The past two years we have witnessed the transformation of John McCain from a maverick to a mimic. Still smarting from his 2000 primary loss to George W. Bush, and after soiling his reputation in 2004 by rushing to the president’s reelection defense, by 2007 McCain realized that the only way he could make it to the White House was to change his stripes and adopt the reckless ideology and empty platitudes that brought Bush to power.
But let’s be fair about McCain’s historical voting pattern: If you look at McCain’s National Journal voting history since he arrived in the Senate in 1987, he is a moderate. “In the first eight years after his 1986 election, McCain was typically among the more conservative GOP senators,” writes the Journal. “But starting in 1995, he became more moderate.” And his voting record most of this decade was pretty consistently down the middle. This was the old John McCain, the guy who once opposed Bush’s tax cuts and supported immigration reform and campaign finance reform.
Of course, McCain missed so many votes in 2007 while running for president he didn’t even earn a National Journal score last year. Once he set his sights on the White House, the former POW went MIA.
A related note: You might notice from the same link above that Barack Obama was ranked most liberal senator in 2007. This is the source of the Republican talking point you hear all the time. But Obama was not the most liberal in either 2005 (16th) or 2005 (10th). And while there is a strong case to make that Obama will in fact be the most liberal candidate ever elected to the presidency, should he win, if McCain trots out the “most liberal senator” line in the next two debates Obama ought to just say, “Well, at least I was around enough for the National Journal to give me a rating … whereas you, Senator, have missed so many votes you don’t have a rating.” (On the other hand, I’m guessing Team Obama doesn’t want to draw any more attention than necessary to that 2007 “most liberal” rating.)
While manyof thosein thebig-league media are chronicling Sarah Palin’s slide, especially following her disastrous interview with CBS’ Katie Couric, the Internet continues to be the best source for Palin-related Internet oddities.
Here’s my fave five, in no particular order:
1) Nude faux portrait of Palin
Since last Thursday, Chicago’s Old Town Ale House has been hanging a nude portrait of Sarah Palin above the bar. The body, of course isn’t actually Palin’s, but rather that of Grace Elliott, who works at the bar. Her father, Bruce Elliott (also a co-owner of the bar), worked for nearly a week to capture her form on canvas.
Flickr and various other sites (including the bar’s own) are carrying the uncensored version of the painting, should you desire to see it. Likely NSFW.
Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin broke the iPhone
Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin bought all the Wii Fits that Nintendo made and is sellig [sic] them on eBay.
A new site, InterviewPalin.com (“Can’t get an interview with Sarah Palin? We’ve got you covered), auto-generates sentences from things that Palin has said to create a nonsensical answer to a potential question from a reporter. It’s based on a rather flabbergasting exchange from the recent interview between Palin and Couric.
Q: What is your foreign policy experience?
Alaska that we will be committed to Georgia. And we’ve got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade we’ve got to stop. Spending that, investing that, not using the prudence that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps could be implemented if things weren’t gonna go right. I thought yes, right off the face of the grade of problem that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to. It doesn’t have to stand for that. I believe that what Congress is going to have all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil and gas development in our state to produce more for the other party.
After all the hullabaloo around the Palin children, and their fun names like Trig and Track, one site created a script to come up with funny Palin baby names. Sadly, the site, which once created names like Tape Boise Palin or Wood Corps Palin, is now offline.
With apologies and regrets to Ed “Captain Ed” Morrissey, whose well-deserved “Funniest Blog Post Ever” crown is being snatched away after such a tragically short period of time, this observation today, from National Review’s Mark Levin, will be hard to top for many years to come, even by the most imaginative right-wing satirists:
The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution’s limits on governmental power. If conservatives don’t stand up to this, who will? If they don’t offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will?
If it weren’t for the heroic resistance led by the small-government, Constitution-loving conservatives at National Review, Weekly Standard and right-wing talk radio — cheered on by the freedom-loving, truth-seeking investigators of the right-wing blogosphere – we’d probably be living in some sort of Lawless Surveillance State by now, complete with secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, process-less and indefinite imprisonments, a virtual abolition of Fourth Amendment guarantees, and other anti-constitutional nightmares too heinous even to contemplate. As the heroic freedom-fighter Mark Levin so memorably put it: “If conservatives don’t stand up to this, who will?”
UPDATE: As El Cid notes in comments, the Right has become such a sewer of self-parody that they are destroying actual political satire — speaking of which, here’s the latest segment from history’s longest (or at least most-milked) interview:
In order to learn the source of her political knowledge, Katie Couric asked her three times what specific newspapers she read prior to being selected as Vice President, and Palin — after trying to answer a couple times with her trademark rambling incoherence (“all of ‘em, any of ‘em that have been in front of me all these years . . . a vast variety”) — abruptly decided that the question was an elitist, condescending East Coast media assault on Alaska and chided Couric accordingly, without answering. How could you mock that other than by repeating it verbatim?
* Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?
* Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?
* You’re pro-life, and how much of the virulent opposition to you on the left do you attribute to your pro-life position, and maybe even to the birth of, your decision, your and Todd’s decision to have Trig?
Left Creates a Crisis Mentality, Uses It to Abrogate Constitution
Let me read to you the preamble of the United States Constitution. . . . Some Hugo Chavez or some Brazilian president attacked the US over the weekend, saying that the US Constitution is out of whack. Somebody needs to tell him the US Constitution is not in play anymore. The US Constitution has been abrogated and is being tossed overboard section by section by the Democrat Party and the American left.
Indeed. I wish those liberals would stop exploiting crises in order to expand the power of Government at the expense of the individual, but I sure am grateful that our nation is teeming with stalwart conservatives who defiantly stand up to those erosions, because if they didn’t, who would? You can read all about the conservatives’ heroic stance in defense of our Founding Principles over the last eight years, and their epic struggle to battle against the Left’s exploitation of crises in order to “expand the power of government at the expense of the individual,” in numerous books, including this one, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage:
In 2006, I also wrote a deeply admiring book chronicling the Right’s historic crusade in defense of core Constitutional liberties, as the American Left relentlessly sought during the Bush presidency to exploit the 9/11 attack, Saddam Hussein’s mushroom clouds, the evil labs of Mrs. Anthrax and Dr. Germ(the Five of Hearts in the U.S. Government’s deck of playing cards), Sinister Sleeper Cells lurking on every neighborhood playground, the revolving door of New Hitlers, and so many other crises — real or imagined — in order to expand federal government power at the expense of the individual.I didn’t make those up; that’s really what he asked.
UPDATE III: This Mark Levin “point” is obviously now a virus making its way quickly through the right-wing noise machine. From Rush Limbaugh yesterday:The GOP has controlled the House for all but 20 months of the last 14 years. They’ve controlled the White House for the last 8 years, and also had control of both houses of Congress for 4 of those years. It’s amazing what “the Left” can accomplish by never being in power, and how “the Right” is powerless to stop it even as they control the levers of Government.
The bailout — certainly as originally put forward — really, was no more than Our Leaders’ usual: a show for the media — a line, as it were — and an opportunity to get gobs of public money to their supporters or “cronies”.
Me, I kind of, sort of, agree with this gut, I think. The WaMu and Wachovia purchases show the way: the strong will eat the weak and the crap loans and debts and “debts” will be processed and pass through the system, so to speak.
Still don’t understand what the bailout would actually accomplish in any sort of, you know, macro-economically beneficial way. Nonetheless, kudos to the Dems for trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
U.S. CONGRESS STRUCK A BLOW FOR FREEDOM yesterday, giving the lie to its critics on Wall Street and the administration, who have shown a far weaker grasp of principle.
My colleague Brian Reading argued for a buyout rather than a bailout a few days ago, and that seems to be what is happening. The disposal of problems by existing well-tried systems is adequate to the situation, e.g., the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. with Citigroup (ticker: C)/Wachovia (WB) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM)/Washington Mutual (WM).
The Irish addressed the true issue directly by simply guaranteeing all deposits. Let the shares do what they want.
No more loans? Oh dear! Maybe, in a crisis caused by grossly excessive private-sector debt loads, that is exactly what is needed. It reminds one of our own Tony Blair blathering on about the need for new laws to curb terrorism, while his then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was busily restraining funds for the police and the Courts.
We do not need headline-grabbing initiatives, we need good administration. Per my note yesterday, the U.S. banking system is mostly not broke — it can be fixed without too much drama. Other countries are only marginally involved.
This last point was highlighted by Hong Kong today. The Hang Seng opened down 5.5% and ended up on the day. Sometime during the day investors woke up. In London, the FTSE-100 opened down 3% and was then up, now down a touch. Yet Britain is certainly closer to the eye of the storm than Hong Kong. Why are they not tanking? Because they are cheap, that’s why! The S&P is (oddly) still quite pricey, on a trailing, special-charges-adjusted price/earnings multiple of over 13 times. The Hang Seng is at 11 times, the FTSE and the main Economic and Monetary Union indices at under nine times.
Huge problems are already overdiscounted, including the fact that Americans will not only not be borrowing for a while, but actually spending less than their income. It’s called saving. Maybe we will have a recession. Nobody has actually forecast one any worse than 1990’s — compared to 1980-1982 or 1974-1975 this is minor, as is the market disruption. And comparisons with the 1930s are ridiculous.
It is true that Messrs. [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson and [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke are part of the problem, with their gross neglect of contingency planning followed by attempted blackmail of the Congress. But even if they have not (yet) done the decent thing and resigned, stocks are probably close to the bottom of this downcycle.
A: John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that contract that should be wiped off the face of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I didn’t blink then even, when asked to run as his running mate, that we have got to remember what the desire is in this evil, in this post-9/11 world, where we are at a crisis time like this. I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I know is that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what has got to play an appropriate role in the trade sector today we’ve got to remember what the desire is in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia.
An aspiring chef died after eating a “super hot” chilli sauce in a competition with his girlfriend’s brother, an inquest in England has heard.
Andrew Lee, 33, challenged his girlfriend’s brother to a contest on September 19 to see who could make and eat the hottest sauce, London’s The Timesreported.
The forklift driver from Edlington, West Yorkshire in England, made a tomato sauce with red chillies grown by his father, but after eating it suffered intense discomfort and itching.
Mr Lee went to bed and asked his girlfriend, Samantha Bailey, to scratch his back until he fell asleep.
When she woke in the morning he was dead, possibly after suffering a heart attack, TheGuardiansaid.
Paramedics were called to the home but were unable to revive Mr Lee, who was lying on the floor,The Telegraph reported.
Toxicology tests will be conducted to establish if he suffered a reaction to the food. Mr Lee was in perfect health and just passed a medical examination at work, the inquest heard.
Mr Lee’s sister, Claire Chadbourne, 29, said he took a jar of the sauce to his girlfriend’s home and challenged her brother Michael, 29, to a competition to see who could eat it.
“Andrew just ate the chillies with a plate of Dolmio sauce. It was not a proper meal because he had already eaten lamb chops and potato mash after work,” she said.
“He apparently got into bed at 2.30am and started scratching all over. His girlfriend … woke up and he had gone. It is incredible. Who would have thought he could have died from eating chilli sauce?”
She said a post-mortem examination showed no heart problems.
“He loved cooking for his friends. He always said he wanted to be a chef but didn’t want to start at the bottom.”
