The first Presidential debate of the election season between Barack Obama and John McCain at Ole Miss was a mostly sobering, understated affair. No one tossed any pounding blows. No one came away with any killer lines. There was, I think, a fairly decisive victor but it wasn’t necessarily because of debating skill or technique. This was to be a battle between the 72-year-old McCain and the much younger upstart Obama, the former clearly one with experience in the Senate dealing with the evening’s theme, foreign policy and national security. Obama, by contrast, had to be seen as the distinct challenger and there is evidence that his poll leads have not been as high because voters have taken his relative lack of experience to heart. McCain clearly tried to expose this vulnerability as much as possible. But Obama was able to hold his own against the senior senator.

Some highlights (and lowlights): Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no need to set this one up. Triumph, the nasty, potty-mouthed Doberman that is the creation of long time cocmedy writer Robert Smigel (“SNL”), and a recurring character on Conan O’Brien, is at it again. This time he and his acid tongue has been sent to St. Paul’s Excel Center and the recent Republican National Convention. It’s not only hilarious to see this puppet dog in a straw hat and cigar, but it’s amazing that Smigel can come up with such rapid ad-lib zingers to the pale, captive crowd of supporters. And somehow, in the end, Triumph also succumbs to the charm of a certain sexy and zesty librarian VP choice, Sarah Palin.

In the interest of fairness, Conan’s people also sent Triumph to Denver for the Democratic extravaganza. But these two clips are uproarious, and it’s not merely the fact that many of these people are not as familiar with Triumph or his schtick. There are two clips here, in fact, and the MO is the same. Triumph searches out the Read the rest of this entry »

Well that didn’t take long. Not even 24 hours had passed since John McCain, in only his reportedly second meeting, announced that Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska would be his running mate, that the knives have come out from all corners. While social conservative types like Pat Buchanan (whom Palin supported in 2000) and Rush Limbaugh are beyond themselves in rapturous excitement, much of the media and other rational heads have called the pick the single biggest political gamble they had ever seen in modern American history. Ed Rollins, former Reagan henchman and former supporter of Mike Huckabee, has admitted just as much. David Gergen, former administration official under both Republican and Democratic White Houses, an Independent and respected analyst, told Wolf Blitzer he had not seen this coming. A gamble, yes, but one that had potential to possibly ruin McCain’s chances to be President.

The usual suspect of Democrats or Clintonistas are naturally apoplectic. Horny toad James Carville declared himself at “a loss for words” to Larry King on Friday night. This before taking apart Stepford Wifish Nancy Pfotenhauer, once respectable economist-turned McCain acolyte on payroll for repeating over and over again that Palin was the most popular governor in the country right now. As if that brings experience and as if the former mayor of Wasilla, AK three years ago is poised to become Commander in Chief should, God forbid, something happen in the next few years to the 72-year-old McCain. To think this was the most qualified of all Republicans –even, to take the female argument, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas—that McCain could have chosen only points to the political contrivance of this all. Read the rest of this entry »

Morning news anchors are tripping over themselves trying to figure out who is going to be John McCain’s VP pick. This on the day after Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. What should be a day after to go through highlights from that speech and provide some post-election afterglow instead becomes a masterfully calculated announcement from the McCain folks to drive the news cycle today.

Breaking news at 7:39 am PDT: Matt Lauer of NBC News and Today announced that McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. The 44-year old staunch conservative and mother of five, has been in office for two years. Chuck Todd of NBC News said just an hour ago that three years ago, she was just a mayor of a small town in Alaska. This morning she will appear in Dayton, OH with McCain at a rally designed, as only the GOP can muster, to present what is a rather bold and shrewd choice for the Arizona Senator and his campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Fundrace 2008

Care to know if your well-off stepmother is playing a blue or red card? Has your office mate led you astray by donating to the “other” side? Want to know at which party your favorite celeb has thrown millions?

Find out by using this fully interactive Fundrace 2008 map detailing campaign contributions and their sources.

Drag the map to find the hotspot of your choice, and then click to find the juicy details.  You can search Fundrace by name, address, zip code, occupation or employer.

Interesting sidenote: Barack Obama donated $4,600 to Hillary Clinton, then Hillary donated half this amount ($2,300) to Barack.

Wow, this can become addictive.

[Via The Huffington Post]

Your DIEBOLD Vote Hasn’t Counted For a Decade

Are you a lucky lotto winner? I hope so.  With the recent announcement from the e-Voting champions themselves stating that their e-machines are inherently flawed and that they have been dropping votes for years, the chances of getting your vote through and making it count are as slim as they’ve ever been - but for a change, you’re now painfully aware.

The logic error is present in both types of voting machines made by the company: touchscreens and optical scan systems. These machines are used in 34 states (1,750 jurisdictions). For example, in Ohio’s March primaries, it is known that the machines temporarily lost 1,000 ballots.

The e-Voting machines “contain a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point”.

Clearly the most shameful element of this scandal and recent admission is that Diebold (ahem… now Premier Voting Solutions) has previously denied any malfunction or impropriety in their e-machines, and they have continued to Read the rest of this entry »

I did not get my text message –until 1:04 am PST. After a long day in which CNN and every other news organization was chomping at the bit big time wondering who Barack Obama would select as his vice-presidential running mate, we finally have word that it is Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. That bit of news came courtesy of CNN, and chief Washington correspondent John King at 12:42 am EST –a full three hours earlier–from a well-placed source. It was a bit disappointing that the news had leaked and that it didn’t go to the supporters first via SMS.  Millions of Obama supporters who signed up for this bit of news was significant because it symbolized the Obama campaign’s taking this to the people first and notifying them before anyone else.

My cellphone buzzed at this ungodly hour while I was already sleeping. I knew what it was, and I didn’t bother getting up to read the SMS. I knew who Obama had chosen, and in fact, I had just switched off the TV with a bleary-eyed Larry King with the same talking heads that he had on six hours earlier. Honestly, CNN had been apoplectic and snappy all day long, promising that “at any minute now” they would tell us who the VP pick would be. That meant that all of the newscasts featured mostly speculation, but also updates from the also-rans like Tim Keane and Evan Bayh, who sent word that Obama had called them to say they would not be the choice. How do I know all this? I had CNN on virtually all day too, thinking too that they would have the answer first, even though I tried to convince myself that my cellphone would go off first. I was wrong. I was misled. But OK, let’s get on with this. Read the rest of this entry »

Three years almost to this week, while Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, Condoleezza Rice was shopping for designer shoes in Manhattan. She was on vacation, though as a high security official she surely received updates about disasters like the horrendous floods that took place in Louisiana. She still attended the Broadway play that night, “Spam-a-lot”.

Ten days ago, the Bush White House watched helplessly as Russian tanks rolled into central Georgia in what has now been called the most serious showdown with Moscow since the end of the Cold War. By all accounts, the attack on Georgian troops inside their territory along the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was savage and brutal. But it wasn’t a surprise. These borders have been disputed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The once-familiar saber rattling finally roared one bloody afternoon. Not only did the US help hasten this event, but it completely failed in dealing with it in the days that followed. Diplomatic disaster of the first order? No –that’s much too kind. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Phelps has won yet another gold medal. He broke another world record. He and his team, by a virtual millisecond, pounced on the nasty French who had vowed to “smash” the Americans, and made away with the gold. Triumph. All American gold medalists on the dais with the national anthem blaring.

Cut to a half world away where a different kind of smashing was taking place. In Georgia –not the US state, for the geographically-impaired— a former Soviet republic a fierce air, ground and sea war was being waged at the hands of a fierce and angry bear, the Russians. Hey, wait, isn’t the purpose behind the Olympics to avoid armed conflict between nations? Let’s take our battles on to the soccer or track field, and all that. Well, that longstanding belief didn’t seem to faze Moscow. Nor Georgia, for that matter, because while all the hoopla in Beijing was getting underway last weekend, it was being pummeled mercilessly in what may be considered the opening salvo in the Second Cold War.

According to the latest developments, the 5-day conflict appears to have ended, with the typical uncertainty that surrounds these kinds of skirmishes. A diplomatic team composed of French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and EU officials have been in Georgia since last weekend and then in Moscow to try to bring about a diplomatic solution as soon as possible. Overnight, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made an emergency visit to Moscow to personally persuade Russian leaders to have a ceasefire and end what has been an attack that has killed probably 2000 people already –although even that figure is almost impossible to confirm. This morning, Moscow announced a Read the rest of this entry »

John Edwards’ announcement of a sexual affair with a campaign staffer on Friday is a whopper on a few levels. The former Senator from North Carolina, running mate of John Kerry in 2004, and more recently, populist Democratic candidate for President, deemed Friday to be a good day to bury this story amid all the Beijing Olympics hoopla. The hope, perhaps: get the story out quickly, make a brief “official” statement and hope few will notice. Yet this story is all the more significant for what it says about the betrayal of Edwards’ family and supporters while at the same time raising questions about how the mainstream media dropped the ball entirely.

The story is sordid, but not unfamiliar. A dapper, handsome politician finds carnal comfort with a younger woman and Read the rest of this entry »

I was going to write an open letter to Kathy Hilton, she being Paris’s mother, responding to her brief commentary she put up on Huffingtonpost.com over the weekend. She was somehow bothered that John McCain, in an idiotic ad last Friday, suggested that Barack Obama was being treated as a celebrity in the same way as her daughter Paris. (And Britney Spears.)

I was going to call her a hypocrite and that no Hilton would ever turn down any publicity, no matter how unsavory, and that she was just asking for more attention. I was going to challenge her to do the unthinkable: simply say or do nothing and thus not dignify what was, even among many Republican circles and pundits, a superficial ad. Reaching farther still, I was going to blame her for raising the one person who has perhaps singlehandedly glorified the meaning of celebrity and all of its vapidity. I was going to say that Paris, the talentless heiress who became superstar famous for a sex tape and for Read the rest of this entry »

The release last week of a scathing report from the Department of Justice claiming that there was widespread corruption in its hiring practices should not surprise anyone. The report, from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility portrayed an agency fraught with improper behavior inside former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, and the actions of two bad seeds in particular, former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson and White House Liaison Monica Goodling. All testified last year in Congressional hearings and did so in what was a spectacle of ineptitude, but also of evasiveness and pointing fingers. All three resigned and are thus not subject to any internal rebuke.

While Gonzales is still looking for a real job, he still is able to command five figures for speeches to right-wing groups to deliver, what, speeches about what it was like to help politicize the DOJ and completely taint what had been one of the most independent agencies in the federal government. Gonzales, who went from White House Counsel to the President in the first Bush term to Attorney General, certainly has much to answer to still. His opaque answers and general incompetence belie his Harvard pedigree. But besides being Bush’s favorite Mexican, he was also Read the rest of this entry »

CNBC’s “Mad Money” host and financial gadfly Jim Cramer went on Joe Scarborough’s
”Morning Joe” on sister cable network MSNBC yesterday morning and for once, he didn’t yell and scream, in his usual deranged, unhinged and gimmicky way.

In fact, he was pretty subdued. Maybe he was catatonic or in a medicated stupor – of the type that Paula Abdul goes on sometimes on American Idol when she thinks she’s seen two performances instead of one (this happened earlier this year). Cramer was part of a panel that was discussing the stock market and whatnot; he is a regular guest, except that he really wasn’t well. Discussing economic policies of yesteryear, primarily during the late 1970s, he seemed to Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little fun with Adam West, and timely indeed given the recent media stir created by The Dark Knight.

Can you guess which of the following quotes — provided by Philadelphia sketch group, Secret Pants — belong to our president, George W. Bush, and which belong to Batman from his 1960s TV series?

It’s harder than you might imagine…

[Via ComedyCentral]

Eager to post missteps or flub-ups designed to embarrass the Obama campaign each day on his gossipy website, Matt Drudge of the Drudgereport managed to find a doozy yesterday. Apparently, rapper Ludacris, aka Chris Bridges, has released a new song called “Politics: Obama is Here”. It’s, not something the Obama people will be happy about, and this despite the fact that their man revealed once in an interview that Ludacris, one of his favorite rappers, was also on heavy rotation on his iPod. Take a quick listen to this uplifting, inspiring and certain future Grammy Award-winning track and don’t forget to follow along with the deep, socially responsible lyrics:

I’m back on it like I just signed my record deal

Yeah the best is here, the Bentley Coup paint is dripping wet, it got sex appeal

Never should have hated

Never should’ve doubted him Read the rest of this entry »

You would think that after a much-ballyhooed, mostly very successful swing through Afghanistan and Iraq, and a trip through some European capitals last week, Barack Obama would be rising even higher in the polls.

His speech in Berlin, in front of an estimated 200,000 people, was on the front page of every newspaper and on every newscast. The German press, for the most part, applauded the speech and saw in Obama a fresh new departure from what have been troubling years with the current Bush White House.

From the looks of it, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy found a new American friend in Paris, wildly shaking his hand and agreeing to a rare dual news conference after their meeting in the Elysee Palace. (When McCain visited Sarko recently, McCain was left to find his out and search for the cameras.)

In any case, the tour enjoyed extraordinary coverage and Obama himself seemed very pleased with the results of what had been, let’s face it, a very carefully scripted expedition from start to finish. Every single Kodak moment was deliberate and determined; this was a Read the rest of this entry »