Priorities

The McCain campaign has decided to put their money in make-up artists. They can not win on the issues. Perhaps they should hire David Copperfield. Some smoke and mirrors might help.

The New York Times reports that Amy Strozzi, the traveling makeup artist for Sarah Palin, is in fact the top-paid staffer on the campaign. Strozzi was paid $22,800 during just the first two weeks of October, compared to only $12,500 for top foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann.

Make-up? Make-up?

What a girlie man. John McCain spends thousands a month on make-up. More than twice as much as Sarah Palin's $4,000 or so in a month.

Tifanie White, who reportedly has done makeup for the shows "So You Think You Can Dance" and "American Idol," was paid a total of $8,672.55 in September by the McCain-Palin campaign, according to the campaign's latest monthly financial report filed this week with the Federal Election Commission. She was paid $5,583.43 the previous month, records show.

David Letterman Does Not Trust McCain

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! John McCain!

John McCain and Sarah Palin at The Fairgrounds on Rt. 88. Binging it on!
Via Avedon and Down With Tyranny!

Sinking Economy

Yes John McCain does pay that much to his household staff.

McCainwreck A Brief Aviation History

Some excepts from a Rolling Stone article on John McCain.

1. In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing.
2. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout. That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam.
3. hat December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.
4. Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck.
5. McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.
6. Still cocky from the previous day's kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that "can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."

   But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs — just as the SAM blew his wing off.

7. As his marriage unraveled, McCain's naval career was also stalling out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.

Not such a great pilot. Read the whole thing. There is no new information but it is interesting to see so much unflattering information together without his cheerleaders telling how great he is. Oh did you know he was a POW?

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

McCain Is 72. He Has Had Four Bouts With Cancer

MSNBC will not play this ad by Brave New PAC.

Thank John McCain

Thank John McCain for eight years of George W Bush.
Via Blue Girl at They Gave Us A Republic.

Lie!

Why is it that the ladies on the View can tell it like it is and CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, let John "the Opportunistic Liar" McCain lie again and again with saying he is lying.

More On The Lies

Ezra says:

if there were justice, or consistency, in electoral politics, than we'd have to admit something. John Kerry may have been a flip-flopper. But McCain is an opportunistic liar. And that's not a partisan judgment, there's simply no other way to interpret these facts.

McCain Is For Sex Predators

Really he believes sex predators should be allowed in you kids room unsupervised. Well, I made some of that up. After all if John McCain can lie so can I. A new ad by Planned Parenthood.

Liar Liar

Josh Marshall asks "How can we trust a liar a big as John McCain?"

I'm using the L-word. So that may come across as a slashing blog remark.

But let's slow down and look at the facts that are not being disputed. John McCain is telling lie after lie. Not off the cuff remarks that can be excused as accidents or flubs but the same lies consistently and many of them. Serial liars are never trustworthy people -- that is a truism. But it also demonstrates a deeper character flaw. A normal job applicant would be disregarded out of hand after such a record became clear.

Disturbing

From PZ Myers who says, " I see nothing bit madness." A video of Sarah Palin's church of many years.

The song with the line " this world has nothing for us" is sung a few times. The line for me is particularly disturbing. Do you want someones finger on the button that can destroy the world, that does not believe the world is for them?

This is who the 72 year old cancer survivor wants to be a heart beat from the presidency.

McCain

Andrew Sullivan

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.

Josh Marshall

There's just no getting around it at this point, the man is not morally fit to serve as president.

Steve Benen

So, I'll just say this: John McCain has no business leading the greatest nation on earth.
UNFIT.... John McCain was presented with a choice: lose the election or lose his honor. As has become painfully clear, McCain chose the latter.

Brad DeLong

Nobody has any business voting for a sociopathic liar like John McCain.

Not A Maverick

Just more of the same.

More Palin

Steve Benen

During her brief tenure in statewide office, Palin never demonstrated significant interest in federal issues. But more strikingly, she didn't seem especially engaged in state issues, either.

McCain Is Not Stable

This is a video of Philip Butler, who was at the Naval Academy the same time as John McCain. He was also a prisoner of war with John McCain. He does not want McCain to be president. His essay here. A list of McCain's flip flops here.

Palin Is Not Green

John McCain's Vice presidential pick is in no way shape or form green. She is a global warming denier.

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain's choice of a running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska , favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, questioned the science behind predictions of sea ice loss linked to global warming and opposed a state initiative that would have banned metal mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams.[...]

Earlier this month, the state of Alaska under Palin's guidance sued Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in an attempt to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species. Palin said that scientists' predictions that global warming will eliminate the ice where the bears live in summer were unreliable.

Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low by the end of last summer, and satellites now show that the ice has been reduced to a level very close to last year's with some days remaining before a new winter season begins.

The Anchorage Daily News reported in May that the head of the marine mammals program for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and two other marine mammal biologists on his staff agreed with nine studies the federal government cited to justify listing polar bears as a threatened species.

She is in the hands of big oil. Just more of the same. But with big hair.

McCain

Did not get any female ass for five and a half years in a Vietnamese prison camp so he picked Sarah Palin as his VP.

Via Libby at Newshoggers.
Her Palin observations at Detroit News.

All That Time

In a POW camp, sure did mess McCain up. More than 30 years later it is causing him to make mistakes.

"This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

For those of you who haven't kept track, the McCain campaign just recently cited McCain's POW years in explaining away the Miss Buffalo Chip gaffe, and in dealing with the allegation that he broke the rules and listened in on Barack Obama during the Rick Warren forum.