The Impeachment Hearing Room: This Obama (v) McCain Is The Video That Ignites Cyber Space And Burns McCain/Palin Crashing To The Ground.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

This Obama (v) McCain Is The Video That Ignites Cyber Space And Burns McCain/Palin Crashing To The Ground.

Posted by ed. dickau at 4:54 AM

This Obama (v) McCain Is The Video That Ignites Cyber Space And Burns McCain/Palin Crashing To The Ground. Use It. Pass It On. Now!

McCain/Palin, Desperate, Disturbed and Dangerous!

Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator

By Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano

Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.

The McCain/Palin Ticket Is Failing In More Than One Way. Desperate And Grasping At Straws A Ticket Whose Physical and Mental Health Is Increasingly Suspect And Being Called Into Question Has Elected To Finish The Campaign In Raging Hate, Innuendo, Lies And An Attempt To Repaint Obama With Guilt By Association In The Neighborhood. In McCain’s Case It’s Guilt By Fact!

John McCain's options narrow on the electoral college map

By Mark Z. Barabak

The economy and Obama's spending power force the Republican to concentrate on a few must-win states

Obama Leading In Ohio, Poll Finds
Edge Is 6 Points In a State Looming Large for McCain
(By Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, The Washington Post)

Make-Believe Maverick

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

McCain, Obama introduce newly sharp tone amid major news events

By Peter Wallsten

McCain intensifies his attack on Obama's past and character, and Obama returns the favor. The tactics may not resonate with voters in a time of crisis.

Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from note cards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia,Spain), and she's on a mission from God!

John McCain and the Keating Five, What Every Voter MUST Know

During the 2000 Republican Presidential Primaries, Slate.com writer Chris Suellentrop wrote an excellent in-depth feature article about John McCain and his role in the Keating Five. This is a must read article for every American, especially for anyone who “thinks” John McCain is a hero.

Two Important things to know before you read the article:

1. John McCain admitted to intentionally filing false income tax returns to defraud the IRS by not claiming thousands of dollars in gifts McCain and his family received from Charles Keating and Keating’s company. Years later, when the IRS noticed Keating’s company had written off the gifts to McCain as business expenses, McCain fessed up and admitted filing false returns and made a “donation” to the U.S. Treasury to cover the amount he defrauded American tax payers. (Committing tax fraud is one of the least offensive things John McCain has done over his career, but this article just focuses on his role in the Keating Five, and the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the late 1980’s-early 1990’s). McCain also leaked information about the Keating Five to the press multiple times in an effort to appear above the other Senators in the scandal. A 1989 Phoenix New Times article summed it up best with their title - McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five.

2. John McCain’s wife, Cindy McCain, along with her father, made a $359,000 investment in retail property owned by Charles Keating in 1986, a year before John McCain first met with federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Keating was later convicted on 73 counts of fraud, conspiracy, and other crimes. Years later, Cindy McCain sold her investment for $15,000,000.

For anyone not aware of the Keating Five, here’s a very simple summary:

Charles Keating owned a savings and loan in California. He was illegally using the money of his bank’s customers to give loans to himself and friends that they didn’t have to repay, and to speculate on risky real estate investments, which was strictly forbidden by U.S. law (and was one cause of the Great Depression).

When the feds found out what was going on and launched an investigation into Keating and his company, Keating called five U.S. Senators whom he had wined, dined, and lavished with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and personal gifts.

Keating asked the five Senators to tell the feds to bug off, and the five Senators, later known as the Keating Five, obliged, meeting with federal investigators twice and pressuring them to stop investigating Keating’s crimes. They bought Keating some time, but the feds didn’t give up and eventually Keating was nailed. The reason the feds were so persistent was because Keating wasn’t playing with mere chump change. Keating blew $3.4 billion through illegal personal loans and bad investments, and the FDIC had to reimburse Keating’s customers who had been ripped off. (More)

Obama Says McCain’s Keating Five Connection Is Not Off Limits

McCain's "Keating 5" Scandal Involvement To Be Highlighted By Obama Campaign

Exclusive: Obama to hit McCain on Keating Five

Ed. --

John McCain wants you to forget about his role in our country's last major financial crisis and costly bailout: the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s.

But voters deserve to know that the failed philosophy and culture of corruption that created the savings and loan crisis then are alive in the current crisis -- and in John McCain's plans for our economic future.

We just released a short documentary about John McCain's role in that financial crisis -- watch it now and share it with your friends:

http://my.barackobama.com/keatingvideo

Voters should know the facts about John McCain's poor judgment -- judgment that has twice placed him on the wrong side of history.

Please forward this email to everyone you know.

Thanks,

David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

http://www.keatingeconomics.com

Movie (http://www.barackobama.com/images/keating/keatingeconomics.mov )

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday is launching a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

The sudden spate of personal attacks continued Monday, with McCain releasing an ad called "Dangerous": "Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are 'just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.' How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops. Increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and Congressional liberals. Too risky for America."

Obama’s Keating offensive comes after McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, spent two days telling voters, donors and reporters that Obama showed poor judgment in his relationship with the former radical William Ayers.

McCain’s campaign has vowed to make a major issue of Obama’s Chicago relationships in coming days, with a senior McCain official telling Politico that they are “the vehicle that allows us to question Obama’s truthfulness about his past and his plans for the future.”

The McCain campaign also plans to invoke money launderer Tony Rezko. Officials say they will not bring up Obama's former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because McCain has forbidden his campaign from using that as an attack. But the officials said outside groups supporting McCain might highlight Wright.

Responding to the Keating blast from the past, a Republican official said the Obama team seemed "frantic" at "the mere mention of the word 'Ayers.'"

McCain-Palin spokesman Brian Rogers said: "The difference here is clear. John McCain has been open and honest about the Keating matter, and even the Democratic special counsel in charge recommended that Senator McCain be completely exonerated. By contrast, Barack Obama has been fundamentally dishonest about his friendship and work with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, whose radical group bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. Nor has Barack Obama come clean on his close friendship with Tony Rezko, a felon convicted on bribery charges who subsidized the purchase of Barack Obama’s home. It's obvious that Barack Obama is frantically attacking because he knows that most voters find these kinds of friendships, and the failed judgment they expose, to be unacceptable for our next president." (More)

And Now More Health Questions As McCain And Palin Seem To Be Losing It More Everyday!

With Palin The Word Is SOCIOPATH! (And Can You imagine a sociopathic devious, deviant shallow intellect, Pentecostal, Armageddon/Rapture believing Extremist “One Heart Beat” from the Presidency?) Seriously; read on and think about…please!

The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.

There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)

That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from note cards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia,Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.

Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.

It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.

In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.

We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”

Why Some Women Hate Sarah Palin

Some polls are suggesting that after gaining an initial bump, McCain's campaign is being hobbled by Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy. The voters who are deserting her fastest, some of whom are even calling on her to withdraw, are mostly women.

Ah, women, the consistently, tragically underestimated constituency. What the Democrats learned during the primaries and the Republicans might now be finding out the hard way, I learned at my very academic, well-regarded all-girls high school: that is never to discount the ability of women to open a robust, committed, well-thought-out vat of hatred for another girl.

Women are weapons-grade haters. Hillary Clinton knows it. Palin knows it too. When women get their hate on, they don't just dislike, or find disfavor with, or sort of not really appreciate. They loathe — deeply, richly, sustainingly. I do not say this to disparage my gender; women also love in more or less the same way.

When men disagree, the steps to resolution are reasonably clear and unsophisticated. Acts of physical violence are visited upon one another's person or property, and the whole thing blows over. Women? Nu-unh. We savor the discord. We draw it out. We share our contempt with our friends, like a useful stock tip, or really good salsa. And then we all go hate together: a mutually encouraging group activity for when the book group gets quiet.

The hatred women have for Sarah Palin, and others had for Hillary before her, is not necessarily about politics. Anybody can run the numbers on how many people Palin's pro-life, pro-gun, socially conservative policies will seduce and how many they will alienate. Rather, the test that the McCain campaign failed to put her through was the Abbot sleigh Ladies College test. (Named after my high school. Go, green and gold!). It's a simple three-point pass-fail exam: Will the other girls like her?

Here's why Palin doesn't make the grade:

1. She's too pretty. This is very bad news. At school, pretty girls tend to be liked only by other pretty girls. The rest of us, whose looks hover somewhere around underwhelming, resent them and whisper archly of their "unearned attention." So, if everyone calls your candidate "hot," you're in a whole mess of trouble. If the Pakistani head-of-state more or less hits on her, well, yes, she'll get a sympathy vote, but we're in Dukakis-in-the-tank territory. It's an admiration vaporizer. (Of course a candidate can't be too ugly, or it will scare the men, who are clearly shallow as a gender.)

2. She's too confident. This also bodes ill. Women have self-esteem issues. But they also have other-women's-esteem issues. As almost any woman — from the head of the Budgerigar Breeders association to Queen Elizabeth — can attest, it's almost impossible to get confidence right. Too timid and you're a pushover. Too self-aggrandizing and you're a bad word unless it's about a dog, or Project Runway's Kenley. Or Michelle, my best friend until 9th grade, after she won that debating prize and got cocky.

3. She could embarrass us. History is not on Palin's side. Every time a woman gets a plum job, be she Hewlett-Packard's ex-boss, Carly Fiorina, or CBS's Katie Couric, there's always that whispery fear that people will think she got the job just because she's a woman. So if things don't go well — and a couple of YouTube clips have suggested that they're certainly not going well for Palin — women are the first to turn on her for making it harder for the rest of us to louse up at work.

The fact of the matter is once a female decides it's over with another female, it's like an end-stage marriage. No matter how seemingly benign, every attribute becomes an affront: the hair, the voice, the husband, the moose-shooting, the glasses, the big family, the making rape victims pay for their own rape test kits.

I know, I know. With all this extra baggage a female candidate has to bear, the chances of finding a woman whom other women won't hate seem skinnier than last year's jeans. But don't despair, if all else fails, we could just do what we always do and just vote in some guy. It's worked so well for us in the past.

See photos of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail here.

Click here to see Sarah Palin's rise to power.

Watch Sarah Palin, queen of YouTube here.

Pit-bull Palin Mauls McCain

SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.

McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?

Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.

The second bit of pre-debate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.

Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.

Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Six-pack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

NY Times' Harwood quotes Palin's "palling around with terrorists" claim, but not Times' own reporting otherwise

In an October 6 article, New York Times political writer John Harwood wrote that Gov. Sarah Palin "assert[ed] that" Sen. Barack Obama's "relationship with Bill Ayers, the onetime Weather Underground figure, constitutes 'palling around with terrorists.' “But in reporting Palin's claim, Harwood did not mention that the Times itself, in an October 4 article that Palin cited for her claim, reported that "the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.' "

In the October 4 article, the Times also reported that in 1969, Ayers helped found the Weathermen and "twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama's first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors."

Further, Harwood wrote that in response to Palin's comments, Obama "has answered by criticizing Mr. McCain as 'erratic' during the financial crisis and 'radical' in pressing a market-based health care approach resembling Mr. Bush's." But Harwood did not note that the Times previously reported that the Obama campaign issued a statement specifically rebutting Palin's claim. The statement -- noted in an October 4 Caucus post by Times staff writer Kate Phillips -- said in part: "In fact, the very newspaper story Governor Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Senator Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less 'pals,' and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was eight."

I have really disagreed with columnist Frank Rich over the last couple of years when he declared that the Christian Right and the Bush administration were "over". But I think his perceptions about Sarah Palin in the debate Thursday night are on to something about her steely appetite for power.

"The standard take has it that she's either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she's memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there's a steady unnerving undertone to Palin's utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder."

I would add that this hubris comes from her belief that she's on a mission from God.

Today, she was at a fundraiser in the Bay Area, where no press was allowed. A couple hundred of us were mostly stuck behind barricades across the street: union members, Obama supporters, women’s' rights activists. Lots in the crowd had really creative, perceptive signs exposing her opposition to evolution, sex education, protection of the environment, and the McCain/Palin support for the war. It was great to meet people there on this list, and many new people!

Here are excerpts of your responses to my request for comments on Palin:

I received a fascinating letter from Deennaa, an indigenous native of Alaska: "Palin opposes tribal sovereignty - which also covers, under the Federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) the right to keep our own children. Where is anyone telling this in national news? She opposes our inherent (and by Federal Law) our rights to our traditional way of feeding ourselves by hunting & fishing - this being called the "Subsistence issue". This Subsistence battle is one of long standing in Alaska government and politics and IS well known in Alaska. Where do we hear of this in national news? She is shown so obscenely in pictures of hunting OUR moose and caribou and is praised for this, yet she is adamantly against the Federal Law that is our protection for the Subsistence way of life we have known for ice ages.

Not only moose & caribou, but her and her husband want to further pollute our beautiful state with gold mining (she’s a gold digger in all senses of the meaning plus) and more sports fishing to take away from the indigenous peoples of Alaska who are in such dire straits out in our villages that if it were not for Subsistence, would suffer malnutrition and more hunger than we already suffer. Our people do not live in the same condition that Sarah Palin does. They do live in Big beautiful lakefront homes near the city hub of Wasilla and Anchorage, Alaska."

Virgil A. wrote, "The assemblies of god is another branch of the radical Pentecost although they account for 2/3 of the Pentecostals. I grew up in a Pentecostal family and I chose to stay out of religion in my adult life. Although I read the bible cover to cover in my early adult life and what I understand is totally different than these fundies interpret it. Sarah Palin as VP is as scary as the last 8 years of Dick Cheney."

Regina Purcell sent a link to her blog WomenReportedNow, where she wrote, "A YouTube video shows Republican Vice President Nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin being anointed with a protection prayer against witchcraft prior to her victory as governor. Palin filed campaign papers a few months later, in October 2005, and was elected governor the next year. On a visit to the church in June 2008, Palin spoke fondly of the Kenyan pastor and told a group of young missionaries his prayers helped her to become governor."

Melanie Lee wrote in part, "This Palin quote scares me: 'Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and [Obama's] worried that someone won't read them their rights?' Republicans love to deny due process to those they don't like, especially those of a darker hue or different religion. What if someday Palin decides that I'm a terrorist or a criminal?"

Jim Abourezk, the former US Senator who is on our Advisory Board, sent links to Katie Couric's interviews with Palin, where she displayed intentional ignorance on world affairs, and could not name one Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, other than Roe. v. Wade.

More are going up on worldcantwait.org.

I want to say a last word on Palin/McCain's criticisms of Obama for associated with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers. Obama has done his own distancing from both men. I thought a lot of what Wright said was "right" about the history of the United States, certainly more true than anything Rev. John Hagee, the Christian fundamentalist nut-case McCain was hanging around with through last spring.

Bill Ayers signed World Can't Wait's Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime in 2005. In the 60's, he tried to stop the war as a leader of the Weather Underground. Federal charges against him were dropped because the federal government didn't want to reveal all the spying done against the anti-war movement. The last time I saw Bill, he was an Obama supporter. But along comes Palin, calling Bill a "terrorist" while she's on the ticket with a war criminal called "hero". Does any Democratic leader ever ask why McCain was in that prison camp in North Vietnam? Because he flew many missions dropping bombs on civilians, and was eventually shot down doing so.

But, hey, according to Palin, "victory is assured in Iraq" because it's part of God's plan.

If it's important to you to have a community of resistance against this whole Bush plan, whoever the president is.

Are we depresssed yet?

By Steve Fraser

Agrisly banner was held aloft the other day at a demonstration on Wall Street. Its graphic message advised denizens of the street to "Jump!" It was a frightful reminder of perhaps the most widely believed legend about the Great Depression of the 1930s; that the sudden collapse of the economy filled the sky with the falling bodies of suicidal stockbrokers. As a matter of fact, there were very few such suicides. But the myth captured a deeper truth. Except for the Civil War, no event in American history proved more traumatic. It left scars that are with us today.

Judgment without borders

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

What we are seeing is the birth of a type of worldwide judicial anarchy.

Another Must See | Naomi Wolf