I love it when this happens. In fact, I love it so much, I’m going to post such occasions regularly.
Republican tool Joe Scarborough [Morning Joe, MSNBC, 9/10/08]
MATTHEWS: [...] Two days from now — I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?
SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive. [...]
[Emphasis mine.]
Here’s a fine example of the slimy tactics of Republicans these days, courtesy of Oklahoma’s senior senator, Jim Inhofe (R-Exxon): Don’t claim outright Obama isn’t patriotic, just say voters “can question whether or not he really loves his country[.]”
Regardless of what polls show, Inhofe said, voters will have to ask themselves a question once they get behind the curtain in the voting booth on Election Day.
“Do you really want to have a guy as commander in chief of this country when you can question whether or not he really loves his country?” he asked.
“That’s the big question.”
In the same Tulsa World article, Inhofe is quoted lying about the polls after the Democratic convention.
… [Obama] goes into their convention and comes out of the convention without a lead,” he said.
“That’s unheard of.”
Nice cherrypicking of the polls there, Jim. And, I might add, not getting a bounce is not unheard of.
The perfect example of this phenomenon is the 1964 conventions. Goldwater got a huge bump, in part because he was running 16 points behind his expected vote share, and Johnson got no bump, in part because he was running 6 points above his expected vote share.
Remind me who won that election, again?
But back to the “question” of patriotism.
For simpletons like Inhofe, who just has to have enough brain power to hold his hand out when Big Oil is passing out money, patriotism is measured with bombs, flag-waving and lapel pins. Caring about your fellow Americans enough to work at low pay for their rights and needs — that’ll get you nothing but sarcastic derision as a wastrel. Obviously, Republicans believe if you aren’t using the public treasury to steal from the poor to give to the rich, you just don’t have a real job.
Oh, and by the way, if we’re gonna be the flag pin police, where the hell was McCain’s flag pin when he gave the most important speech of his life on Thursday?
It was nowhere to be seen — maybe he left it at one of his (Cindy’s really) seven houses, along whatever integrity he ever had before he fell to his knees before the evangelicals who have taken over his party. Without that symbol flashing on his chest for his big moment, I guess we are all free now “question” how much McCain really loves his country.
Of course, that’s not how rational, decent people think or operate. Just Republicans.
But I’m not playing coy with my take on Senator Jim Inhofe; I’m saying flat out he’s a lying, corrupt, moronic, and mean-spirited snake. Flat out, no questions about it.
Update: This story in TW got front-paged at Daily Kos and is generating lots of donations to Andrew Rice’s campaign and the Orange to Blue ActBlue page. Yay! The more money Rice has, the more he can get himself known across the state; and the more he is known, the closer the race gets. Andrew went from 19% to 41% in the last poll, and Inhofe is having to hustle to save his job. So, please, Jim, say some more vile things about Obama we can use for fundraisers. C’mon, you know you want to.
Update II: Holy cow, that DK post is causing a flood — of $$$ for Andrew. SusanG reports:
You guys are AWESOME. In two-and-half hours, 117 of you donated for more than $4,300 … should we shoot for 150 by midnight Pacific Time? Let’s see if we can do it.
I hope to get a report from the campaign tomorrow (or Monday) about how much came in on their page.
Update III (and final?):
Final Update: Over the top! Way over the top … 220 contributors, for a total of $7,805. You guys are the best. What an awesome way to spend a Saturday night, kicking some donkey, eh?
Update IV: Yet more donations reported.
Major kudos to the Daily Kos community! Responding to last night’s call to make sure there was hell to pay for James Inhofe questioning Barack Obama’s patriotism, the community raised $10,797 for Inhofe’s progressive challenger Andrew Rice.
Update V: Just found this at Media Matters
Tulsa World reported Inhofe’s smears of Obama’s patriotism without rebutting purported evidence
Summary: A Tulsa World article uncritically quoted Sen. James Inhofe stating, “I am not questioning Sen. [Barack] Obama’s patriotism, but you have to question why at times he seems so obviously opposed to public displays of patriotism and national pride, like wearing an American flag lapel pin.” The article failed to note that Obama is not “opposed” to “wearing an American flag lapel pin” or that Sen. John McCain reportedly said he doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin on a daily basis.
I’ve criticized Chris Matthews plenty, but he’s been on a new tack lately, which I love. I think he actually realizes that if the Republicans keep the White House, democracy in this country is done for. This clip is from yesterday’s Hardball, with Chris talking with two Republicans: decrepit nutjob Pat Robertson and the sane though conservative Michelle Bernard.
The topic is whether questioning Sarah Palin’s qualifications is sexist, and whether the public has a right to ask tough questions (through the media), and politicians to answer those questions. Chris takes the pro side of the latter question. Pat has some other crazy ass idea about privilege and message control, and Michelle is, literally and figuratively, somewhere in between.
This is what Hardball should be all the time, but rarely has been — until recently. The video is 11 minutes long, but worth watching.
I’ve been scouting out the best online news resources for following the Democratic Party convention in Denver, other than the well-known, corporate news operations (that I generally avoid anyway), which I think we can all find on our own. Below is what I’ve found so far, and I’ll add to the list as I come across others.
Note: If you only care about the Oklahoma angle, jump down here.
The official convention site is worth a look for speaker schedules, logistics, last minute updates and the like.
This is the first convention where bloggers are more than an afterthought, so check out the official list of bloggers credentialed by the Party. These independent (that is, not Party funded; all are fiercely partisan Democrats) bloggers will be “embedded” with their state delegations, so as to bring all the surprise and spontaneity of the convention to life for their readers back home. (Seriously, it’s a good thing, and probably demonstrating much more integrity than that other embedding project the government tried with the media a few years back.)
The Big Tent - there is literally something called “The Big Tent” (subtle enough for you, Dems?) serving as bloggers central for the convention; this site is not for news reporting apparently (bloggers do have their own outlets, after all), but for coordinating use of the facility. Still interesting for those of us into the meta stuff. This not run by the Party, but by a group of bloggers and sponsors like Digg and Google.
Just to keep everyone confused with information overload, some of the credentialed state blogs (including Oklahoma’s), along with some non-credentialed ones, decided to aggregate their convention reports on yet another site, Roots Wire.
DemConWatch is an independent blog run by grassroots Democrats that has a pretty thorough background and coverage of the event — including live cams! And check out the DNC history links in the sidebar
Colorado sites that will probably have major resources dedicated to the convention.
A number of netroots/Democratic/progressive sites have dedicated sections for convention news, and have folks on the ground there.
Plus, some really good news: Democracy Now! will expand to two hours live broadcast on radio and tv for the next two weeks, covering both conventions. Unless you live at or near UCO, you’ll have to pick the show up after the fact on the web, but it’s worth it. Their in-depth interviews are unequaled.
If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the Twitter Search tag #dnc08 that Twitterers in Denver at using to flag their tweets. Or, the Denver Post has a dedicated Twitter account for convention related updates, The DNC - a warning though: this is high-volume so you may just want to visit the page once or twice a day, rather than follow and hve your timeline completely swamped.
Last but not least, there’s the Oklahoma credentialed blog team, Calvin and Tim from DemoOkie Forum. Yes, Oklahoma’s credentialed blog is a forum, but I think it was an apppropriate selection, since it is the major site for the grassroots of the state Democratic Party. Anyway, thanks to Howard Dean, they will be right there in the Pepsi Center and INVESCO Field with the Oklahoma Delegation.
I’m very happy to see that the boys, once selected, actually realized they would need a real blog to pull this off, rather than trying to stretch that Snitz 2000 forum, which is already distorted way beyond its intended purpose (bless ‘em, they do keep things hopping over there, it’s just clumsy and ugly as shit, and about as state-of-the-art as Windows 98, and I obsess about those things). I’m hoping they’ll like the new format so much that they will come home and do a complete overhaul of their site once Barack has moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with Michelle and the girls.
Tim posted about their plans for Denver:
f you want Gavel to Gavel, watch the news. It will be better than we can do. However, since we are embedded with the Oklahoma Delegation, we will be with them all day. You will get to meet them and see what really happens at these conventions. Delegates usually start with a breakfast at 7:30 am and continue until late night. I know when I went to Boston I was exhausted when I came back. You’ll go with them to receptions, caucuses and just hanging around.
We’ve brought digital cameras, digital videos and digital audio recorders. We plan on making a few of the attendees YouTube stars. Dr. Earl Mitchell from Stillwater has been drafted again as a special correspondent. We also will be sharing photos taken by the delegates themselves.
Hopefully we will fulfill Howard Deans vision of bringing the other parts of the convention home. We look forward to the opportunity.
If you want a down and dirty compilation of news out of Denver, check the sidebar of DenverOkie.com, there’s a list of the latest news headline from all the state bloggers, as well as the RootsWire feed. For any normal person, that will be more than enough! (I of course, am not normal and will be trying to go to every site for every last pixel of information.)
Tim and Calvin say they are making their photos and reports available to Oklahoma media. I hope they mean new/digital as well as old/dead-tree media, or I’ll really have to give them a netroots/open-source whup-ass tutorial, if they don’t get one in Denver first (which I suspect they might).
This list is by no means definitive! It’s just a starting point. If you have other links to offer, please post in comments.
Update: How could I forget C-Span!?!
Another Twitter collective: DNCjournalists
It’s disgusting what these chickenhawks will do just to be able to say they are “winning”. Winning what the fuck, you are not supposed to ask (and so the corporate media doesn’t). Certainly “hearts and minds” are no longer on the table.
This article courtesy our neighbor to the north, where apparently truth can still be spoken occasionally within the mainstream public discourse without three-quarters of the political establishment/punditry going into spastic fits of mock outrage.
This “Anbar Awakening” has been a slow process, beginning long before the recent U.S. “surge” that increased the number of American troops in Iraq by 30,000, to 180,000. But it is still a shaky union, a desperate marriage of convenience based on shared enemies: Iran, and the Sunnis’ former-friend-turned-foe al-Qaeda. Many of America’s new allies are former insurgents and Saddam Hussein loyalists (Saddam was a Sunni) who only a short while ago were routinely called terrorists, “anti-Iraqi fighters,” and “Baathist dead-enders.”
This guy [warning: this article could seriously damage your left frontal lobe] gets paid to think, and advise. And write!
Aaarrrgggghhh!!! Just shoot me now!
Cliff Notes version (in which the author’s true meaning is devined):
David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff’s “The Road”
Pam Spaulding is one of the premiere LGBT bloggers. She’s on a story about the news coverage about Merv Griffin since his death. Seems like some hot shots in LA (and perhaps the late entertainer’s family) are all in a tizzy because America might find out that he was gay.
That this is still an issue is just ridiculous. It’s sad that Merv felt the need to stay closeted all his life, but he was from a different generation, and I’ll cut him some slack. But to continue to promote a myth after he’s gone does neither Griffin nor the country — nor the entertainment business I guess I should add — one bit of good.
News tip for the media: there’s nothing wrong with being gay, so stop your silly tiptoeing around the truth, which is supposed to be the business you’re in, not pacifying bigots and whitewashing the lives of public figures.
Pam’s House Blend:: Mervgate continues — article restored, but altered
You’d think the matter of an obit about or reminiscence of a public figure wouldn’t generate all this brouhaha, but that’s what happens when the world outside of the closet is so frightening to people in Hollywood that all sorts of insane measures are taken to reinforce the message is that there is something inherently wrong with being gay.
Van Taylor wants you to know
Van is mad at Murtha for something he didn’t actually say. The Miami Sun-Sentinel misquoted him and no one checked the quote (sounds like bloggers have taken over, doesn’t it?) before running with it.
Van Taylor, the Republican candidate for the District 17 House seet, and the only R candidate who is an Iraq vet, is joining the swiftboating of John Murtha for his position on the war.
Of course the whole campaign is politically motivated and fueled by lies and distortion — else it wouldn’t be “swiftboating” but of course we can’t count on the media to clarify things for voters.
Fortunately, there’s a local blogger who takes on this task for the district. Nate Nance publishes the blog Common Sense, and tirelessly covers this race. If you live in this area, you should bookmark Common Sense and check it regularly. If you have local news that Nate might be interested in writing about, he’s got his email posted. And of course, use his comments to get a local dialog started — a civil, respectful one, of course, regardless of your political persuasion..
I moved to the Waco area from the Oklahoma City Metro, home of “the worst newspaper in America“(CJR).
The Waco Trib is slightly better, which instead of a failing grade of 20 on the journalism test, it gets a failing grade of 40.
The star student in the class who skews the curve is editorial columnist John Young, and of course, the local no-nothings rail at every turn against him and his even having a job at the Trib.
Here’s an example of why Young drives the Bush ite fanatics over the edge: A million little evasions
