Hundreds of absentee voters from Rensselaer County, NY, were sent ballots offering them the exciting opportunity to cast their vote for Democratic candidate "Barack Osama." Election officials are saying it's an honest mistake. Except that the ballots in question were supposed to be proofread by at least six people. So, in other words, election fraud!
So how the hell does John McCain pull this one out of the bag? Even the conservative commentators think the national economic crash has doomed him. Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday the Republican presidential nominee needed to do well at the debate or "say goodbye," and he didn't do well at all. Now comes Joe Scarborough on last night's Colbert Report saying "it's too late" for McCain because he can't win on tax cuts or a sexy VP or terrorist fearmongering or just general demagoguery when voters are scared of starving in the streets.
Wow, CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds just unloaded a pissy rant on the Obama campaign, saying the Democratic presidential nominee is going to be punished for not coddling campaign reporters well enough. And it sounds like he thinks Obama deserves it. In a "reporter's notebook" posted to CBSNews.com, Reynolds complains that Obama's people pick up journalists' luggage at a very inconvenient hour. It keeps them waiting for up to two hours in parking lots with nothing to do, bored. And they sometimes force them to travel when they could be on live television, goosing ratings for their corporate overlords. Don't even get Reynolds started on Obama's weak-ass plane!
A website called View Their Views has put its esteemed, one-month old reputation for YouTube-embedding excellence on the line to bring you some breaking investigative news or false-flag smears or whatever about John McCain's eldest biological daughter, Sidney. Exposed as a showbiz Democrat and "rebellious... boundary pusher" in the Times last year, Sidney supposedly had a baby at the age of 20 or 21 and gave it up for adoption. Of course she wasn't married at the time, so now McCain doesn't want anything to do with the granddaughter, and ignores her desperate calls every Christmas Eve to all 43 of his houses. That could be because she isn't real, except as a Democratic hit piece, or as a supposed Democratic hit piece that makes us pity GOTCHA smear victim John McCain. But it could also be because she is real and the Republican ticket is already too full of obscure sons, daughters, half-siblings, adopted kids and love children to handle another. McCain probably can't keep track of them or even remember their names, so here's a nice list of the more prominent ones:
Tom Brokaw was determined last night that he wasn't going to put up with any crap from presidential candidates or their running mates, who had their way with previous debate moderators Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill. So every time John McCain or Barack Obama broke one of the debate rules, Brokaw delivered a verbal slap. The NBC News commentator got increasingly frustrated with infractions as the night wore on, but both candidates seemed to be on their best behavior yet, even when Brokaw rather oddly insisted they yield a heated moment to a question from the entire internet.
John McCain at least made eye contact with Barack Obama during tonight's presidential debate. But that seemed to be about all the pleasantry he could manage. First he called Obama "that one." Now blogs are burning up with chatter that McCain also refused Obama's post-debate handshake, pointing him to wife Cindy instead.
One might expect a right-wing shouting head like Bill O'Reilly to help the Republican Party ratchet down expectations for John McCain ahead of tonight's presidential debate. But the Fox News Channel host is raising the stakes. A few minutes before the debate started, O'Reilly said the event will mark the Republican presidential nominee's "last stand." "McCain has to do well tonight, or say goodbye," he added. We're still pretty sure there's a scheme here — O'Reilly's probably got an easy definition of "well" — but this makes it all the more difficult for McCain to spin if he does poorly. Click the video icon to watch the clip. (PS: The commenter liveblog is here in case you missed it.)
Well, this election is fast turning into an opposition-research-fueled shitstorm. On Meet The Press Sunday, Democratic strategist Paul Begala casually mentioned that John McCain sat on the board of the U.S. Council For World Freedom. And the Associated Press this morning elaborated on exactly what that entails. "The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.," AP said. Very interesting! But the rest of the article doesn't give any details on these Nazis or the role of this group, called the World Anti-Communist League, in launching a "Cocaine Coup" that turned Bolivia into a drug trafficking hub and hotbed of brutal torture. Luckily a former AP and Newsweek reporter named Roberty Parry wrote an oddly fun book called Lost History , which can provide further illumination:
Although Sarah Palin said yesterday she was "impatient" and "annoyed" with Katie Couric's irrelevant questions about her book learnin' and whatnot, the CBS Evening News anchor wisely avoided firing any direct return fire when confronted with a camerman from TMZ, of all places. But it's all too easy to read — or invent? — meaning between Couric's lines, especially if you can successfully look past her usual smiling charm. Who might Couric be talking about when she says she doesn't "lie" about reading The Economist? Is "luckily I'm not running for vice president" some kind of swipe? It's harder to tell than you might think. Click the video icon to watch.
"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" [Palin] continued.
The New Yorker published its profile of Arianna Huffington. Though disappointingly far from the juicy takedown we hoped for, it does contain a few interesting nuggets. We learn, for example, that the Republican-divorcée-turned-internet-publisher bizarrely "hides" all three of her BlackBerrys in her bathroom at night, even though she lives only with a housekeeper and her two daughters. Her gay ex-husband Michael Huffington elaborates on how she knew of his interest in men before their marriage, saying, "in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women and men so that she would be aware of it." And Huffington sounds downright proud of her lack of long-term friendships, saying, "I metabolize experiences fast." But there's so much missing, so much that should be in this 14-page story, starting first with how she runs the Huffington Post — would any male mogul be profiled at such length with so little said about how he runs his business? — and continuing through to juicer questions about her dating life and cultlike religious guru. A few specifics:
For much of tonight's debate, Sarah Palin avoided any spectacularly obvious stupidity and Joe Biden steered clear of any casually offensive statements. Then came "Say It Ain't So, Joe," an attempted cute catchphrase deployed by Palin that not only failed spectacularly but which was also followed by a cascade of other dumb attempts at adorability. The Republican vice presidential nominee then looked increasingly like the end of Tina Fey's most recent impression. She winked! For the second time in the night! She called her own joke "lame" and tried to laugh at it.
Post your elitist, "gotcha" commentary on the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden below. Will either candidate defy expectations? Will Palin meet them in spectacularly mockable fashion? Will Joe Biden perform his legendary foot-in-mouth maneuver? We'll see! Gwen Ifill said the crowd in the debate hall has promised to remain "polite." Our commenters, of course, are bound by no such pledge. You'll probably want to view the thread with newest posts first. Or for a faster skim of the hottest topics, look at the most active discussions.
For American presidential campaigns, the run-up to any televised debate is nothing so much as an exercise in managing expectations. Your opponent is fearsome and will probably crush you. Your own candidate will be lucky to form a single coherent sentence. Then, after the debate, you can spin a weak performance as a come-from-behind victory. In this little game of flackery, Sarah Palin could not be better positioned for tonight's face-off against Joe Biden. The Republican vice presidential nominee is up against a respected lion of the senate. Severe economic anxiety has put her ticket nine points behind in a new poll. The debate moderator has a big crush on Barack Obama. And, most importantly, a series of disastrous interviews with Charles Gibson and especially Katie Couric has made Palin look like an uninformed, inarticulate embarrassment. You can watch the complete lowlights in the attached video, including Palin's failure last night to name a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe vs. Wade. But keep in mind that the worse Palin looks now, the better she'll likely appear, to some key voters, tomorrow morning.
Page Six thinks it has figured out why Bill Clinton gave such a tepid endorsement of Barack Obama on The View and David Letterman last week. Not that anyone was really scratching their heads, befuddled, as to why the ex-president couldn't get past his wife's bitter loss of the Democratic primary to Obama. But Page Six gets specific: Obama supposedly refused to promise Hillary Clinton a Supreme Court nomination as she demanded, so Bill exacted revenge. Clinton on the high court is not exactly a new idea. And her people deny the new version of the rumor. The timing of the gossip is interesting, though. As the Obama ticket battles it out with Sarah Palin, star of Thursday primetime TV, for former Clinton supporters, painting Hillary as shrill and demanding makes Obama look a bit more sympathetic. And celebrity gossip sheets may be nearly as good a way to reach Hillary Democrats as The View.
Sarah Palin spent some more time with Katie Couric, her new undermining roommate, who seems to have accumulated like 20 months worth of interview material, all of it horrifically damaging to the Republican vice presidential nominee. This time around, Palin couldn't name any newspapers or magazines she regularly reads, except for "all of them," which she clarified to mean whatever four-year-old copy of U.S. News she finds in the waiting room at her dentist's office. Then she didn't know what the morning after pill was. Katie was like, "whatever, I'm so out of here." Then Palin said she "loved" her lesbian friend, and Katie got excited again, about seeing Palin naked and "unfiltered" at the big debate. When will Palin finally vote Couric out of her sorority house and end this embarrassment? Cringe for her in the attached clip (click the video icon to watch).
The Daily News has had a sudden change of heart about Sarah Palin. On Sunday, the paper's Thomas DeFrank and David Saltonstall quoted three Republicans critical of Palin's embarrassing answers for CBS anchor Katie Couric and others on the campaign trail. The story's headline said there were increasing calls for Palin to "step down from GOP ticket." Then, on Monday, came an article by "Daily News Political Editors" — no writers' names were attached. It was titled "Eight reasons why John McCain won't drop Sarah Palin from ticket." And it called Palin a "fundraising dynamo" and "crowd magnet" who had "unconditional love" from social conservatives. We hear the story was considered an embarrassment by News journalists, but was ordered from on high. UPDATE: See below.
Here's John McCain saying that now's the time to "leave partisanship at the door" and fix this Wall Street mess, instead of acting like Barack Obama, who "infused partisanship into the process" of voting on the bailout plan personally redesigned by the Republican presidential nominee, in a day, alone. Before you ask which candidate injected himself into the process, and which one returned to Washington only at the behest of the president, remind yourself that "now is not time to affix the blame." I guess this means McCain's campaign is unsuspended. Click the video icon to watch this jaw-dropping bit of political posturing.
The talking heads tended to think John McCain won the presidential debate, but what do elitist Beltway observers and political scientists know about such matters? They might have sneered at Obama's epic "I have a bracelet, too!" line, but America thought it was kind of sweet. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 46 percent of debate-watchers thought Obama won, versus 34 percent for McCain. At CNN, it was 51 percent for Obama winning the debate vs. 38 percent for McCain. Similar results at CBS. In the election, Rasmussen said Obama led 50 vs. 44 percent in polls taken after the debate. The numbers give you a sense of how the debate might nudge the race, and Politico has more of them, but of course the election is many days and market meltdowns away, and really who knows if America will event exist by November, so try not to care too much.
