Author: jen-sorensen

I just had to remark on the ad for Rep. Virgil Goode I just saw while waiting for David Letterman to come on. The voiceover said "Independent-minded. Working for us." The tagline: "Independent voice."

It’s as if he doesn’t want us to know something… like his party affiliation. (Psst — he’s a Republican!)

Is Virgil Goode trying to borrow McCain’s schtick and sell himself as a (chortle) maverick? What exactly is that good ol’ boy independent from? Reality? ‘Cause it ain’t the Republican party.

I’m watching Letterman because McCain canceled on him at the last minute, then turned up in a live interview with Katie Couric during the taping of the show. Dave has been mercilessly busting his chops. Worth watching online if you missed it. I guess this partially answers my earlier question about late-night comedy.

[Update: According to the Sunlight Foundation, Goode ranks 13th among members of Congress when it comes to oil company investments. A fun fact to keep in mind as you watch his "energy independence" spot. Drill baby drill!]

By suggesting he might back out of the debate with Obama on Friday without first informing the Obama campaign, McCain seems to be doing anything but "putting politics aside." Especially since the Obama campaign had just proposed making a bipartisan statement on the economy.

I think this makes McCain look weak and evasive, and possibly like the Republicans are trying to win Sarah Palin more time to learn her lines for her upcoming debate. The more the public hears her speak, the more it seems to understand she is a fluffwagon. Moreover, McCain’s erratic, herky-jerky style does not make him seem like a stable leader.

Of course, I thought Bush came off terribly in the debates with Kerry, and that didn’t seem to have any effect. So who knows how this will play out in the end.

I have another post up from earlier tonight.

McCain campaign spokesperson Brian Rogers recently said "We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it." Rogers was responding to accusations that the campaign was sinking to new lows with its fabrications about earmarks, bridges to nowhere, and lipstick-wearing pigs. But the statement rings even truer now, as McCain appears to be going to bizarre lengths to avoid any chance of real public scrutiny.

First he kicked the press pool off the Straight Talk Express in an apparent effort to avoid any unscripted blurtings; then the campaign made Palin comically inaccessible to reporters (aside from the few cringe-inducing TV interviews we’ve seen so far). Now McCain is playing games with the debate schedule. It’s message control taken to absolutely absurd levels, the goal of which seems to be the creation of a one-way beam of disinformation. And to use Palin’s term, anyone — even former allies — who calls that beam into question is a "hater."

This is not the way democracy is supposed to work.

Meanwhile, I see that both the bailout negotiations and Washington Mutual have collapsed. Friday should be fun.

So a dominant right-wing meme about the mortgage crisis seems to be that it was caused by the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, intended to help minorities achieve home ownership. Apparently this load of bunk has been making the rounds for many months now and was recently amplified by the likes of Neil Cavuto and other talking heads on Fox News. This American Prospect article from April handily dismantles the myth, yet I would not underestimate its potential to affect the presidential race. It’s a plausible-sounding narrative (to ignorant boobs, anyway) that taps into racial stereotypes and resentment of affirmative action.

Let me just say that after all the housing discrimination African-Americans have endured over the decades — from being denied loans unfairly, to being refused rentals, to facing all manner of threats when moving into white neighborhoods — making them into scapegoats for the collapse of the housing bubble is transcendently wack.

Do you remember those obnoxious web ads promoting super-cheap mortgages, the ones with the dancing cowboys and awful fonts? If you want to point fingers, that’s one place I might start.

[Update: I have more below in the comments. Here’s a clickable link to the article I mention.]

Republicans’ fixation on welfare never ceases to amaze me. Many times throughout this campaign season, I have heard the familiar refrain of "I won’t vote for a Democrat because I don’t want my taxes going to some lazy bum who refuses to work," or something to that effect.

Oh, what a simple world these people live in. I only wish I lived in a world that simple, where my biggest concern was — god forbid — my tax dollars going to a couch potato. In this time of economic collapse, melting polar ice caps, war on multiple fronts, and a criminal health insurance system that is literally killing people, these bots continue to drone on about welfare, as if this were just any election, at any place in time.

Never mind that most welfare recipients aren’t lazy bums, but people suffering from dire circumstances — often disability — and that two-thirds are white, with many living in poverty-stricken rural areas (contrary to the inaccurate stereotype of the "Cadillac-driving black welfare queen" — thanks, Reagan!). I think it’s safe to say assumptions about race feed into the right’s welfare obsession.

Speaking of welfare, did you hear the one about the Bush administration wanting to cut a $700 billion blank check to Wall Street with no strings attached? That’s an unfathomably huge gift from taxpayers to the very wheelers and dealers who got us into this mess. Now that’s rewarding personal responsibility! Anti-handout Republican voters must really have their panties in a bunch about this plan. Right?

As for the candidates themselves, both Obama and McCain have called for more oversight, but bear in mind that McCain’s economics guru and potential Treasury Secretary pick Phil "nation of whiners" Gramm was a great champion of the deregulation that led to this glorious moment. (Gramm stepped down from his formal role with the McCain campaign after the "whiners" comment.)

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather give a hand to some poor, laid-off soul in a gutted manufacturing town than to a Master of the Universe. But maybe that’s just me.

I got so wrapped up in the Women for Obama rally and then my cartoon deadline that I haven’t had a chance to remark on the vortex of doom that seems to be swallowing our economy. John McCain said something last week that struck me as particularly laughable. On Monday morning, as you may have heard, he stated that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." This was, of course, mere hours after Lehman Brothers went kaput, and at the beginning of what turned out to be a catastrophic day on Wall Street.

McCain started getting hammered immediately for sounding like an out-of-touch buffoon, so by the afternoon he was massaging his "fundamentals are strong" statement into a new line: that he had actually been talking about the American worker. That was what he meant by "fundamentals," you see. By the next morning, he was all over the morning news shows accusing Obama of not thinking the American worker was strong.

Well.

It’s funny, but whenever I’ve heard the term "fundamentals" in regards to the economy, I always thought it referred to indicators in the form of, you know, data. Profits, unemployment numbers, orders for pork bellies, all that fun stuff. If it refers to the bootstrap-yanking American worker, by McCain’s definition, the fundamentals must be all good all the time, right? By this logic, even during the Great Depression the "fundamentals" were strong.

Seriously, though, when a foe of labor like McCain tries to twist the meaning of his "fundamentals are strong" pronouncement into a big, slobbery butt-kiss of the working class, it’s insulting. Only someone who takes working Americans for a bunch of chumps would attempt BS like that. Some might even call it… elitist.

Yesterday’s Women for Obama rally, while decidedly light on attacks on the McCain campaign, contained the single most important message the Dems can deliver about McCain and women: that McCain failed to show up for the vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and that he later said he would have voted against it.

If ever there was an opportunity for McCain to stand up for women, this was it, and he blew it big time. You want to stand up for women? You vote for equal pay for equal work. You don’t recruit an embarrassingly unqualified, anti-choice, intellectually incurious, Trojan horse whackjob to curry favor with the ladies. As I jotted in my notebook while I listened to pay discrimination victim Lilly Ledbetter yesterday: "Palin seems like an absolute disgrace compared to this woman." And Ledbetter isn’t even running for office.

Michelle Obama noted that many people present may not had heard Ledbetter’s story. I believe it, and I wonder why that is. Kudos to the Obama campaign for having her speak on the trail; however, her story — and the fact of McCain’s opposition to equal pay — needs to be put forth much more forcefully. Honestly, McCain’s rejection of the Ledbetter law should be a running joke by now.

Amazingly, many followers of Trojan Horse candidates like Palin do not understand that they are a tactic — a tactic towards greater inequality. Party operatives who put up Trojan Horse candidates know exactly what they’re doing. Palin is a living contradiction in that she would never be in the position she’s in had it not been for progressives who fought for decades for women’s rights. They fought against the conservative ideologies Palin espouses and promises to put into practice. She’s a cynical ploy, folks. Hence my cartoon for this week. You might also want to read my cartoon about Lilly Ledbetter.

If you missed my pictures from the rally, check ’em out here.

I’m about to head out to attend the Virginia Women for Obama Rally featuring Michelle Obama, Jill Biden, and Goodyear sex discrimination victim Lilly Ledbetter. It will be a chance to relive my glory days as a blogger covering the DNC in Denver. Ah, those were good times. I will report back tonight.

Please note that older posts in this blog are listed over on the right, in case you missed my theory that Sarah Palin is possessed with the lying spirit of Satan.

While doing some Google research for my cartoon the other day, I inadvertently came across an article written by pastor (and hardcore "Obama is a secret Muslim" conspiracy nut) Grant Swank, asserting that "John Edwards has a lying spirit." On the subject of Edwards’ affair and subsequent cover-up, he states:

Now he speaks to media from two or six sides of his mouth. In biblical terms, Edwards is possessed. He is possessed with a lying spirit of the devil.

There are sins of the flesh. There are sins of the spirit.

Adultery is obviously a sin of the flesh. But now Edwards, caught in the unfaithfulness toward his wife and family, is committing the sin of the spirit — lying.

This got me thinking. It has been widely demonstrated that Sarah Palin has been speaking from two or six sides of her mouth. The Ninth Commandment states pretty clearly: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Could Palin be possessed with the lying spirit of the devil?

If so, that would be big news, since we all know how she feels about sinnin’. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, when she was a city councilwoman in 1995 she wanted to remove the book Daddy’s Roommate from the shelves of the Wasilla Public Library. The book, according to her former campaign manager, inoffensively explained homosexuality to children. Palin didn’t even want to read it. I can only imagine she feared the devil within. So why isn’t she afraid to lie? Is she trying to get off on the technicality that Obama isn’t literally her neighbor, since he doesn’t live in Alaska? Hmm…

I was going to throw in the Pet Shop Boys’ video for "It’s a Sin," but I thought I’d do one better. Sarah, this Tom Robinson song is for you!