Fair & Balanced Screenshot of the Day

The Counterrevolutionary Media just can't help themselves. The front page of their website this afternoon shows pictures of Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper and David Shuster with capital lettered words written across all of them reading, "TV TOILET HUMOR."

Promoting yesterday's freakshow event like a rock concert made a lot of us laugh. Now, Fox News ' feelings are hurt.  They're fighting back, exposing those left-wing media types and all of those supposed filthy jokes they've been broadcasting -- because the tea parties were such a family event. (see the Huffington Post's Top 10 most offensive tea party signs) 

Markets Plunge, McCain-Palin Sink Even Lower

The stock market continued its stunning collapse today, with the Dow plummeting more that 678 points to finish the day below 8600. The equity markets have now lost some 38% of their total value in the last twelve months. Millions of individual small investors have seen trillions of dollars in retirement accounts, college funds and nest-egg savings evaporate. Ordinary people are worried and - frankly - very scared by what they are seeing.  Average folks are looking for reassurance and realistic plans from their leaders.  So how are the Presidential candidates reacting to this catastrophe?

Incredibly, as the economy falls apart like a cheap suit, the Republican ticket of McCain-Palin is obsessed with some sixties-era radical named Ayers. They have made the activities of Mr. Ayers forty years ago the new focal point of their increasingly desperate campaign. If it weren't so utterly pathetic - and downright dangerous - it would be laughable. But laughable it's not. They are serious. The Republican Party apparently believes that it can hold on to the White House by attempting to smear Senator Obama with an association that is paper-thin at best. 

And that's not all. The Republican candidates are suggesting - more and more openly - that Obama is somehow unpatriotic and downright un-American. The Republican appeal to racist sentiment is becoming less and less subtle. It's disgusting and very far from the best traditions of their own party. While the US faces its most serious economic crisis in 75 years, these latter-day Herbert Hoovers are engaging in electioneering tactics that would appall the decent, but incompetent, 31st President.

Thankfully, Senators Obama and Biden have retained their cool and their laser-like focus on solving America's economic woes. They are calm, confident and reassuring. They have a plan and the will to execute it. They will not be cowed by hate-speech and the undisguised efforts of McCain and Palin to incite extremists in the Republican base to chants of 'treason' and 'terrorist' at campaign rallies.

It is increasingly apparent that the current leadership (if I can call it that) of the Republican Party is isolated, angry and desperate. One must wonder, as Bob Cesca does in a brilliant piece written for The Huffington Post today, if the Republicans really deserve to be considered a serious political party at all. Their own failed policies and ever more radical fringe tactics have very nearly put them in the class with Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr: mildly interesting (maybe), possibly dangerous and thoroughly unfit to govern.

Come November 4th, I'm confident the American people will utterly reject the Republicans' politics of smear and fear. Hope - and real change - are surely on the way. 

Delusions... but no grandeur

This weekend's forum with Barack Obama and John McCain at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church provided three separate incidents which give us some insight into the Arizona Senator's current  state of mind. Although each of these incidents is not particularly important in and of itself, the three of them taken together make one wonder about Mr. McCain's grip on reality -- or perhaps his grip on the truth.

1.  McCain named civil rights icon and US Representative John Lewis (D-GA) as one of the three men he most admires and would consult often on important matters of policy. This revelation came as quite a surprise to Lewis, who told the MotherJones blog that McCain "does not consult me". Hmmm... 

2. At the beginning of his segment with Warren (which followed Obama's), McCain confirmed that he had been in the so-called 'cone-of-silence' unable to hear Warren's questions and the Illinois Senator's answers. He did so by admitting - jokingly - that he had been "listening at the walls".  As we all now know, this was simply untrue. By his own campaign's admission, McCain was in his car on the way to the church for a good portion of Obama's discussions with Warren. To give the impression that he was in fact in the cone of silence, straining at the walls to hear, was disingenuous at best. The excellent website, FiveThirtyEight.com, has an succinct account of this story for those who might have missed it. Double hmmm...

3. Later in his conversation with Warren, McCain recounted a story he has often told about a North Vietnamese guard who drew a cross in the dirt while he (McCain) was a POW in Hanoi. My impression, as I listened to McCain relate this tale on Saturday night, was that it was somehow subtly different, in an oddly disconcerting way, from what I had heard the Arizona Senator say in previous tellings. The story, as McCain was now relating it, sounded very familiar somehow. It was a nagging feeling I had, but I couldn't quite figure out where I had heard or read a very similar story before.  Then, a couple of days ago, I ran across Mark Nicolas' blog on The Huffington Post... and eureka!  Of course! There was an eerily similar scene in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's great work, The Gulag Archipelago. Nicolas' well-researched and thoughtful blog is well worth a read. So, ok, triple hmmm...

Too clever by half? Overly disingenuous? Slightly delusional? I'm not sure, but I do know that these little tidbits from McCain's performance at Saddleback make me very uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.