What a maverick that John Sidney McLobbyPants is. Why, he’s so defiant that he surrounds himself with lobbyists, some with ties to Myanmar, no matter what anyone thinks! Now, that’s what I call mavericky!

From NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann
NBC NEWS has confirmed that another McCain aide, Doug Davenport, has resigned because of his lobbying ties to the Myanmar government’s military junta.

With the mainstream media’s steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio. The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee’s fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all. There were two infamous statements that were discussed.

As an Obama supporter this primary season has been like enduring a year-long root canal, without Novocain.

It's been painful. It's been like watching two bullies harass, belittle, lie and push your kid around everyday at school, and not being able to do a thing about it except to try to reassure yourself that, in the end your kid will emerge a better and stronger person because of it.

Or not.

After all, the same kind of sleazy, low-brow, thuggish politics is exactly the kind of politics that got George W. Bush elected, twice. So maybe "my kid" will come out of it a better and stronger person, AND lose.

This general election more than most will test the courage of voters to avoid lesser-evil strategic voting that has propped up our two-party plutocracy. People with intelligence and conscience must resist peer pressure and the temptation to vote against John McCain by voting for Barack Obama.

Of course, a McCain presidency that pursues much of the same policies and values of the totally inept and morally bankrupt Bush administration is something to loathe. But lesser-evil voting sustains our corrupt political system.

Many say they are voting for Barack Obama in a most enthusiastic and positive way. For me, this does not work. I see no compelling evidence in Obama's history that he has what it takes to be a true, solid reformer. All I see is a young, inexperienced terrific talker that has used slick rhetoric to sell himself. With intellectual and ideological elitism and an aura of superiority and academic smugness, he has successfully fooled millions of people who are so disillusioned with our corrupt political system that they have let themselves be manipulated by poetic promises of change. In reality, he is just another super-ambitious, lying mainstream politician that has taken considerable money and support from all sorts of corporate and other special interests.

Obama's electibility reflects his likelihood of winning. The chance of victory hinges on key states.

I've said Obama is unelectable. Yet no one can say definitively that Obama would do worse than Hillary against McCain. Polls over McCain vs. Hillary, McCain vs. Obama are brought out by one candidate's side to denounce the other. The media is blitzed with polls, predictions, and punditry. Those in one camp are receptive to information positive for their candidate and negative for the other. The same holds true for those in the opposing candidate's camp.

I do hope the majority of this nation, who do hold a set of largely progressive values in common, can overcome the squabbling of two politicians and focus on the larger issue, which is beating John McCain in the fall. Compromise is invaluable tool in politics, and the idea that progressives would abandon each other if their candidate isn't nominated is utterly childish.

I’ve been thinking about registrations. Actually I’ve been thinking about the 2008 elections, the endless campaigns, the Supreme Court, endless payment increases, and a growing malaise affecting all US/us. It is really difficult to get fired up for the coming elections which are still some six months off into the future. This is no small observation coming from me – the all-time news and political junkie! I am not alone in this feeling of weariness as many of my readers agree on this.

You see the Tuesday primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina “may” determine who will be the standard bearer for the Democratic Party in the 2008 Presidential election, but I am not counting on it. Both Senators Clinton and Obama claim they are in the fight until the 2008 Denver Convention. Senator McCain has “locked in” the Republican Party spot on the ballot. Campaigning has gone on for two years. The conventions, real debates, and podium combat still loom before us. I was disgusted and undecided about my choice options in 2004. I voted for President last and ended up actually flipping a coin - John Kerry “won” the toss! That is no way to make a voting decision. Please read on.

I am one American that is ashamed of what this nation has become. I am sick to death of watching my country invade other nations for their oil. I am ashamed of the people we wantonly attack in the “name of democracy”. I cringe when I see police officers kill citizens with impunity and beat people as if they the police were nothing but state sponsored gangs. I am disgusted with this so-called Presidential race where you can’t tell one candidate but for their gender or race and the citizens of this country fall for the same old tired rhetoric that there will be “change”.

There will be no change, no matter who is elected. We can’t even count on the election process, Votes are not counted and voting machines are rigged. It’s laughable that any of these candidates will bring this nation back to where it once was a pillar of light in a dark world. We have become what we hate. We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us. We are not even contemplating stopping a war that we started, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis and Afghanistan’s while the American voter does and says nothing to stop it.

— from Truthdig

In the increasingly unlikely event of a McCain-Clinton election, folks who care about the peace issue would have serious reason to worry. Both of these candidates are inveterate hawks, and what we would be up against is a choice between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals as to who could be more adventurous in getting us into unjustifiable foreign wars.

Both not only voted to authorize President Bush's irrational invasion of Iraq but also have failed to apply those lessons to the real challenges we face, particularly concerning Iran. On the one hand, we have Sen. John McCain's wildly inane "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" singing refrain, and on the other, Sen. Hillary Clinton's commitment to "totally obliterate" Iran in response to any nuclear attack by Tehran on Israel.

Word has it that regardless of today's results in Indiana and North Carolina, the Democrats have already lost the presidential election. Until the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sounded like equally qualified presidential contenders with every reason to keep battling. They were refining their issues seriously and entertainingly and making mush of old sexist and racist barriers despite attempts by debate "moderators," as the television networks' agent provocateurs brand themselves, to entrap them in the mud-pits of white-male king-making.

What a transformation, though. Since March 4, Clinton and Obama have become uninteresting. They've abandoned issues for triggers. Their pandering to voters who cling to guns, gods and prejudice as badges of virtue reminds you of Republican primary contests or country music acts. Their greater purpose is lost to the egomaniacal compulsion to annihilate each other, and with them the party they presume to represent.

John McCain has to be the luckiest politician in human history.

He doesn’t have the presidency in his grasp yet, but he is within spitting distance, and that alone is an astonishing fact.

There is no way, for starters, that McCain should ever have won the Republican nomination he is about to. For all his horrible politics, he is perceived by the sundry Klingons and Borg who make up the voting ranks of his party as insufficiently insane to be a true-blue (true-red?) believer in the full creed of Jesus, money and violence (not necessarily in that order of importance, of course). After all, he hasn’t personally invaded a country yet (unless you count his blasting Vietnamese peasants into obliteration when he actually served in the military – which somehow doesn’t seem to matter to these folks except when Democrats don’t do it). And, since he politely wipes the blood off his chin when he eats his red meat, he is apparently too civilized to be president for those who think George W. Bush is one of history’s greats.

— from FindLaw

Arizona Senator John McCain recently completed a "biographical" tour of the country in an effort to keep his name in the media as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, given the fact that Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are currently consuming much of the newsroom oxygen. McCain ended that tour in Prescott, Arizona.

A Prescott newspaper noted the symbolism of McCain's final speech at the historic Yavapai County Courthouse. This was the location where McCain's Republican predecessor, Barry Goldwater, started all his bids for office. McCain likes to refer to himself as a Goldwater Republican. Accordingly, the McCain campaign welcomes and invites editorials like that of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which found him to be "in the mold of Barry Goldwater, a principled conservative, not a kleptocratic opportunist."

Health policy proposals can reflect many different ideologies or political philosophies, but John McCain's plan isn't so much ideological as utilitarian. There has been a lot of excellent analysis of it in recent days, but there's one critical aspect of it that's somehow been overlooked: The McCain plan, if enacted, would result in an enormous transfer of wealth from the general public to large American businesses.

In that sense, it reflects a lot of what passes for "conservative" ideology nowadays. There is no underlying belief system, just a mixed big of policies - so "pro-big government" and some "anti big-government" - that share only the ability to enrich the large corporate donors that finance Republican campaigns.

In 2000, when George W. Bush first ran for President, one of his selling points was the claim he would be America's first "CEO President." Of course, Bush's assertion was far from the truth, but for most voters the notion of an effective executive running the White House has enduring appeal. Looking at Clinton, McCain, and Obama, who would be a CEO President?

As none of the three remaining candidates have been business executives, any assessment of how they would perform as America's CEO requires that we rate them on their managerial attributes. In the business world corporate executives are typically graded on four performance measures: making a profit, reducing costs, making good decisions, and developing a strategic vision.

Roger Hickey has a great post at ourfuture.org on the "dangerous fraud" that is John McCain's healthcare plan. As I point out ad nauseam in The Real McCain, McCain's positions are not simply fraudulent. The "straight-talker" rarely limits himself to simple dishonesty.

First, read the email The McCain Campaign sent out today on this issue:

— from Truthdig

Would President John McCain forget who made that 3 a.m. call to the special White House phone? I suspect that his aides would not just let him nod off back to sleep, even if they were intimidated by the prospect of one of his alleged intemperate outbursts, but might our septuagenarian president be less than fully focused?

Most likely he would be, although as someone born in the same year as the senator, I too bristle at suggestions that age has made me less perfect than I once was. But it has. Sadly, those brain cells do go, and “senior moments” of befuddlement are more than a joke. But that shouldn’t automatically disqualify one of us still-agile silver foxes from the White House, as few of my contemporaries are likely to turn in a worse performance than the much younger current occupant. However, looking at the top two men in the present administration, the age question does make a compelling case for very carefully evaluating McCain’s vice-presidential choice.

Don't expect any labor union to endorse John McCain for president in the general election. The wounds from the Bush-Cheney Administration are just too deep. But, their reasons aren't because of social justice issues that once pervaded the labor movement, but on bread-and-butter issues that have dominated unions the past five decades.

"Our economy is in crisis after years of failed Bush Administration policies that Sen. McCain has adopted as his own," says Karen Ackerman, AFL-CIO political director. McCain, says Steve Smith, AFL-CIO senior media outreach specialist, "assails working families from worker health care and safety to trade policies." McCain, in agreement with Bush, has voted against protecting overtime pay and for trade deals that consistently send American jobs off-shore, often to countries where sweat shop labor is common. McCain has also voted against health insurance for children and worker safety and health. American labor also opposes his votes to privatize Social Security.

After weeks of badgering from the mainstream media as well as right wing talk radio, Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), summoned reporters to say he was outraged by the President George W. Bush's "divisive, destructive, and frankly, grammatically incorrect" remarks. Scrambling to contain the flare-up in a controversy that has dogged him since clips of some of Bush's most objectionable remarks began circulating on TV and the Internet, McCain finally repudiated Bush's long history of inane rambling and nearly unintelligible comments have been swirling around YouTube and OMGDidYouHearWhatThePresidentSaidToday.com for years now.

Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife's struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome-a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

Referred to in hospital jargon as "pumphead syndrome," the condition, thought to be caused by debris and bubbles that are created and released into the bloodstream by artificial pumps used to circulate blood while hearts are being operated on-material that can block blood flow in smaller vessels in the brain, causing neurological damage--this recognized condition has been demonstrated in some studies to lead to significant cognitive impairment that can show up in as many as 42 percent of heart surgery patients even as long as five years after surgery.

I take Obama to task on a lot of issues, but it wouldn't be fair if I didn't acknowledge that he does take some good positions in this campaign. An example is illustrated in yesterday's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, which states:

The impression that Mr. McCain’s tax talk is all about pandering is reinforced by his proposal for a summer gas tax holiday — a measure that would, in fact, do little to help consumers, although it would boost oil industry profits.