Thank The Goddess

Obama Wins

Dixville Notch.

DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. – Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, N.H., where tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on.

Democrat Obama defeated Republican John McCain by a count of 15 to 6 in Dixville Notch, where a loud whoop accompanied the announcement in Tuesday's first minutes. The town of Hart's Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain and two for write-in Ron Paul. Independent Ralph Nader was on both towns' ballots but got no votes.

New Hampshire wants to be first all the time. If all registered voters have voted they can count the vote. All in good fun.

Please Forgive Me!

The YouTube Election

This is the first presidential election with YouTube. It allows anyone with computer access to see and hear the candidates at an unprecedented level. If you missed something you can just go Google it. It is much harder for republicans to hide behind the media's filter. You can go and see the actual quotes in their context. But I digress.

Teressa at Making Light said "Elections were so much less fun before YouTube." in reference to Vlad and his friend Boris present Song for Sarah. A funny video. But there are many more videos out there for Sarah Palin.

The Ballad Of Sarah Palin

$150,000

For caribou Barbie's clothes.

The John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign is striking back at a report about money spent on Palin's appearance.

Politico reported that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 to clothe and accessorize Palin since she was picked by McCain in late August. According to financial disclosure records, the bills include $75,063 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis and $49,426 at Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York. The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

Politico also reported that its review of similar records for the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee turned up no similar spending.

Backpacker Magazine Interviews McCain And Obama
Nothing is really surprising in the interview. I think it would have been nice if they had looked into their records on the environment(McCain/Obama) and did some fact checking. A sample:

Where would you take a BACKPACKER reader hiking?

Obama I remember fondly my childhood visits to Yellowstone, and I would very much like to return there for some autumn hiking.

McCain I would want to take you to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, which I believe is among our nation's best-hidden natural treasures.

Backpacker also surveyed some of their readers that was more surprising. 47% of their readers think we should be drilling in ANWR now.

And this:

McCain breaks his leg in the Grand Canyon; Obama is lost in the Smokies who survives?

McCain 71

Obama 29

I guess the readers assume that the Vietnamese are there to take McCain to the hospital after he tells them his father is an admiral.

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."

Racism Alive And Well

Sarah Palin has taken off the gloves and put on her hood.

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Someone is going to get hurt.

Post Turtle

Post turtle II, originally uploaded by ET's Photo Home.

Palin is a post turtle. I just have to steal this from one fly.

An old Texas rancher was discussing Sarah Palin's bid to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. He said, “Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.”
Not being familiar with the term, I asked, “What's a post turtle?”

The old rancher said, “When you're driving down a country road and you spy a fencepost with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle.”

He saw that I looked puzzled, so he continued, “You know she didn't get up there by herself; she doesn't belong up there; she doesn't know what to do while she is up there and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.

Moo

An OP/ED by Timothy Egan in the New York Times.

People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.

What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.

Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!

Palin Truth Squad

Palin Truth Squad

No Honor

Deception is all McCain has left. Obama's newest ad.

Brutal

Defenders of Wildlife's new ad about Sarah Palin's promotion of killing wolves from planes.
Update: Lindsay Beyerstein reports.

As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin teamed up with lobbyist for the hunting industry to champion the aerial hunting of wolves an bears. In 2007, she spent $400,000 of taxpayer's money to propagandize the public about the benefits of shooting wildlife with air supremacy:

Too Funny

Josh did a good job on this video. Sarah Palin is a liar. John McCain is a liar too. Neither can run on what they have done or what they will do because no one wants to live in a third world country. But that is what republican government is.

Here is Josh's colleague Kate Klonick on the earmarks.

According to Alaska's 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state's sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin's office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin's running mate, John McCain.

"We're not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana," McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money."

They had no need to lie about Palin getting ear marks. It is a governors job to get as much federal money as they can. Why tell the truth when a couple of lies will do?

Approve This Message

A nice independent ad. I'm Chef Loves Beer and I approve this message.

Fiscally Responsible

Steve Benen.

Second, embarrassing stories about McCain’s personal finances don’t exactly inspire confidence. It creates an interesting contrast — Barack Obama has no credit card debt and has set up college funds for his daughters; John McCain has a six-figure credit-card debt and hasn’t paid one of his property-tax bills. Which of these candidates sounds like the fiscally-responsible one?

Obama Winning Beer Track

Eric Kleefeld from TPM Media

And despite the constant message in the primaries that Obama wouldn't be able to win "beer track" voters, the pollster's analysis has this: "Obama has a sizable lead among those voters earning less than $40,000 a year, with McCain well ahead among those who earn more than that annually."

If McCain and Obama Were Food

Matt Yglesias points to this Serious Eats post with some pretty funny answers.

Mine would be

1. Obama: Romain salad with burp less cucumbers, sweet red peppers and dressing on the side.
2. McCain: Dried navy beans and salt cod.
   

No Clue

He clearly does not understand Iraq. The Iraqi's will kill US troops as long as they are there Period.
Update: Steve Benen from the Carpet Bagger Report.

In fact, everything about McCain’s bizarre worldview is misguided. First, as recently as Monday, McCain reiterated his support for an indefinite war in Iraq. Coupled with this morning’s remarks, McCain believes the U.S. presence in Iraq has no end in sight, and bringing the troops home is “not too important.”

Second, his repeated comparisons to Germany, Japan, and Korea are not just foolish, they’re bordering on absurd. The more McCain makes the argument, the dumber it sounds. (Indeed, McCain himself has said his own comparison doesn’t apply well to Iraq.)

And third, there’s the pesky detail of the growing number of Iraqi officials who used to support a long-term U.S. security presence, but who are now ready to see Americans leave.

There Can Only Be One

Ezra has some musings about how the press will cover the general campaign.

That worked out well. I'm actually optimistic. My hunch is that because Obama and McCain keep saying, in speeches, that they disagree, the press will actually report on their disagreements. The media is perfectly happy to be led around. The problem in 2000 was that Bush insisted he was a moderate and the press had no interest in questioning that. But that doesn't answer the question of how the disagreements will be reported. Will McCain's policies be written up as a conservative, or deliciously "mavericky?" Will the press be able to say that Obama's health plan actually gives people insurance while McCain's makes it easier for insurers to discriminate against you? Will they note that Obama's global warming plan is in line with what experts think needs to be done, while McCain's is not? On all this, I join with Krugman in gloomy pessimism.

It will not be pretty.

Veterans Benefits

John McCain does not support them. My dad was a Marine. He taught me a man's actions were more important than what he said. McCain should have learned that in the Marines. Being held prisoner does not mean you support veterans benefits. It means you were held as a prisoner. Here are McCain's actions. From Think Progress.

The recognition McCain has received from veterans groups is not “high awards” but failing grades:

— Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave McCain a grade of D for his record of voting against veterans. (By contrast, Obama got a B+.)

– Disabled Veterans of America noted McCain’s dismal 20 percent voting record on veterans’ issues. (Obama had an 80 percent.)

– In a list of “Key Votes,” Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) notes McCain “Voted Against Us” 15 times and “Voted For Us” only 8. (Obama voted for VVA 12 times, and against only once.)

McCain frequently cites his own experience as a POW in Vietnam as the ultimate evidence of his dedication to his fellow veterans. Unfortunately, his record belies his rhetoric.

Click through the link to watch him lie.