McCain - Palin
revere | October 10, 2008John McCain's white hot anger is legendary among those who know him and among his colleagues (the real reason he won't win the Miss Congeniality Award), but the public still hasn't seen it boil over. So it's useful to have the accounts of those who have. Yesterday in HuffPo Nico Pitney pointed us to a piece by Michael Kinsley, recounting a gambling trip McCain took with Jeff Dearth, former publisher of the New Republic (now an investment banker!). McCain and Dearth were at a magazine industry junket (not clear who paid for it) in Puerto Rico in 2005 and here's what transpired (according to…
revere | October 9, 2008Until his botched grandstanding over the financial crisis last week, John McCain hadn't set foot in the US Senate since last April. That doesn't mean he wasn't doing business as usual, though:
The Bush administration is currently in discussions to send $6 billion in arms to Taiwan. Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sent a letter to President Bush, urging him to "add more submarines and new fighter jets to the package" as Taiwan had requested:
"The package will not include submarines or new F-16 aircraft. I urge the administration to reconsider this decision, in light of its previous…
revere | October 8, 2008Here I am watching 20% of my retirement savings going down the toilet and John McCain tells me he will be doing me a favor over the next ten years by cutting $1.3 trillion from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets. $1.3 trillion. I'm on Medicare and I am not too happy about this. He needs to do this to pay for his health care plan. I'm all in favor of catastrophic health insurance but I don't want health insurance plans that are catastrophes, and that's what Dishonest John is offering me. He wants to give me a $2500 tax credit for health insurance that will cost me much more. Meanwhile my…
revere | October 7, 2008It's Nobel Prize time, and once again I didn't get the call. In fairness to the Nobel Committee, I didn't deserve it either, but since Henry Kissinger got a Nobel Prize he didn't deserve, I don't know why this should have been a barrier. I could use the money and the fame wouldn't hurt. Anyway, this year the Medicine prizes went to French virologists and a German virologist, for pioneering work on HIV and papilloma virus. What's this got to do with John McCain? None can vote, since all three are Europeans, another sign of waning US influence in science. More importantly, Nobel Laureates seem…
revere | October 6, 2008It's common knowledge John McCain has an anger management problem. That's what's at the bottom of his oft repeated refrain that he wouldn't win the Miss Congeniality prize in the US Senate. It's not that he's a maverick. It's that he's nasty and impulsive and without any instinct for comity with his colleagues. He also doesn't like Barack Obama. That was quite evident long before the current presidential campaign. McCain set his sights on the nomination years ago and was busy laying the mythology of his candidacy as early as 2006 and before. "Ethics reform" was one of his narratives, but it…
revere | October 4, 2008My father was an old fashioned "physician and surgeon," something we don't have today. He did everything: delivered you, took out your appendix or tonsils, treated your parents' heart disease, your childhood diseases, your broken bones, your kids' childhood diseases, the diabetes you got later in life and the heart disease that went along with it. And probably delivered your grandchildren, too. He went to the office seven days a week, made housecalls in the middle of the night, met cooks from the White Castle hamburger chain in his office at 3 am to sew up their lacerations, made his own…
revere | October 3, 2008I just watched the Biden - Palin "debate." Governor Palin succeeded by not failing. Biden succeeded by not putting his foot in his mouth. The rest of us were losers. Like the Presidential debate, we learned little, and everyone will see the "winner" in terms of his or her own preferences. Probably the main outcome will be that the Palin-induced hemorrhaging in the McCain campaign is staunched. McCain's economy-induced free fall is likely to continue, since Dishonest John's only response seems to be to jump on his horse and ride madly off in all directions. Congress's reaction seems to have…
revere | October 2, 2008Tonight is the much anticipated Vice Presidential debate between Governor Palin and Senator Biden. As Governor Palin noted, we all know a lot about Senator Biden. He's been around a long time. He's not as old as Senator McCain but he's more experienced. Governor Palin? Not so much. Here's some of what we know, a compilation of the Governor Palin's Greatest Hits (from Talking Points Memo):
revere | October 1, 2008You may have heard of the Keating Five scandal but not know much about it. Given the size of the scandal, that's a bit curious. Maybe it's the fact that four of the five Senators were Democrats that explains why the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have been fairly quiet about it. All five Senators were dinged by the impotent Senate Ethics Committee in 1991, three for substantial and improper interference with a Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) investigation, two with exercising poor judgment. They all finished their terms, but only two stood for re-election and both…
revere | September 30, 2008Many people characterized Dishonest John McCain's shenanigans around the bail-out bill a gamble that didn't pay off, but it was hardly uncharacteristic. McCain is not only a risk taker but an inveterate gambler, literally and figuratively. He is also a Big Friend of the gaming industry and a customer. Over the weekend the New York Times ran a very long investigative report about McCain's close ties to the gambling industry and his own fondness for the dice. Here's how it starts:
Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in…
revere | September 29, 2008A lot of people, especially in the media, have had a hard time reconciling John McCain's past reputation as an honest reformer with his current dishonest and dishonorable campaign behavior. Now that he is in the harsh spotlight of a national campaign, dogged investigators are beginning to lift the rock and what's come crawling out isn't very attractive. Two of the most recent creature sightings involve McCain's campaign director, Rick Davis, and McCain's assurances that Davis had long ago severed ties with his old lobbying firm that was intimately tied to the failed mortgage enterprises,…
revere | September 28, 2008There's been a lot of talk about McCain's failure to look at Obama during Friday night's debate. Here's Chris Matthews (who is a total bonehead as far as I am concerned) speculating:
In fairness to Matthews, his view was mirrored by many others. The dominant views were either it was an expression of contempt or anger.
However since this is also a science blog I thought I'd share this interesting take by one of Josh Marshall's readers over at Talking Points Memo (TPM):
And here's another note from TPM Reader TB. I guess I'm really not sure quite how to characterize it ...
I think people…
revere | September 27, 2008So here's my problem. I think this is satire. So I think it's funny (your mileage may differ, of course). On the other hand, this could really be a conservative website. Then it's just more of the last eight years. Not so funny. Is Art imitating Life or is Life imitating Art? You decide:
revere | September 25, 2008Leaving aside the absolute disingenuousness of John McCain's claim he is elevating the financial crisis to a non-partisan issue by plopping the Presidential race into the middle of the negotiations in Washington, it wouldn't seem that the whole thing needs that much thought -- at least from his engagingly simplistic point of view. After all, his solution to the millenium old Gordian Knot that Iraq's Sunnis and Shias have entangled themselves in is to tell each side to "":
For all the national attention surrounding John McCain's two highly anticipated, protest-ridden commencement speeches in…
revere | September 24, 2008By now we all know that Governor Palin, possibly a future President if things work out badly, as recently as this year didn't know what the Vice President did, probably because constitutionally Vice Presidents don't do that much. It's also been widely reported that she charged the citizens of Alaska travel per diems while she was at home in Wasilla, since Wasilla wasn't her official duty station (which was at the capitol in Juneau). But it took Scott Lilly, writing at Politico.com, to do the math:
The Washington Post recently reported that, in her first 19 months as governor, Palin billed the…
revere | September 23, 2008"The fish love to be around those rigs!"
He looks like somebody's crazy uncle. Except that he wants to be Uncle Sam.
revere | September 22, 2008Good news. Governor Palin's "road to nowhere" has just opened and now you can take it there. If that's your destination:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's transportation department has completed a $25 million gravel road leading to the site of a bridge that Palin, as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, now boasts that she stopped, so as to save taxpayers money. The road was built with federal tax dollars.
Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein said the 3.2-mile road will be useful for road races, hunters and possibly future development. But with no bridge to serve it, that's probably about it.
"I think…
revere | September 22, 2008Mrs. R. made the very same comment that Echidne of the Snakes did regarding John McCain's prescription of how to fix the US health care system:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation. (Quoted by Paul Krugman, New York Times, from McCain's article Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, just published. Bad timing?)
Oh good, Mrs. R. said. Now we'll finally get socialized medicine.
I…
revere | September 21, 2008There are creationists and creationists. One of those creationists (which one?) wants to be just a 72 year old's cardiac arrhythmia away from being President of the United States. It would be historic, although more historic for the rest of us than for the potentially almost President, Governor Sarah Palin, because her notion of the length of historical record is so much shorter. Like many Pentecostals, Governor Palin is said to be a Young Earth Creationist, someone who thinks the earth is only 7 thousand years old and that humans walked alongside dinosaurs. At least that's what one of her…
revere | September 20, 2008Listen to the person who John McCain says knows more about energy than anyone in the United States. Maybe he learned all he knows about energy from her? If so, maybe he'll explain it to the rest of us:
LOL.