I look at the hits and wonder who these people are (other than me, of course).
Go here, and look at the first comment, for a clue. I’m actually a teeny bit proud!
Day: August 24, 2008
Media Apocalypse; Why We’re Stupid Enough To Elect President McCain
WTF? I mean, who could this possibly be that important to??
CUTE AND CUDDLY PAYS THE BILLS: A total of 2.6 million copies. That’s how many newsstand issues of People with the exclusive photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, have sold, according to sources close to the magazine, citing early sales estimates for the issue. People and Hello reportedly snatched up the exclusive baby photos for a wallet-busting $14 million, the cost split between the two in some manner. People scored the domestic rights for the images; Hello bought the international ones.
The issue is the biggest seller in seven years, and is the fourth highest newsstand seller in the magazine’s 35-year history, behind the Sept. 11 issue (4.1 million single copies), the issue covering Princess Diana’s death (3 million) and the one covering the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. (2.8 million). The June 19, 2006 issue with the exclusive baby pictures of Brad and Angelina’s first daughter, Shiloh, moved 2.2 million newsstand copies (perhaps the extra Pitt-Jolie baby provided a bigger draw this time).
Link.
And this guy (was gonna call him a putz but as a guy, I don’t feel like insulting penises): Maybe he got the axe because he was freaking stupid and a little crazy? Oh, wait, he is but it’s his then-lover’s fault, not his.
A former Los Angeles Times editorial page editor sued his ex-girlfriend Thursday, alleging that the public relations executive had cost him his job at the newspaper and tarnished his professional reputation.Andres Martinez resigned from The Times last year after revelations that his then-girlfriend was doing public relations work for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer at the same time that Martinez had tapped Grazer to be a “guest editor” for the paper’s opinion section.
An attorney for Kelly Mullens, who was romantically involved with Martinez for about two years, called the lawsuit “meritless and clearly frivolous.” She said it was filed in retaliation for a temporary restraining order Mullens obtained in April after Martinez stalked her and sent her threatening e-mails and text messages.
Link.
A magazine gives an award for excellence to a non-existent restaurant because its editorial department is just too dumb and/or lazy to makes a few calls and/or go online for a couple of minutes of research.
Oh wait, the editor cobbles together an excuse for the magazine’s ineptitude. Me, I’m not persuaded but I’m only a blogger, not the editor of a prestigious magazine that has set itself up as some sort of arbiter.
And look, here’s the Washington press corps doing its job — not:
Chris also said of media coverage, “It never seems to matter that John McCain is the wealthier candidate and represents economic interests that are in many ways aristocratic; it’s always Barack Obama who is the ‘elitist.’”
So it was amusing to pick up today’s Washington Post and read this:
Sen. John McCain’s inability to recall the number of homes he owns during an interview yesterday jeopardized his campaign’s carefully constructed strategy to frame Democratic rival Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist and inspired a round of attacks that once again ratcheted up the negative tone of the race for the White House.
So even though McCain’s wealth is hardly a secret, it took a verbal gaffe by the candidate, and information about his real estate holdings provided by the Obama campaign, for the media to figure out that McCain is rich.
Link.
Big Media is succeeding one way: By the came they truly and completely collapse, no one will have cared it because it will have been years since they performed any sort of public service. The only loss will be those of whom who lose their jobs.
Right The First Time
Actually, a micropenis of a prick, still, fact is fact….
TPM:
Whoopsie! Check out this inadvertent description of Joe Lieberman in an Associated Press story on the Veepstakes…
His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, andConnecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.
A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that…
An Angry White Guy Vents
Question really is whether Pressident McCain will be as bad as Beloved Leader or worse?
Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.
His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.
Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.
I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn’t bother to show up. Now I know why.
It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. “It means I’m saved and forgiven.” Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we’ve all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.
Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?
Throughout the evening, McCain chose to recite portions of his stump speech as answers to the questions he was being asked. Why? He has lived 71 years. Surely he has some thoughts on what it all means that go beyond canned answers culled from the same speech he delivers every day.
He was asked “if evil exists.” His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to “the gates of hell.” That was it.
He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question — his wife is worth a reported $100 million — he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.
One after another, McCain’s answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has — virtually none.
Where are John McCain’s writings exploring the vexing moral issues of our time? Where are his position papers setting forth his careful consideration of foreign policy, the welfare state, education, America’s moral responsibility in the world, etc., etc., etc.?
John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.
He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the “Straight Talk Express” for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he’s reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner — short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.
I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and see into his soul.
George Bush’s record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.
He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens’ faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.
I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.
Presidential Round-Up
So much crap, so little energy for separate posts….
An interesting tidbit from the end of a piece in the Politico on McCain’s 8 homes. (They’ve decided it’s eight.) From 2006 to 2007, the McCain’s budget for household staff went up roughly 50% from $184,000 to $273,000 …
The McCains increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain’s tax returns.
The additional cash supports an “increase in the number of employees,” the McCain aide told Politico. The aide did not answer a question about whether the growing staff stemmed from addition of new properties to the family’s real estate portfolio.
Link.
How he’ll lead:
McCain’s approach and tone on foreign policy has always been more emblematic of a tv pundit rather than a sober president. While McCain has attacked Obama as the “celebrity” candidate, the fact is that a bad place to be over the last 25 years has been between John McCain and a TV camera. The New York Times on Sunday noted that one of the first things McCain did after 9-11 was go on just about every TV program – where he incidentally called for attacking about four countries. In its biographical series profiling the candidates the Times also noted that McCain was attracted to the celebrity of the Senate with one close associate noting that McCain “saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.” McCain clearly enjoys being on television and he has been a constant commentator on the Sunday news shows and the evening talk news programs.
But TV appearances encourage sound bites, over-the-top rhetoric, and good one-liners, not reasoned and nuanced diplomatic language. This is especially true from guests who are not in the current administration, since you are less likely to get invited back on Face the Nation if you down play a crisis or take a boring nuanced position. Thus on almost every crisis or incident over the last decade, McCain has sounded the alarm, ratcheted up the rhetoric and often called for military action – with almost no regards to the practical implications of such an approach.
The big concern with a McCain presidency – a concern which I am surprised has not been vocalized more fully – is that the U.S. will lurch from crisis to crisis, confrontation to confrontation, whether it be with Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. The danger is that McCain’s pundit-like rhetoric will entrap the U.S. in descending spiral of foreign policy brinksmanship. Just think about the very likely scenario of McCain giving Iran/Russia a rhetorical ultimatum and Iran/Russia ignoring it. Now we are stuck – either we lose face by not following through on our threats or we follow through and go to war. We can’t afford such a reckless approach after the last eight years. For the next eight we need a president not a pundit.
Link.
Again, the common man.
A little President McCain campaign dementia.
The common man’s compound-as-cabin.
What Those Who Will Elect President McCain Look For In Women
Interesting, no beer distribution heiresses….
Link.
How We Lost
Of course, it’s not too late but still…. And while President McCain’s achieved great success the past few weeks, it has been by massive advertising and repeating ad nauseum crap that he can’t keep pumping out til election day without a lot of people tuning out.
Still, this is a problem:
Barack Obama, the prospective Democratic presidential candidate, has managed to turn a 5-8 point lead over prospective Republican opponent John McCain into a 7-point deficit—a double-digit slide—in just two and a half months following a campaign that had voters really excited over his candidacy.
How did he manage this feat (which is documented in the latest latest Reuters/Zogby poll)?
Simple: he followed the tried-and-true strategy of Democratic centrist advisers who have increasingly dominated his campaign since the end of the primaries, and who have a proven track record of producing Democratic electoral disasters now for several decades.
Like John Kerry and Al Gore before him, Obama, who ran his primary campaign as a liberal, staking out an anti-war position, has morphed over recent weeks into a Republican-lite candidate, calling for a hard line against Palestinian rights, threatening to attack Iran, calling for an expansion of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, and backing away from genuine health care reform and other important progressive goals here at home.
One might think that after watching Democratic candidates lose the last two presidential elections by following exactly this kind of “strategy,” if it can be called that, Obama and his campaign managers would have decided to try something different, but it appears that the Democratic Party at the top is hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests that favor war, free-market nostrums and corporate welfare. (Okay, I know Gore really won the 2000 election, but he should have won it so convincingly—for example taking New Hampshire and his home state of Tennessee—that the election couldn’t have been stolen. And Kerry, similarly, should not have had his race determined by a close vote in economically distressed Ohio, which should have been his by a blowout.)
Obama got where he is—the first African-American major party nominee and the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the White House—by appealing to the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Now Zogby reports that Obama’s support among liberals has plunged 12 percent. That’s liberals folks!
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Out Of My Mind 