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    Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7653132.stm

    Are they desperate or what?

    Why oh why oh why can't the US deputies to their leader take a leaf out of our book, and follow the lead of our own dear John Prescott?

    #2
    Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

    This year's US election is bound to descend into personal mud-slinging, I reckon, over the next month. Neither party's going to want to play the "it's the economy, stupid" card this year, are they, the Republicans most surely so.

    Comment


      #3
      Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

      Palin is just repeating the kind of snide Big Lie that is part and parcel of "talk radio" in the US.

      What will be interesting is to see just how much she gets called on it.

      Comment


        #5
        Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

        "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

        I mean, last we checked, right?

        Comment


          #6
          Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

          McCain's last stand - Jeremiah Wright's rantings are on deck.

          Obama can continue to stay w/ the high road and hammer McCain and his party as unfit and clueless to command or they can fight back w/ smears hitting him w/ his unclassy bailing of his marriage, Keating 5 scandal and then show a beat-to-shit 1973 Ford Maverick and some tag line stating that this is about as maverick as these idiots will ever be. Scare voters w/ his Melanoma and age as well.

          Palin needs to be dropped a number of pegs as well -- namely, run that disturbing video of her Assembly of God justification of the Iraq War. Show bits of the Couric interview - then a close w/ "and there are people who think she is ready to fill in for the president?"

          I don't think Obama will stoop to it yet, but I hope he calls out McCain face to face during the debates and asks him point blank if McCain thinks he is Un-American - that would drop him quick.

          Comment


            #7
            Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

            Femme Folle wrote:
            I was really annoyed with that NY Times article. Not that I don't think it's accurate, but I don't think it deserved to be as long a feature as it was--meaning they thought it was something really important--to say basically "yeah, Obama knows Ayers, but it's not like they're friends or anything." In her attack, Palin even cynically claimed that the NY Times printed it, twisted the article's claims, and then said since the NYT ran it, it must be true.

            Comment


              #8
              Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

              $22.5 million.

              The amount of money that the financial sector donated to Obama's campaign.

              That shit will stick, I'd say.

              Get ready for a false dawn.

              Comment


                #9
                Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                Yeah, and McCain got $19m. Probably from a lot of the same people as gave to Obama. These people just want to be on the winning side, they don't care who it is.

                Comment


                  #10
                  Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                  I can't see this tactic working too well for McCain. Mainly because all this stuff was out there anyway, in chain emails, in GOP mailouts, on blogs, in state party adverts and so on. Now maybe there are incredibly low information voters who haven't heard about it, but there can't be many and do they even vote?

                  Moreover, it plays against his supposedly high minded campaign image and is clearly a sign of desperation. He'll lose the media over this, if only because it makes him look like a loser. That said, Obama is in a tricky spot, too. Does he, as Cal suggests, hit back in kind and undermine the whole message of his campaign, or does he try to refocus attention on to the issues, something that rarely works?

                  Comment


                    #11
                    Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                    It looks as though the Obama campaign have been waiting for this and Mccain, by going negative has walked into an ambush
                    And somehow serious and investigated allegations of financial impropriety aren't going to play well in the current climate.

                    Comment


                      #12
                      Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                      He'll lose the media over this, if only because it makes him look like a loser.

                      I think McCain already lost the media, which is why it's going to be almost impossible for him to reverse momentum in the next 30 days.

                      That said, Obama is in a tricky spot, too. Does he, as Cal suggests, hit back in kind and undermine the whole message of his campaign, or does he try to refocus attention on to the issues, something that rarely works?

                      I think enough people in the middle are already focused on the issues to make it unnecessary for Obama to refocus them. Those people see McCain playing at sideshows when there are more important things to worry about. The bad economy is going to do most of Obama's work for him.

                      Comment


                        #13
                        Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                        Clinton used the Ayers line in the primaries...wasn't there also something about Ayers having held a fundraiser for Obama? Or was that BS?

                        Comment


                          #14
                          Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                          In hiring Palin as Veep candidate, McCain took out many of the criticisms he could have made about Obama's alleged relationship with Reverend Wright.

                          The first time the Repugs raise the Rev. Wright issue again, all Obama's people have to do is point out the details of that nutcase church Palin belongs to, and their belief in 'The Rapture'.

                          "Do you want someone in the White House, a heartbeat away from the nuclear button, who believes that the end of days is near, and that it must be triggered by a war in the middle east?"

                          I don't think so.

                          **

                          Also Obama needs to deal with McCain's 'The surge is working' schtick.

                          Because the surge isn't working.

                          http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-mccain-is-deluding-himself-over-the-surge-952490.html

                          Comment


                            #15
                            Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                            Incandenza wrote:
                            Yeah, and McCain got $19m. Probably from a lot of the same people as gave to Obama. These people just want to be on the winning side, they don't care who it is.
                            Indeed. And can we expect Obama to introduce sweeping reforms to Wall Street corruption when he received $22.5 million from said Wall Street firms? There's a conflict of interest there, surely.

                            Comment


                              #16
                              Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                              Is this more about corruption or is it more about deregulation?

                              Comment


                                #17
                                Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                Well, deregulation has essentially legalised bad practice. Deregulation that was introduced with the help of politicians who received many donations from financial firms, which is essentially corruption.

                                Comment


                                  #18
                                  Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                  Well, some of the firms Obama received money from probably no longer exist, so maybe there's that. Also Obama hasn't been much of a deregulator himself to my knowledge. Third, the government has nationalized so much by this point that I would think it could do whatever the fuck it wanted with Wall Street. Aren't they at the mercy of the US Government now? (This is just my superficial non-economist reaction, any resemblance to actual knowledge of the matter entirely fortuitous.)

                                  Comment


                                    #19
                                    Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                    Maybe, but I just think there's gotta be a conflict of interest there. I don't hear any of the mainstream candidates advocating reforming campaign finance and donations, which is probably the biggest problem in American politics.

                                    Comment


                                      #20
                                      Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                      Bryantop wrote:
                                      Maybe, but I just think there's gotta be a conflict of interest there. I don't hear any of the mainstream candidates advocating reforming campaign finance and donations, which is probably the biggest problem in American politics.
                                      Democrats in "not much different than Republicans" shock.

                                      Trust me Bryan, a lot of progressives are in no way 100% in love with Obama. There's a lot to criticize about his political views, but there isn't a viable third party candidate this time around.

                                      For a look at Obama's economic views, this NYT Magazine article from August is really good. Long story short--a lot of times, he seems to want to have things both ways. He spent some formative years teaching at the University of Chicago, the home of free-market ideology, but he also wants more regulation.

                                      “The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.” In other words, free-market policy isn’t likely to dominate his agenda; his project would be fixing the market.

                                      And it does seem to need fixing. For three decades now, the American economy has been in what the historian Sean Wilentz calls the Age of Reagan. The government has deregulated industries, opened the economy more to market forces and, above all, cut income taxes. Much good has come of this — the end of 1970s stagflation, infrequent and relatively mild recessions, faster growth than that of the more regulated economies of Europe. Yet laissez-faire capitalism hasn’t delivered nearly what its proponents promised. It has created big budget deficits, the most pronounced income inequality since the 1920s and the current financial crisis. As Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Rubin ally from the Clinton administration, says: “We’ve probably done a better job of the last 20 years on the problems the market can solve than the problems the market can’t solve. We’re doing pretty well on the size of people’s houses and televisions and the like. We’re not looking so good on infrastructure and education.”

                                      The closest thing to an Obama doctrine on market regulation was a speech he gave in March at Cooper Union in New York, called “Renewing the American Economy.” It included his usual praise of market forces, and his prescriptions for regulating the financial system were mostly mainstream Democratic fare, like tougher penalties for loan fraud, tighter rules and closer oversight for Wall Street. These steps might or might not prevent the next crisis, but they would certainly place a bigger emphasis on trying to do so. And the speech, if anything, probably placed Obama on the more aggressively liberal side of the Democratic platform. Afterward, Robert Kuttner, an unabashedly left-leaning Democrat, praised Obama for going “well beyond the current Democratic Party consensus.”

                                      Shortly before Obama’s speech, the Federal Reserve made emergency loans to investment banks that hadn’t officially been under its supervision. Obama argued that, going forward, the Fed had to be given permanent oversight of any such institutions, because their executives would henceforth assume that the government would come to their rescue. If taxpayers were going to be on the hook for those banks when they failed, he suggested, the government should have the chance to minimize the risk of failure. (Since March, Fed officials themselves have inched toward a similar position.)

                                      There is, plainly, a big potential conflict between the University of Chicago side of Obama and the regulator side. A regulation that sounds sensible today can end up having nasty unintended consequences. But in Obama’s view, the risks to market-based capitalism now have more to do with too little regulation than too much. He can sound almost righteous on this point. He talked to me about the need for a moral element to capitalism and said that the crony capitalism of recent years should be the nightmare of any market-loving economist. At times, this part of his message can seem to overwhelm his respect for the market. Obama’s aides have justified his proposed windfall-profits tax on oil companies, for example, by saying that it makes up for the unjustifiable tax breaks the energy industry has received in the past. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a tax targeted at a specific industry, which, as some economists have pointed out, is just the sort of tinkering that the Chicago School detests.

                                      Comment


                                        #21
                                        Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                        BagNewsNotes says it better about the NYT Ayers article than I did:

                                        With Obama opening up a strong lead in the polls, it's hard not to feel The Times is either taking it upon itself to make the race more competitive, or adhering to some juvenile rule of parity in which each candidate gets whacked in turn, even if a front page article -- raising all kinds of long hashed-over and discredited innuendoes -- ends in the conclusion there is nothing there to speak of.

                                        Friday afternoon's NYT.com front page features an image and article resuscitating feeble allegations -- all then discounted -- of some kind of professional, philanthropic or even political collaboration between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, the article serving little more than a re-introduction of Ayers -- and, by association, questions about Obama's character and patriotism -- into the media sphere.

                                        If you can hold your nose long enough to read the article, you'll also notice how the author -- by way of an interview with a Chicago Tribute columnist -- also manages to reference Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright, including the "God damn America sermon." But then, given the specter of a less competitive election in comparison to the orgy the media had over Reverend Wright, why should all the election fireworks fizzle out now?
                                        [...]
                                        I am typically a lot more high-minded in my conclusions, but frankly, this is right-wing enabling crap.

                                        Comment


                                          #22
                                          Throw enough shit, some of it will stick...

                                          Love him, hate him, or like me ho-hum him, Obama is easily the most wired candidate we have ever had. Miles ahead of the McCain campaign, they are like candidates from a different century.

                                          http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/iphone

                                          Comment

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