Wasilla, Alaska
Republican Party
Sarah Palin for Vice President
I am kind of amazed that the Democrats have decided to directly attack Governor Palin’s experience. Someone should remind them who they nominated for President.
In fact, I can see the GOP cutting an ad talking about how Sarah Palin made a difference in changing Alaska, and asking Barack Obama whether he’s done as much to change Illinois. The answer might well be: no.
I realize, of course, that she’s totally unqualified to be President at this point in time. If McCain were to die in February 2009, I hope Palin would have the good sense to appoint someone who is more ready to be President to be her Vice President, on the understanding that she would then resign and be appointed Vice President by her successor. (Lest anyone say that this is an absurd, unconstitutional or undemocratic scenario, recognize that this is pretty much what would happen in a Parliamentary system where, if the head of government dies, a successor is chosen by the party.) Palin is absolutely not ready to be President now, but that is a problem that is very easily dealt with if she is and the governing party want to do so.
Sarah Palin for Vice President Read More »
John McCain Has an Announcement
I’m very happy today to spend my birthday with you, and to make a historic announcement in Dayton.
-- John McCain
John McCain Has an Announcement Read More »
How Many Houses?
WASHINGTON -- Days after he cracked that being rich in the U.S. meant earning at least $5 million a year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain acknowledged that he wasn't sure how many houses he and his wealthy wife actually own.
"I think -- I'll have my staff get to you," McCain responded to a question posed by Politico, according to a story Thursday on the publication's Web site. "It's condominiums where -- I'll have them get to you."
Later, the McCain campaign told Politico that McCain and his wife, Cindy, have at least four in three states, Arizona, California and Virginia. Newsweek recently estimated the two owned at least seven properties.
-- Douglass K. Daniel, "How Many Houses Do the McCains Own? Republican Candidate for President Not Sure Himself," Minneapolis Star-Tribune, August 21, 2008.
Define Rich
Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy. I think that rich is -- should be defined by a home, a good job and education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited. I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don't believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth. But I can tell you for example there are small businessmen and women who are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week that some people would classify as, quote, 'rich,' my friends, who want to raise their taxes and raise their payroll taxes. Let's have -- keep taxes low. Let's give every family in America a $7,000 tax credit for every child they have. Let's give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice. Let's not have the government take over the health care system in America.
So I think if you're just talking about income, how about $5 million. But seriously, I don't think you can -- I don't think, seriously that -- the point is that I'm trying to make here seriously -- and I'm sure that comment will be distorted, but the point is -- the point is -- the point is that we want to keep people's taxes low and increase revenues. And my friend, it was not taxes that mattered in America in the last several years. It was spending. Spending got completely out of control. We spent money in a way that mortgaged our kids' futures. My friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now I don't know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue, but the point is -- but the point is it was $3 million of your money. It was your money.
And you know, we laugh about it, but we cry and we should cry because the Congress is supposed to be careful stewards of your tax dollars. so what did they just do in the middle of an energy crisis when in California we are paying $4 a gallon for gas, went on vacation for five weeks. I guarantee you, two things they never miss, a pay raise and a vacation. And we should stop that and call them back and not raise your taxes. We should not and cannot raise taxes in tough economic times. So it doesn’t matter really what my definition of rich is because I don’t want to raise anybody’s taxes.
-- John McCain at the Saddleback Church Civil Forum, Lake Forest, CA, August 16, 2008.
Republicans
Chirs Matthews was discussing Bush’s condemnation of those who appease terrorists with conservative radio talk show host Kevin James yesterday on Hardball. Mr. James was haranguing Team Obama’s being in bed with Hamas and the PLO, as evidenced by foreign policies advisers Samantha Power and Robert Malley, pro Hamas people, having been asked to leave Team Obama, showing that they are on the run regarding their pro Hamas stance in the Middle East. So Matthews, a relentless apologist for Obama, asked James what Neville Chamerlain did to appease Adolf Hitler (what Bush was talking about in his speech), James didn’t answer (probably didn’t know), so then, Matthews kept asking him, again and again, making James look foolish at that point, and diverting attention from the points James was making about the nature of Team Obama’s pro Islamic stance.
And Mika Bzrezinski, daughter of pro Hamas senior adviser to Obama, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, kept playing the clip of the part of the Matthews/James discussion where Matthews was badgering James for the answer, making James look to be the idiot, while Matthews is being allowed to have diverted the attention from Team Obama’s anti Israeli staff and associations, to James’ failure to answer one (not so germane) question. It’s plain propaganda for Obama coming out of the talking heads over at MSNBC, so tune in to watch that "objective journalism." It’s a real hoot.
One Hundred Years in Iraq
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:
The most interesting exchange came at the very end, and it was about Iraq. The money quote—the bit that could come back to haunt McCain—went like this:
Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.
McCain: Make it a hundred.
That’s the sound bite. That’s the headline. Now let’s look at the context, which I think is worth considering in full. . . .
One Hundred Years in Iraq Read More »
Republicans
Planetary distances of policy and world-view divide these men, and the Republican debates have the air of cocktail parties whose guests have been selected by random telephone dialling. The candidates deliver monologues: Romney talks chalk, Huckabee cheese, Giuliani cabbages, McCain kings. Here and there a familiar term spoken by one contender - "Iraq", "abortion", "tax code", "illegals" - will trigger a sudden animated reflex from another, but the prevailing mood is one of bemused civility, as at the cocktail party where the plumber's mate stares gloomily into his glass, waiting for the plant geneticist to stop maundering on about rice genomes so that he can get back to the important topic of stopcocks.
Rove's coalition, even more than Reagan's before it, entailed the yoking together of single-issue constituencies that have little in common and are often philosophically incompatible - free marketeers, right-to-lifers, fence-'em-out border zealots, flat-taxers, terror warriors. As many evangelicals have come to deplore the Bush administration's dismal stewardship of the environment, so business owners employing cheap Hispanic labour fear a crackdown on "undocumented" immigrants, and Goldwater-style libertarians recoil from the theocratic tendencies of the fundamentalist base. When Huckabee calls for a "human life amendment" to bring the constitution into line with "God's law", or McCain takes a measured and humane position on immigration, they enrage one sector of the GOP while burnishing their credentials with another.
-- Jonathan Raban, "Divided They Stand," The Guardian, January 31, 2008.