Lewis: "I do not regret what I said"

U.S. Rep. John Lewis on Tuesday said he had no regrets for claiming that Republican rhetoric in the presidential contest reminded him of words spoken by segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace —- but he admitted that he could have made his point “in a different way.”

“I do not regret what I said,” Lewis said. “Maybe it could have been said in a different way, because it was not suggesting that [Republican running mates] John McCain or Sarah Palin was closely related [in] any way to the actions of Governor Wallace.”

Said the Atlanta congressman and civil rights icon: “It was all about what I call toxic speech —- statements [and] an audience that can unleash bitterness and hatred. And I don’t need anyone to lecture me about my feelings, or what I have observed for more than 50 years.”

Last week, in the face of declining polls, Republicans concentrated on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and what they called issues of character —- and what Democrats called “code words” for race.

Before large crowds, GOP vice presidential nominee Palin repeatedly criticized Obama for “palling around with terrorists.”

“This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said.

On Saturday, Lewis rocked the presidential campaign with his statement that McCain and Palin “are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

“During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate.”

McCain immediately called Lewis’ remarks “beyond the pale” and called on Obama to repudiate them. On Monday McCain fumed to CNN that Lewis’ controversial remarks were “so disturbing” that they “stopped me in my tracks.”

The Obama campaign said any comparisons to Wallace were out of line, but also said that “Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked.”

Lewis made his Tuesday remarks at Spelman College in Atlanta, after the unveiling of a video documenting the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march and the confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge between Alabama state troopers and 600 African-American demonstrators.

Speaking with reporters, Lewis said that a comparison that wouldn’t have injected racial images would have been the McCarthy era of the 1950s and the accusations of “guilt by association” that marked that period.

Regardless of any criticism, which he characterized as overblown, Lewis said his Saturday protest had its effect. “I think it checked some of the things that had been going on. I don’t think you’re going to see people making reference to a young man who is the nominee of his party as running around with terrorists. I don’t think you’re going to have that anymore,” Lewis said.

Chris Matthews on the Debate

Presidential Debate 3

IT'S OVER. John McCain still hasn't told the country why he should be president.

He has talking points. He is against taxes, earmarks, and pork. But he can't knit what he opposes into a coherent economic philosophy that would inspire voters to get behind him in the final days of this presidential campaign.

...McCain had at least one good line last night: "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush you should've run four years ago." But one good line isn't a lifeline.

The Arizona senator finally mentioned Bill Ayers and ACORN to his opponent's face. But he can't link Obama to Ayers and domestic terrorism, or to the controversial community group called Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, as tightly as Obama can link McCain to Bush. And that remains one of Obama's biggest advantages in this race.

The Democrat has other advantages, from the economy to his own eloquence. He also has the ability to do what McCain can't do: look and sound presidential.

Enjoying a surge in the polls, Obama was confident, maybe a bit overconfident in this final debate

.
Obama grinned; McCain grimaced.

Each knows his destiny. One man is walking to the White House. The other is just a politically dead man walking.

source: Boston Globe "That's It for McCain".

John McCain's Anger Management Tour

Senator John McCain extended his "Anger Mismanagement Tour" during last night's debate. According to Harold Meyerson from the Washington Post: John of the Grimaces met Barack the Unflappable in Hempstead tonight, and the guy with the arctic cool, not surprisingly, prevailed.

Now we know why Obama’s aides were goading McCain earlier this week to raise the Bill Ayres issue in the debate. They wanted to play McCain’s rage against Obama’s measured, judicious, statesmanlike, even a bit boring presidentiality. And McCain obliged them big time...

The Obama campaign has always believed that if McCain was going to be knocked out in the course of a debate, it would be at the hands of McCain....

Plainly, Obama’s goals in the three presidential debates were to show his understanding of how the nation’s problems affect real people and to put out some plausible-sounding solutions, and, just as if not more important, to show people he was serious, reliable, thoughtful and safe -- just the guy to steer us through rough economic times. As the debates dwindled down to a precious one, McCain’s goals were all but contradictory: to attack Obama hard enough to get the kid to crack and to reverse voter sentiment, but not hard enough to reinforce the impression that he was waging a preponderantly negative campaign or, worse yet, that he was an angry white man. In short, he had to square a circle. In short, he didn’t.

Silly Sambo Alert

GOP Voter Supression

Salon Magazine's article, "Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria: As Republicans warn of catastrophe at the polls, an expert on election fraud explains the real partisan hoax -- the suppression of Democratic votes":

Warnings about voter fraud prior to a U.S. presidential election are nothing new. But to listen to conservative Republicans lately, you might expect Nov. 4 to bring a voting catastrophe of epic proportions. Writing in the New York Post in early October, Ken Blackwell -- yes, the former Ohio secretary of state of 2004 election infamy -- warned about "the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane -- with radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000."

"To prevent it," Blackwell urged, "we must act now." Many Republicans, including operatives from the McCain campaign, have indeed been raising the specter of voter fraud across battleground states, from Nevada to Michigan to Pennsylvania, and pushing for action by government authorities.

But according to Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has spent the last eight years studying the role of fraud in U.S. elections, the Republican crusade against voter fraud is a strategic ruse. Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud -- a problem that barely exists -- Minnite says the true aim of Republican efforts appears to be voter suppression across the partisan divide. According to Minnite, investigating voter fraud has become a Republican cottage industry over the last 20 years because it justifies questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters -- often targeting poor and minority citizens in urban areas that lean Democratic. Playing the role of vigilant watchdog gives GOP bureaucrats a pretext for obstructing the path of marginalized and first-time voters headed for the polls.

On Sept. 10, the 240,000 Wisconsin voters who had registered by mail since 2006 found their voting status up in the air as the state's attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen -- a McCain campaign co-chair -- sued the state’s Government Accountability Board. In Michigan that same week, Macomb County GOP party chairman James Carabelli told a reporter that he would use publicly available lists of foreclosed home addresses to “make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.” In early October, the Montana Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 6,000 voters in university towns and heavily Native American counties.

And last week, Nevada officials raided a Las Vegas office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a 38-year-old grass-roots political group known as ACORN that advocates on behalf of low-income Americans. News of the raid, following allegations that ACORN workers had submitted fraudulent voter registrations, prompted cheers from many on the right and objections from many on the left -- as did an announcement last Friday, by ACORN itself, that 2,100 of 5,000 registrations forms submitted by ACORN workers in Lake County, Ind., were invalid.

But Minnite says that the latest Republican uproar over ACORN is part of "a far broader effort to corrode public confidence in the electoral process." Minnite is a co-author of the forthcoming book “Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters" and a research fellow at Demos, a public policy think tank based in New York. She predicts that as Nov. 4 approaches, Republican allegations about voter fraud are certain to continue. Minnite spoke with Salon by phone recently from her office in Manhattan.

Do you believe that voter fraud poses a threat to the validity of American elections? 

No. No threat.

The statistics bear me out. From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident -- the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.

Read the entire article, "Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria," here.

Obama's XBOX Ads

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has taken political advertising into uncharted waters this month. In an advertising first, political ads for the Illinois senator have begun appearing on billboards in "Burnout: Paradise City," a car-racing video game on the Xbox 360 console.

The game features a multiplayer element in which users can play against each other if they hook their Xbox consoles up to the Internet. When the game is connected to the Web, new advertisements can be placed on billboards that players see as they race through the streets.

Obama's ad reads "Early voting has begun. Voteforchange.com. Paid for by Obama for President."

Although Weide cannot predict the effectiveness of political online ads in general, he believes the Obama in-game ads will work to grab the attention of game-playing voters.

"This Barack Obama ad is going to be very effective, because it is an unusual ad in a new and unusual marketing channel -- in-game ads -- so it is bound to get a lot of attention in the target group. Plus, because of this, it is also bound to get a lot of press coverage and indirect PR for the Obama campaign," he pointed out.

Bill Buckley's Son Endorses Obama

Christopher Buckley wrote in the Daily Beast, "Sorry Dad, I'm Voting for Obama."  The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

...As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

VP for Vendetta

When I was in Alaska last month, several people told me they were afraid to speak about Sarah Palin on the record, lest they invite retaliation from the governor's office or, God forbid, from the next vice-president. At the time, I didn't take such worries too seriously. As abominable a candidate as Palin is, it was hard for me to imagine vice-presidential staffers trying ruin the lives of private Wasilla citizens just because they had displeased her. But reading the official report of the investigation into the Palin abuse-of-power scandal known as Troopergate, it seems that perhaps her critics were being more prudent than paranoid.

As scandals go, Troopergate is absurdly picayune. According to the report, released Friday by the bipartisan legislative council that authorised the investigation, Palin and her husband tried to use their political power to have her sister's ex-husband, state trooper Michael Wooten, fired from his job and investigated for workers compensation fraud. They also pressed authorities to prosecute him for a moose shooting that was unlawful because of a technicality (the permit had been issued to his then-wife, who was with him at the time, rather than to Wooten, who pulled the trigger). The governor then fired Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner, because he refused to get rid of Wooten, something he could not legally have done. This stuff is so ridiculously small it seems silly to even be writing about it, especially at time of multiplying global emergencies. 

Yet given that there is still a chance - albeit a diminishing one - that Palin could soon be in a position of national political power, it's worth looking at how she has exercised power in the past. As a window into how Palin might rule, Troopergate's very pettiness is what makes it so troubling. We're used to politicians who do favours for campaign contributors, who are too cozy with lobbyists and who resort to underhanded tactics against political foes. What we are not used to are politicians who use their offices to intervene in family quarrels and punish their relatives' personal enemies. For the last eight years, we've suffered under an administration that sees no difference between politics and governing. Palin is something arguably worse, a person who sees no difference between her private life and her public duties. Even Dick Cheney, after all, hasn't used his office to torment disfavoured former in-laws.


Jon Stewart's take on the unethical behavior of Sarah Palin during Troopergate:

McCain and the Republican Reich Wing

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne's aticle "McCain and the Raging Right" states:

Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?

McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a "decent person."

Yet McCain's own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain's attacks, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." What other "terrorists" was she thinking about?

Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.
Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.

Precisely because Obama is not a baby boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.

Yet culture war politics is relatively mild compared with the far-right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.

What we are witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Read the entire E.J. Dionne column here.

David Gergen on August 3, 2008:

David Gergen:

The Republican Party is a Mess and a Fraud

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes: Since George W. Bush became president, the Republican Party has presided over massive, out-of-control government spending, converted a federal budget surplus into a half-trillion-dollar deficit, and looked the other way while Wall Street's greed and stupidity turned the hallowed free market into scorched earth. Now the party has to watch as a Republican president orchestrates the biggest government intervention in the workings of the private sector since the New Deal.

Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?

It's pathetic to hear right-wing talk radio blowhards try to associate Barack Obama with "radical" or "socialist" views when a Republican administration is tossing aside "Atlas Shrugged" and speed-reading "Das Kapital."

The Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it will make unlimited quantities of dollars available for currency swaps with the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank, as these institutions scramble to keep major commercial banks from failing -- and potentially taking U.S. banks with them. None of Bush's Cabinet members could be heard sniffing about the irrelevance of effete "Old Europe."

This attitude adjustment is necessary, mind you. The question isn't whether some kind of drastic, frankly socialistic measures are needed to save the American economy but which measures -- buying up toxic mortgage-based investments (as the White House said it would do), buying up the troubled mortgages themselves (as John McCain wants to do), or pouring money into selected banks and taking part ownership (as the White House now says it will do). Sitting back and letting the dire situation correct itself is not an option, because the market's phoenix-like solution begins with self-immolation.

Politically, though, there is at least some justice in the fact that a Republican president has to deal with this Republican-made crisis. That little piece of irony isn't worth $700 billion, but so far it's all we're getting.

After eight years of the Bush administration, the Republican Party -- to put it bluntly -- is a mess and a fraud.

Read the entire column "Time to be Outward Bound," by Eugene Robinson here.

Rightwing Crack-up

Conservative writer from the National Review and former Bush speech writer, David Frum, repremands Rachel Maddow about her lack of seriousness in discussing the 2008 Campaign. In light of McCain's erratic behavior by suspending and unsuspending his campaign, or the nomination of un-vetted Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, David Frum seems petty.

Eliot Spitzer Redux

Eliot Spitzer
American International Group staved off collapse on Tuesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed to lend up to $85 billion to the cash-strapped insurer over two years in exchange for a 79.9 percent equity stake.

Below are some key dark days in the 89-year-old company's recent history.

2005

February - Former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner send American International Group subpoenas about "non-traditional insurance products and certain assumed reinsurance transactions.";

March - Hank Greenberg, who had led AIG since 1967, is forced out as CEO and replaced by longtime lieutenant Martin Sullivan;

May - Spitzer files a civil suit against AIG, saying the company, Greenberg and former chief financial officer Howard Smith, used "deception and fraud" to inflate the stock's price;

2006

February - AIG settles with SEC and state securities and insurance regulators, agreeing to pay $1.6 billion to resolve claims of improper accounting, and bid rigging;

2007

August - As the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis worsens, the company tells investors it is "very comfortable" with its exposure;

November - After third-quarter earnings fall 27 percent, the company concedes the subprime mortgage crisis is affecting results;

June - SEC begins probing how AIG valued its credit default swaps, which have emerged as a key weakness in its balance sheet;

2008

June - AIG replaces Sullivan with former Citigroup CEO Robert Willumstad after the company posts the second of two consecutive quarters of record losses. Total losses from the subprime crisis reach $18 billion, and total write-downs $25 billion;

Sept 13-14 - AIG officials reportedly meet top New York state officials at weekend seeking permission to liquidate some assets to raise cash, and approach the U.S. Federal Reserve seeking $40 billion in short-term financing to avoid rating downgrades;

Sept 15 - New York State gives AIG permission to access $20 billion of capital in its subsidiaries to free up liquidity to avoid a collapse by AIG, on the same day Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy; AIG shares fall some 60 percent;

Sept 16, 2008- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York agrees to lend AIG up to $85 billion, repayable within two years, in exchange for a 79.9 percent stake, and former Allstate Corp CEO Edward Liddy becomes CEO.

Bush's Economy

Americans should be admired for their patience and fortitude. In a matter of less than eight years, the misguided policies and ineptitude of their not so great leader have damaged their country's reputation and their pockets, perhaps irreparably.

Who could possibly have imagined that in such a short period a massive Federal budget surplus of $128 billion would be frittered away to be replaced with a $ 357 billion deficit? And who can blame Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota for predicting Bush “will be remembered as the most fiscally irresponsible president in our nation's history”?

Who would have believed when Bush moved into the White House that, eight years later, the mighty dollar would be turned into funny money to the extent that Egyptian landlords are now demanding Euros instead?

Not so long ago, even the most reputed financial seer would have been ridiculed if he or she had divined the fire sale of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual or the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

Bear Stearns managed to survive the crash of 1929, Washington Mutual has been in business since 1889 and Lehman Brothers was founded even earlier in 1847. Is it mere coincidence that three “rock solid” institutions should collapse on Bush's watch?
Bush on the economic collapse:

Presidential Debates

A Politico article entitled "Debate coaches: McCain must up game" states,

Top national debate coaches, though, say that McCain made many easily corrected mistakes in the first two debates.

McCain “meanders through the substance of his arguments,” often “getting lost and having to revert back to simple themes,” University of Kansas debate coach Scott Harris said.

Harris added that McCain has allowed Obama to “look more knowledgeable” by simply delivering “clearer arguments.”

While Obama is widely perceived to be a more gifted speaker than McCain, the Democrat was “very rough in the primary debates,” Wade said. “He had an idea about what he wanted to say but didn’t have the concise language to say it.”

But having emerged from the crucible of 23 primary debates, he has “found his groove” in the general election campaign, according to Wade. “There was a lesson in every one of those debates, and he internalized them.”

Obama’s general election debate performances have demonstrated classic signs of coaching, said the debate experts, such as enumerating his answers, using McCain’s arguments to make his own points, and pivoting quickly from the question that was posed to the question he’d prefer to answer. The Illinois senator is also much quicker to offer facts and statistics than McCain.

And Obama smiles whenever McCain attacks him, making him look “more agreeable … [and] more reasonable,” Wade said.

McCain, the debate experts said, has been making classic mistakes that could be fixed.

During both debates, the Arizona senator has struggled both to clearly argue his own point and to rebut those of his opponent, despite 16 primaries of his own to hone his performance.

“Part of the trick in coaching candidates is to have them get to the damn point,” Louden said. “Whatever you can say in five minutes, you can say better in 30 seconds.”

McCain's Aimless Wandering:

Bill Kristol's Message to McCain: Fire the Campaign

Bill Kristol's message to McCain, "Fire the Campaign":

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

The hope for McCain and Palin is that they still have pretty good favorable ratings from the voters. The American people have by no means turned decisively against them.

The bad news, of course, is that right now Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is better than McCain’s. Indeed, Obama’s is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama.

So drop them.

Read the entire New York Times article, "Fire the Campaign," by Bill Kristol here.

Misprint? Typo? Or Dirty Deeds?

In what aides claimed was a slip of the tongue, the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney accused the Illinois senator of urging terrorists to converge in Iraq — as the al-Qa'eda leader did in a tape released this week.


In the midst of criticising Democrats' foreign policy, he said: "Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq."

Speaking on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Mr Obama expressed scepticism that Mr Romney was genuinely confused, and warned that Republicans would try to "make me into this foreign, clearly black person, and to scare you".

Answering a question about negative campaigning the New Hampshire town of Dover, he tried to laugh off the comparison between himself and bin Laden, saying: "I have a lot of trouble growing a beard, and he lives in a cave".

But it was clear that Mr Obama and his team suspect Mr Romney is attempting to subliminally associate him with the terrorist.

In July Mr Romney was photographed smiling with a supporter holding a sign saying "No to Obama, No to Osama and Chelsea's Moma", the latter a reference to Hillary Clinton.