trent has been involved in a lot of this stuff over the years but he has always managed to slip out of the noose.

Dickie nearly fainted when they read the sentence. He had to sit down to hear the rest of it. Who would have ever imagined a judge in Mississippi turning down a $50,000 bribe? What's this world coming to?

[Ninong]

Corrupt Corporate Media Falsely Attacking Wesley Clark

The incredibly corrupt and dishonest corporate media, especially CNN, is falsely attacking retired Gen. Wesley Clark for something he said on Face the Nation yesterday.

What did Clark actually say?

Many in the media have cropped Clark’s June 29 Face the Nation interview to the short soundbite: “I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Those cropping the interview make two serious errors. First, they ignore that Clark was repeating Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer’s words in response to Schieffer’s statement that, unlike McCain, Obama has not “ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.”

Second, they ignore that shortly before that part of Clark’s exchange with Schieffer, Clark praised McCain’s service: “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world.” Clark continued: “But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air -- in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’ He hasn't made those calls, Bob.”

CNN is trying very hard to out-fox FOX. Their ratings have been climbing over the past few months while FOX's ratings have been falling. This has encouraged them to become even more sensational and tabloid-like in their reporting. Like FOX, they're taking tiny snipets out of context and pretending that they represent something entirely different from what the speaker actually meant.

Even Anderson Cooper has been guilty of this on occasion. It's sad. It's sad because so many people think that if they saw it on CNN, or CBS, or NBC, or FOX, or whatever, then it must be true. There are people who actually believe the crap coming from Glen Beck, Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, etc., but those people are beyond help because they want to believe that crap whether it's true or not.

It's also sad to see that hundreds of staff have left (most were let go) the Wall Street Journal now that Rupert Murdock owns it and is turning it into another one of his rags.

[Ninong]

Corporate Media Prostitute Brian Williams of NBC News

Just played this single sentence from Gen. Wesley Clark: “I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

That's it. That was the complete clip. Out of everything that Gen. Clark said, that was the only little snippet they chose to play. They ignored what he said before or after and they ignored the fact that he was responding to an exactly worded question from CBS's Bob Schieffer. Those were Schieffer's words. Clark was simply responding to what Schieffer said. Schieffer was knocking Obama's qualifications by saying that, unlike McCain, he had not "ridden in a fighter plane and been shot down." That's when Wesley Clark responded that he didn't think riding in a fighter plane and being shot down is a qualification to be president." It was Schieffer who suggested that it was and that Obama was somehow lacking because he had no military experience.

NBC is simply following the line laid out by their corrupt corporate overlord, General Electric. Anyone who thinks that the Republican-controlled corporate giants that own the networks don't exert an influence over the content is smoking dope.

P.S. -- You should have seen the prima donna fits Brian Williams threw down here in New Orleans when he was covering Hurricane Katrina.

[Ninong]

John & Cindy McCain Are Just Regular Folks, Not Elitists Like the Obamas

The McCain Campaign is working hard to make sure the voters know that John and Cindy McCain are just regular folks and not elitists like Barack and Michelle Obama.

Neither John nor Cindy McCain attended Harvard, like both Barack and Michelle Obama. And McCain certainly was never elected president of the Harvard Law Review like the elitist Barack Obama. In fact, McCain finished fifth from the bottom in a graduating class of several hundred at Annapolis. McCain is so non-elitist that his high school nicknames were "The Punk" and "McNasty."

It's true that Cindy McCain did inherit a few bucks from her parents and she is chairman of the board of largest beer distributorship in Arizona, which she inherited, but she's not an elitist like that Michelle Obama, who makes about $300,000 a year working for some health outfit. Cindy was president of a charity once but she ran into a little problem with the feds. She didn't do any time though. Just community service and an agreement that she would enter rehab and stop stealing drugs from her own charity. Cindy's no longer a drug addict, so voters shouldn't be worried about the possibility she would turn into another Betty Ford in the White House.

Speaking of houses, it's true that Cindy and John aren't quite sure how many they own -- it's either eight or nine according to Cindy, or at least seven according to John. It's hard to keep track because they buy and sell homes all the time. According to data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Center for Responsive Politics, the McCains spent $11 million purchasing five condos for the family between 2004 and 2007, but Cindy also had income of $29 million during that same three-year period. It's true that Cindy has charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one of her American Express cards and another $250,000 on another card but she pays the balances in full every month. The McCains do spend $273,000 a year for household help but Cindy needs a lot of help.

The McCain's primary condo in Phoenix, that they purchased in 2006, was a mere $4.7 million and 6,600 square feet. But why so many vacation condos? Let hear how Cindy explained it to Vogue recently:

In her recent Vogue interview, conducted from the newer Coronado condo, McCain explained that her husband, a Navy veteran, initially wasn’t keen on the idea of a pied-à-terre in Coronado.

"When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, 'Oh, this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go,'” she told Vogue. “Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn't get in the place. So I bought another one.”

As far as Cindy's $3,000 a pop German suits are concerned, she has promised to switch to an American designer should she become First Lady.

So that should put the rest all those rumors that John and Cindy McCain were elitists like Barack and Michelle Obama.

Here.