Fugue* Magazine is on top of the story.

Despite the best attempts of the McCain campaign to derail a bipartisan commission looking into Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s role in forcing a former official out of office for not firing her ex-brother in law, Sainted Sarah was found guilty of abusing her power and violating state ethics statutes.

Pausing briefly from her campaign of inciting crowds to an irrational fear and hatred of Barack Obama, she simply denied that she had violated anything, and returned to promoting herself as a maverick that would change the way government functions in Washington, D.C.

Despite promising to cooperate with the investigation fully, she clammed up after being selected to replace Darth Cheney as the nation’s VP. Instead, the NY Times reports that

“The McCain campaign flew operatives into Alaska to wage a public relations campaign to discredit the investigation and to help mount legal challenges to it.”

The lead “operative” was former US Attorney Edward O’Callaghan, who HuffPo reports was until just a few weeks ago the

“…co-chief of the terrorism and national security unit of the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.”

Now, I made a living in the legal profession in Alaska for three years in the early nineties, so the names of the special investigator Steve Branchflower, a former prosecutor, and the fired public safety commissioner Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage Police chief, are not unfamiliar to me.

In addition to the traditonal machismo associated with these jobs, these guys are typical Alaskans when it comes to having outsiders tell them how to run their biz, so I won’t be surprised if we learn that they told McCain’s goons to go straight to hell.

There’s an old Alaskan saying that refers to the historic disparity between the number of males to females in the state that can be tweaked to fit the current governor’s improbable rise to power:

Alaska: Where the odds are good but the goods are odd.

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* fugue a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity,
often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated
with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

My copy of LIAR mag came today; well; actually that’s a lie. Click it.

The McCain-Palin team of mavericks is on a lying jag this week. First out of the chute was Six-pack Sarah, paintin’ Barack Obama as pallin’ around with terrorists, like that William Ayers guy.  John Wilson was on it, though:

As part of a larger project where I’m compiling a long list of all the lies and smears spread about Obama, here are 30 lies about Ayers and Obama.

And here are just a few of those, to give you the flavor:

LIE: Obama and Ayers “appeared together at various public engagements…it would seem that they are more than just a little bit friendly.”(Sean Hannity, Hannity’s America, October 5, 2008, “Obama and His Friends: History of Radicalism”)
TRUTH: Appearing on a speaking panel is not a sign of friendship. There is no evidence that Obama had any role in ever inviting Ayers to speak.

LIE: Jerome Corsi claims about Obama: “either he did not know Ayers and Dohrn are still radical leftists–in which case he is implausibly naive–or Obama did know, which would confirm he joined with Ayers and Dohrn because Obama too continues to believe, albeit silently and secretly, in the Far Left’s radical agenda.”(p. 140)
TRUTH: Obama probably knew Ayers was a leftist, but he didn’t care. Obama believes in the notion of a free society, where you work with people you disagree with.

LIE: “Even today, Ayers appears to hold the same radical political beliefs he did in the Weather Underground, and Obama had to know that was also the case when he first met Ayers in 1995.”(Jerome Corsi, p. 147)
TRUTH: Corsi doesn’t explain how Obama “had to know” Ayers’ views on politics when he first met him. Telepathy? Mind-reading?

The rest of them are nearly equally repugnant, but if you can stand it I recommend you peruse them to get a real sense of the scope of the rapaciousness of the effort to paint Barack Obama as an evil man.  The in-your-face hypocrisy of those involved in this effort— including the supposedly wholesome hockey mom/pitbull from outback Alaska— is soul sickening.

But to all but the bottom feeders of the gene pool, to anyone with a sense of honor about their true perceptions of persons through the tee vee— Barack Obama does not present a picture of a dangerous terrorist;  rather does his calm demeanor and poised persona seem increasingly presidential, which cannot help but salve the growing fears over our progressing economic catastrophuque.

Meanwhile, the flailing of hockey mom mud will almost certainly stick on the ignorant, misinformed, and bigoted. But make no mistake: uncritically embracing such deception and viral hate invariably binds it to your own soul.  The increasingly ugly and desperate prevarications of John “straight talk” McCain reveal a soul already decaying and dying under the dual allegiance to self, and evil.

May he rest in peace.

“Happy are you when men shall revile you and persecute you
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely. Rejoice and be
exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.”
—Jesus

WASHINGTON — After calling a halt to his campaign earlier today, John McCain spent the afternoon working on a plan to personally re-inflate the economy, and rescue Wall Street. However, a spokesperson for the McCain campaign has just informed the MSM via video that Senator Barack Obama has destroyed the plan with a childish stunt:

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(Please ignore the frickin’ ads AP feels compelled to run on top of this.)

Ex-president Bush shakes hands with ex-president McCain, who was officially replaced as president today, after a stroke left him with the communication skills of a very bright rutabaga, (a cross between a cabbage and a turnip.)  McCain’s wicked shiner was not explained.

Excerpts from Mark Crispin Miller:  (my emphasis)

The choice of Sarah Palin has been widely and repeatedly assailed as evidence of John McCain’s “bad judgement.” Certainly that choice was very bad. Indeed, it may prove to be catastrophic. But to take it as a sign of John McCain’s mere recklessness is probably a big mistake. First of all, there is no reason to believe that the decision really was McCain’s, since Karl Rove’s minions are in charge of his campaign, which means that Rove himself is running it (as he evidently has been from the start). And while it surely was a rotten choice in moral and/or civic terms, it certainly was not an instance of “bad judgement” in Rove’s moral universe, where winning is the only thing that counts; and Sarah Palin was selected so that (she and) John McCain could “win”—and, even more important, get away with it.

They picked Palin not because she is a woman, and might therefore appeal to diehard Hillary supporters. They picked Palin because she is a theocratic true believer, who has the Christianists all swooning at the prospect of her reign (which will commence as soon as Jesus answers all their prayers for John McCain’s quick death). To get some sense of their millennial excitement, read this excerpt from an email recently sent out by one of them, to others of her kind:

I believe you are aware that Dutch Sheets [http://www.dutchsheets.org/] was used by the Lord to call prayer before the 2000 election that was so close. He said this morning that this election is perhaps even more critical than 2000 because of the Supreme Court. If the right political posture is not elected, we stand to lose decades of progress and the results could be enormous. Last year Chuck Pierce and Greg Hood prophesied that in 2008 we would not be electing a president but a vice president. Dutch said he could get no release in his heart to back Huckab[ee] even though he was pressured by many in the body of Christ. Huckab[ee] is a good man and a strong believer, but he was not God’s choice. Dutch also told us that he knows a man who gave McCain a prophetic word that McCain had made a vow to God when he was at the bottom during his POW days and now God was calling in that vow. McCain was visibly moved by this word. Dutch was traveling to Texas on Friday and when he landed in the airport his wife called and told him to get to the TV asap. He watched McCain introduce Governor Palin and he said he began to weep, even though he knew nothing about her. He asked God, “What is the significance of this 44-year-old woman?” And he saw the clock said 4:44. He asked the Lord what that was all about and the Lord said, “Ezekiel 44:4.” “He brought me by way of the north gate to the front of the temple; so I looked, and behold, the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD; and I fell on my face. NKJV ….. North gate representing Alaska [sic].

And so on.

We could take his arrant fetishism in a positive light, and reason ourselves lucky he didn’t take all those 44’s to mean a 44 caliber Peacemaker to blow the toes off McCaint or even sister Sarah; sometimes these things can go every which way.

Such fervor, which now unifies the Christianist community, was not stoked merely by the sight of Palin’s glowing kisser on TV. More importantly, the governor became the instant darling of the Christianist far right once all the top dogs of the theocratic movement looked at her, and pronounced her good. To some extent, she was their choice—and so it’s wrong to claim, as some indignant pundits have, that Sarah Palin “was not vetted.” The governor was vetted by the Council for National Policy, the secretive and highly influential steering committee of the Christianist far right, which seeks to junk the Constitution and replace it with Leviticus and other flights of Holy Writ.

[Palin's] reckless policies derive from an apocalyptic wish to see the planet die, so that Lord Jesus will come back here, and start kicking ass and taking names.

[Read more →]

Guess who took this picture.

John McCain still thinks someone wants to put him in a box.

“When you’ve lived in a box,  you “only have time for right,” says a deep cowboy voice oozing authenticity, while the orgasmically large flat screen shows the aged maverick returning to his Vietnam prison cell and “forgiving” his captors— and their nation— for, well— sparing his life— after napalming their city, their children, along with their mothers and fathers; you know— WAR.  As McCain says, WAR is:

. . .terrible beyond imagination.

Ya think? This is the (maverick) man who can casually imagine a hundred more years of WAR.

. . .I’m running for president to keep the country I love safe, and prevent other families from risking their loved ones in war as my family has. I will draw on all my experience with the world and its leaders, and all the tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military and the power of our ideals — to build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace.

“Build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace“?  The foundations have been built since the end of WWII;  if anything they’ve been  scorned, ignored and abandoned;  but they still exist.

The 72 year old maverick says:

We’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.

Willing. Patriots. Only. Willing patriots say: The senseless conflicts we are now engaged in with random individual terrorists throughout the entire world, whom we are sworn to track down and kill or imprison at our leisure, are not “the road” to world peace. And a “willing patriot” interrupting a Republican acceptance speech being given by a candidate who sees “more wars,” but never mentions specifics on how we are to actually pursue and achieve peace, is not incivility.  [Read more →]

No, it’s not the slimy severed trunk of the GOP elephant;
it’s “Blackberry” the giant leech.

WASHINGTON — Standing in front of an estimated several hundred thousand skittish supporters at the Succachogie, West Virginia Town Hall, John McCain held a giant leech up as high as he could, telling the anxious gathering our economic woes would soon be over.   The giant leech, which he affectionately refers to as “Blackberry,” would quickly turn our ailing economy around by sucking out the bad economic blood that has been poisoning our national economy.

Notes in one hand, leech in the other, McCain read, “Black Berry will, Black Berry loves the taste of greed, and he’ll suck Wall Street dry until it’s fixed!” Some in the crowd thought McCain was referring to Obama, and a ripple of laughter worked through the half-filled hall, capacity 120.

This latest load of dung was flung against the news that Wall Street would continue its self-immolation until every day of the week would be prefixed with the word “Black.”  McCain surrogates immediately denounced Barack Obama for having engineered the ongoing financial debacle just so “He could associate his race with the days of the week.”  The Obama Campaign officially laughed out loud, but refused further comment.

The Obama folks once again understate the obvious.

Black Monday rolls into town today with a distinctively oily hue and cry, and that fulminating hoard of rats you see running along the bulwark are not rushing out to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean folderal, but are enjoying a bout of panic brought on by another classic Film Noir: The Ship of Fools.

Help!! A black man is trying to destroy my portfolio!!

And just like the telling lines from The Who’s cautionary rat-tale ballad from the seventies, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” the McCain Campaign is too busy plumbing heretofore unexplored depths of political depravity and deception to notice the financial sky is falling. And so what if he did notice?  We’d just get an add blaming that “uppity” Obama for his mismanagement of the financial interests of kindly white folks trying to wrest a living out of Wall Street; who now must send the bill for McBush’s economic clusterphuque to Middle Class taxpayers, and hope there’s enough blood left in their collective turnip to bail their asses out yet again.

Oh, and get ready for Black Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday;  Black is Back, my puppies.

But now you’re on your own.  Deal with it.

The Commander-in-Chief has other things to do.

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For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

That’s the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.

That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now.

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise — that American promise — and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

— Barack Obama

Evangelical Jim Wallace:

Wednesday night, I heard Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, say that her experience as “a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” The convention crowd in St. Paul thought that was very funny. But it wasn’t. It was actually quite insulting to the army of community organizers who work in the most challenging places across the country and have such a tremendous impact on the every day lives of millions of people. I guess Sarah Palin and her fellow Republican delegates don’t know much about that. The “actual responsibilities” of community organizers literally provide the practical support, collective strength, and hope for a better future that low-income families need to survive.

“Politicians should thank community organizers, not insult them. As a longtime organizer, I’ve seen time and time again that we are the ones who make government work for the poor, the powerless and the marginalized.  Politicians’ policies and promises would amount to nothing without grassroots activists to hold them accountable. We are leaders of faith and stewards of democracy. In a time when the face of faith in politics is often ugly, community organizing is a valuable example faith’s positive role in public life,” said Pastor Mark Diemer, senior pastor of Grace of God Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio and a DART community organizer.

I’m sure Sarah Palin never wrote that clever Rovian put down of Barack Obama, she just read it off the teleprompter like a good soldier. It never entered her pretty little head that she was disparaging the service of thousands upon thousands of people who toil among their communities’ poor and disadvataged citizens with an aim to make a better world.

She was speaking to the Republican audience at St Paul, half of whom enjoy a personal net worth of over a million dollars; what they understood her to mean had nothing to with scruffing about on the streets with poor minorites.

The “leather boot” goes up their snoot, by way of wearing it out on the sidewalks of our inner-cities and the pavement of suburbia; the real energy of democracy will always emanate from the souls of men and women who love one another in a way that never fails to engender selfless service.  And that is what the “base” Republicans “don’t get.” That is what makes them the scourge of true democracy.  That is what divides our people and destroys our unity.

Gianardil:

WHAT POLITICIAN DOES NOT KNOW WHAT A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER IS? There are millions of people who do this thankless work. They do everything to help. At 41, I was diagnosed with Parkinsons. My insurance maxed at a million. Bankruptcy was next. I had five kids, 3 were my sister’s, who died at 39. I had an insurance policy owned by my children, which was paid in full.

Killing myself seemed the perfect way out. The kids could go to college, buy the house back, and stay together. I know, it was my fault for having a disease so I should have no insurance. My son suspected something, left, and returned with a lovely woman from the church. She told me that they would do everything they could to help me.

I thought this was a joke, but the joke was on me. They found a decent home, moved us, fed my kids, drove them to their activities, paid $1,000+ a month for my medicine, etc.  I absolutely adore these loving people. Someone comes over at least twice a day.

Hopefully, organizers are busy registering voters to make sure [Sarah Palin] never sees the inside of the Oval Office. Keep up the insults. Obama gets those votes. Face the fact dear, you are only on this ticket because you have a vagina. You also appeal to the gun lobby as a “moose hunting, salmon fishing, pistol packing mother,” who needs to learn a hell of a lot more before you go anywhere.

No “real responsibilities”? Well, none that are written down for you.  None that are not taken on voluntarily.  None that will bring you great wealth or recognition in this life. The candidate who understands this kind of responsibility has a chance to lead our nation to a new understanding of what it means to be American, to live up to the promise of our highest values. Help make Barack Obama our president, and we’ll see what real responsibilities mean to a real man of the people.

McPalin wowed the base* with Rovian rancor and division; what’s new.

Maybe Sarah Palin was a fine mayor of Wasilli; I ‘ownt even know. And, if in the performance of her “actual responsibilities” as governor of Alaska, she got a bad cop off the street and spared a family some domestic violence, well that’s wonderful. Alaska, and by extension, The United States, is a better place.  Above all, I even heartily applaud her personal dedication to God’s Will, and wish every American could live the moral and ethical equivalent of divine good to all mankind.  But the reality is, many Republicans, like John McCain, are just as Barack Obama described him in his acceptance speech. They just don’t “get it.”

They didn’t “get it” in the twentieth century, and they’re not going to get it in the twenty-first, either. Their moral and ethical clocks, wound so tightly around the culture war issues of the neocon religious right that they are frozen in time, will never catch up to the moving vanguard of twenty-first century morals and ethics. Ever.

That’s not to say they couldn’t drag America kicking ans screaming back into the twentieth century; [Read more →]

Forty-five years ago . . . A beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Always we may have diversity of intellectual comprehension and interpretation, even varying degrees of socialization, but lack of spiritual brotherhood is both inexcusable and reprehensible.

—The Urantia Book

H/T to Driftglass; see THIS.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Homes again, homes again, dancing a jig;
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog;
Homes again, homes again, jiggety-jog;
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
Homes again, homes again, market is done.

— Apologies to Mother Goose

In 2006,  John and Cindy sold their 2-acre estate in Phoenix, Arizona for a paltry $3.75 million. It was a hard sell.  The house had been one of Cindy Lou’s childhood homes, which the McCains inherited; it’s where those McCain family recipes were finely honed before they were copied by the Food Network.

“Almost every memory I have of childhood is in this house—very happy memories,” Cindy Loe McCain says. “I want my children to know this house and have these memories.”  Unfortunately for the children, that desire got pushed aside by. . . whatever. But not before Architectural Digest did a wonderful article on the property, which went off the rails by referencing one of the Senator’s rare mentions of his POW™ daze days:

Architectural Digest, July, 2005:

John McCain suffered more than five years of harsh imprisonment in North Vietnam. He was tortured, endlessly interrogated, bound hand and foot, and clapped into solitary confinement; he endured mental and physical punishment. At last, [um, four days after his capture] when it was discovered by his captors [ how does one do that pre-Google? ] that his father was an important officer in the U.S. Navy, he was given permission to leave; yet he refused to go while his fellow prisoners remained behind bars. Because of this stern refusal, his punishment became more severe. Yet the book’s theme is forgiveness and faith.

“Cindy has a picture fetish,” the senator says, gesturing to a bank of framed photographs— family pictures, photos of pets, of landscapes, [and— can you imagine?] of the senator himself on the day of his release from his Hanoi prison. [Wonder who took that?]

Asked whether he will run for president again, the senator chooses his words carefully. “If I talk seriously about it, my activities in the Senate will be viewed through the prism of presidential candidate rather than a senator who’s trying to do good work.”

While one may reasonably ask “What activities in the Senate??” Despite his reluctance to talk about his time as a POW™, the crusty Senator reluctantly volunteered this:

“My best friends are those I was in the Navy with and especially those I was in (expletive deleted) prison with,” the senator says. Describing one of them, he says, “He is one of those (expletive deleted) people for whom everything is either black or white. It’s wonderful to go through life like that. I wish I could.” Reminded of his independent and subtler views, he remarks, “That’s one of the reasons [my candidacy] is so attractive,” and with his signature deadpan, “and one of the reasons it’s so (expletive deleted) difficult.”

One of the Senator’s “independent and subtler views” is that his current “black or white” political opponent, Barack Obama, is “dangerously unprepared” to be president, having just a single unattractive home in of all places, Chicago. McCain subtly pointed out he has numerous homes, too many to even remember, which have prepared him to go to war in order to take care of the many millions of homes dotting the American landscape. McCain added, in his signature bedpan deadpan, “Besides, my (expletive deleted) opponent isn’t even rich.”