Month: September 2008

Scheuneman’s and McCain’s diss of a NATO ally continues to reverberate:

Yes, Zapatero is a center-left politician who pulled troops out of Iraq, but Spanish troops are also fighting alongside American troops in Afghanistan. He stood up to Hugo Chavez, a dictator who is actually problematic for the U.S., at the Ibero-American Summit. He is the leader of an important European democracy. And John McCain wouldn’t meet with him as President? That is just nuts.

Here’s Yglesias’s response:

That’s an insane policy. Recall that under the North Atlantic Treaty, the United States is actually obligated to go to war on behalf of Spanish territorial integrity and vice versa. Also — McCain might want to hire someone who can clarify for his campaign that the head of state in Spain is the “king” and the head of government is the “prime minister.”

How can anyone believe that McCain has a clue about foreign policy?

The email:

"In this week’s interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally," he said in an e-mail. "If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America’s adversaries. It’s called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world’s worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office."

I thought Zapatero was the prime minister, not president. Spain has a monarchy. But this is the McCain campaign. They have no clue about foreign policy, except the permanent search for new and more enemies.

Scott Horton explains how Sarah Palin has used Bush justice:

First, Palin has asserted that her records and communications are protected by executive privilege. Second, her senior assistants have been instructed not to cooperate with the probe. Third, the Alaska attorney general (a Palin appointee and confidant who faces conflict-of-interest charges himself) has issued a series of opinions designed to bar the way for the probe. So how does the McCain team deal with accusations that it is attempting a cover-up of Palin’s involvement in a matter which, at the very least, raises severe questions about Palin’s credibility? They argue that the inquiry should be handled by the Alaska Personnel Board, not by the legislature. The Personnel Board, of course, is dominated by Palin’s cronies and reports to her. If it works in Washington, why not in Juneau?

The epochal vote on marriage equality in California is the biggest test yet for the gay civil rights movement. But many big bucks Hollywood donors have yet to put their money where their mouths so often are. Brad Pitt has done his bit, but many actually gay figures seem AWOL:

Missing (as of Sept. 10) from the [donor] rolls were: Rosie O’Donnell, whose Feb. 27, 2004, marriage to Kelli Carpenter was nullified; Sir Elton John, who tied the civil partnership knot with partner David Furnish in England; rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose domestic partnership/wedding to actress Tammy Lynn Michaels Sept. 22, 2003, was celebrated in In Style magazine.

Other producers and directors not on the list include Paul Colichman (here!TV) Greg Berlanti (Brothers & Sisters), Marc Cherry (Desperate Housewives), Bryan Singer (Superman Returns), Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin), and Gus Van Sant, though Bruce Cohen, who produced Milk, directed by Van Sant, was recently married and did contribute. Max Muchnick (Will & Grace) also contributed, as did David Geffen, partner in DreamWorks, who gave $50,000, and Bryan Lourd, managing partner of Creative Artists Agency who contributed $5,000.

I have no independent confirmation of these numbers so treat them with caution. But the general point is surely well taken. C’mon! The Christianist right is currently out-fund-raising the gay civil rights movement in California!

Former publisher of National Review, Wick Allison, endorses Obama. Why? Because no conservative can support the current GOP:

Today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Read the whole thing. Jeffrey Hart, Bruce Bartlett and Douglas Kmiec are in the same boat. Real conservatives are appalled at the current Republican insanity.

Nate Silver:

A tight race?  It certainly is a tight race, and has been all year. But this, of course, is not really the lead story. The story is that there has been a rather dramatic shift in the national polling toward Barack Obama in the past 2-4 days, coinciding with the Wall Street financial crisis. Some pundits will love this, since it gives them something fresh to talk about. But others, like those cynical beat writers in the Wrigley Field press box, will be annoyed, because it means that the the story they were telling us just a few days ago — that the Obama campaign was in trouble, that Sarah Palin was the greatest thing since sliced bread — has now been more or less invalidated.

Kimberton, Pennsylvania, 1.52 pm.

That question the Dish aired yesterday about whether Sarah Palin lied about asking her girls to vote before she accepted the McCain offer? It’s settled. The Confabulist struck again!

Ah, the world-weariness of it all. But it still does not add up to a case for Palin.

Shying and plunging from conservative economics to incoherent populist boilerplate:

The real lesson of this quotation is that the Republicans have no good language for discussing recent events.  They’re not allowed to say anything that sounds like "showing sympathy for Wall Street," so they have to find someone else to show sympathy for but they can’t turn to traditional Democratic rhetoric about how an unregulated capitalist economy is failing us.  Citing the construction bonds is like worrying that the financial crisis will postpone the retirement of many professors. Yes that is true but it’s odd (though not unprecedented) if that’s the first thing that comes to your mind or for that matter to your talking points.