John Flips Again! Now It's Only A Phone-In Crisis For McCain

Just How Many Faces Does This Guy Have?

McCain flip-flopped his image by insisting he attend the Capitol Hill meetings about the economic crisis, threatening a postponement of the Presidential debate, attending one day's worth of meetings, then going back to the Mississippi debate (spurning David Letterman in the process)and then going back to Washington for meetings on Friday. He spent yesterday "phoning in" his stance from his Arlington, VA condo.

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer

McCain flew to Washington from Mississippi to resume work on the bailout, arriving shortly before dawn. Obama continued his campaign schedule, appearing at rallies in North Carolina and Virginia.

After making a dramatic entrance on Capitol Hill Thursday to be part of the bailout negotiations, McCain stayed away Saturday as lawmakers inched toward an agreement. He made phone calls to the White House and GOP leaders from his suburban condominium and later at campaign headquarters.

From all accounts, McCain's actual appearance on Capitol Hill was more hindrance than help. He then accused Obama for "politizing" the crisis!?

I agree with David Letterman: "Someone in his campaign is screwing up! This isn't the John McCain we know." It's too late in the game to fire Rick Davis, the "ex" lobbyist (as of last May?). McCain is sending mixed signals to the press and the public. He should go back to the campaign trail and continue with the debates.

He should also cut the "maverick" image thing, because he's doing just what a young maverick steer would do: trying to run in all directions at once. John, the image is not working for you anymore. You look totally panicked and undisciplined. Telephoning hundreds of Congressmen from your condo or campaign headquarters is as easy as it would have been from Mississippi BEFORE the first debate. Have you never before been in a video conference? Technology has stepped up a bit in the last 10 years. In a flash, you could have requested and received state-of-the-art equipment in Mississippi. You could have shown people what a great leader you would be for the 21st (and not the early 20th) century. Instead you wasted congress' time, your own campaign time and, yes, the public's time by going back and forth, tither and yon.

The McCain campaign is nothing if it is not sloppy. The Palin debacle shows it. "Let's pick a...Fundamentalist WOMAN! ah, from a huge but barely populated state, put her in the public eye, no wait, keep her away from the press and pick her quickly to show everyone how good we are at snap decisions, then if we find out anything shady about her, we'll teach her how to stretch the truth like a true Washington lawmaker and trooper!"

The list of McCain flip-flops has been upped to 76 major issues. Steve Benen in The Carpetbagger Report has them all with solid reference to McCain's votes and contradictory speeches and quotes. I'm particularly to #65:

65. In May 2008, McCain approved a ban on lobbyists working for his campaign. In July 2008, his campaign reversed course and said lobbyists could work for his campaign.

Then there's his opposing views on gay marriage: (Chris Matthews, Hardball, Oct. 19, 2006):

MCCAIN: I think that gay marriage should be allowed, if there’s a ceremony kind of thing, if you want to call it that. I don’t have any problem with that, but I do believe in preserving the sanctity of a union between man and woman.

(Again, with Chris Matthews at the Stephens Auditorium at Iowa State University, in Ames)

"On the issue of the gay marriage, I believe if people want to have private ceremonies, that’s fine. I do not believe that gay marriages should be legal.”

To which he surprisingly received a chorus of "boos"!

To some people, McCain is "McSame." While to others, he has several more (aggressive) faces:















Which one do you want?

Just a thought.

Homophobic, Racist Michele Bachmann And Minorities Redux

Why, Cap'n Bush! Let's hope Mammy Doesn't See Us Together!

And Yes, She's Christofascist Too!

I just looked at my numbers for the last post. O.K., I get it, very few people were interested in a pink ATM. But I'm still going to write about this Bachmann-minority mess.

The law [the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act] imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.

...Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA.

Michele Bachmann (R-MN) quoted Terry Jones in the right-wing publication Investor’s Business Daily about minorities and the CRA. Now remember, this is a congresswoman who told Nancy Pelosi that the planet had already been "saved" by Jesus Christ. She's also woman who can't spell her own first name (honey, she ain't that original!)

It wouldn't be so bad if she were just a moron. After all, being a moron is not a crime. But she's a MORALIZING moron!

And those kind of morons are especially dangerous. She's obviously a politician backed by some very strange, but powerful people:

McCain: Unoriginal Maverick

McCain: Unoriginal Maverick
Originally uploaded by The Searcher

"Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!"
Said Jan Brady.

"Maverick, Maverick, Maverick!"
Said Sarah Palin.

"Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!"
Said John McCain.

McCain's supposed to be the Maverick, but Palin's in the spotlight. This campaign is riddled with more holes than a ten-times used condom. No wait, PALIN'S supposed to be the condom, or at least she was pegged for protection. But she's abstinence only. See how confusing this campaign is?

I wouldn't hire Rick Davis to promote an ugly dog contest! I guess that's what McCain gets for campaigning against lobbyists, then hiring one to manage his campaign.

The Two Christofascist Michelles: Blacks, Hispanics, Gays to Blame for Economic Crisis!

"And by now, it's getting into

PROTOCOLS of the ELDERS of ZION territory."

The neocons and Christofascists have actually figured out ways to blame minorities about Wall Street's Financial Meltdown. While they haven't mentioned gays directly, they've managed to implicate two major minorities (major-minors?): Hispanics and African Americans.

Michelle Malkin:

It’s no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave — Loudoun County, Va., California’s Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters — also happen to be some of the nation’s largest illegal-alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Amanda Terkel (Think Progress):

Yesterday in a Senate hearing on the financial crisis, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) spoke on what caused the situation. To make her point, she read from an article called “How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable,” written by Terry Jones in the right-wing publication Investor’s Business Daily.

The article criticizes the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for pushing “Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities.” Jones goes on to say that Clinton was misguided to push “homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.”

(Rick Perlstein - Campaign for America's Future)

Third of all: the part that makes you sick to your stomach. The pattern being drawn across the right—the Big Lie so notorious it's hard to belief they'd even dare it—is that this financial mess is something black people have done to white people.

Now watch this recent John McCain ad, the one that gratuitously, and with visual bluntness, ties Barack Obama a mustachioed villain who has nothing to do with the Barack Obama campaign but does have something to do with the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack—a man who happens to be black.

National Review's Mark Kikorian added gays and lesbians to the fault mix just by titling his post "Cause & Effect?" It was WaMu's press release the day before the fall:

WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer—Again

Company ranks in top ten of Hispanic Business’ Diversity Elite and earns perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

I haven't been able to link diversity with bank failures, but God does work in mysterious ways! Hell, we knew they'd find a way, ANY way to link all minorities to Wall Street's Great Fall.

The reasoning of bigotry never ceases to amaze me.

Just a thought.

But Will They Turn Them Gay?

When it comes to kids with special needs....

(New York City) A study released Thursday by a non-partisan adoption group says that states need to tap into the gay and lesbian community to reduce the number of children up for adoption.

There are about 129,000 children waiting to be adopted, the New York-based Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute said in the report.

Many of these children are older and have special physical, mental health, and developmental challenges.

In other words, these poor kids are deemed "unadoptable." The Evan Donaldson Adoption Institute goes on to say that it found gay and lesbian adults to be “very willing to adopt children with special needs and, as a demographic group, may be more willing to do so than heterosexual adults.”

Yes, they're willing to take the children other people don't want.

The little guy to the left was adopted by a gay couple. Does he look like he cares?

Orphans have suffered discrimination for centuries. Some years ago, many children's birth certificates were stamped ILLEGITIMATE. Good "Christian" people insisted upon the policy. The orphanage I was born in was labeled an "Infant Asylum" - the largest Catholic orphanage in Chicago. The orphanage was also very careful in "matching" me up with my parents so that no one outside the family could tell I was "adopted" "unwanted" "illegitimate." There is a bill floating in England's House of Lords that would make sperm-donor children identifiable through their birth certificates ("so that these poor children KNOW how they were conceived!!")

At Least They Won't Blame This Latest Disaster On Gays

God's Ambulence Chaser
"Disasters R Us!"

...OR WILL THEY?

Christofascists LOVE disasters of all kinds: hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions and (if you think of them as a disasters) wars. They tell people that God hates the victims for some reason or God's benevolence and protection has been removed by the devil and sinners. Then they rain Bibles and Scriptural tracts on those victims (after, of course, they've fed them a bit - they are Christian, of course).

But what about an economic disaster? Will proselytizers scream "Look what you've brought on yourselves! It's God's punishment!"?? This is a tricky one, indeed. In our latest and biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression, the origin points to the people the Christian Right put faith in: the bastions of capitalism. The deregulation of banks, savings and loans and even greedy retailers like Walmart was championed by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and, of course, George W. Bush. Are they going to say to Republicans "God punished you for your evil ways"?

Or will they find a scapegoat?

Scapegoats are big with Christofascists. They're so handy and so...hate-able. Pick any outside group of people, label them "sinners" and tell everyone that THEY were the cause of all our economic problems.

That's why I'm worried that the gay community will be blamed for the fall of WAMU, Goldman Sacks, etc. I don't as yet know exactly how they'll do it, but they will. Were gays marching and whoring on Wall Street last week? Did they pillage a Starbucks? Did gay marriage somehow threaten to close the women's wear section of The Gap? Who knows what those infidels were up to!

Rest assured that some "Reverend" head of a megachurch is going to say something to make a connection between the fall of Wall Street and the drop of our 501s.

Beware!

The show's just starting.

Just a thought.

Bush's Last Stand

He Always Wanted To Wear A White Hat
And Lead The Cavalry In A Charge.

He did.

He lost.

Last night, President George W. Bush gave what many consider his farewell speech. We should only hope. He entered the presidency with hubris enough to choke the nation. And it did. He is leaving it in shambles. His reputation goes beyond "the worst president ever." People all over the world deride him as a clown who thinks he's a leader and "decider."

People saw how hungry he was for a war. Any war. People saw how his administration handled natural disasters. People saw how he pandered to big business and deregulated everything in sight. People saw his avarice for oil and its protection. People saw him as a plunderer and torturer. People saw how he moralized about "marriage." People saw his hypocrisy.

But many Americans never really saw him.
How sad for America.
How sad for us all.

George:

We don't need you any more. We never did.

Say goodnight, George.