The Old Eighteen

Looking for work

Here's a pretty funny joke that I got in an email from a friend of mine:

A Japanese doctor, German doctor, British doctor, and a doctor from Texas were sitting in a bar together having drinks one day, when the discussion turned to which country has the best health care system.

The Japanese doctor said, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another man, and have him looking for work in six weeks."

The German doctor replied, "That's nothing!  We can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks."

The British doctor said, "Oh yeah?  Well, in my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half of a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks."

Not to be outdone said, the Texas doctor boasted, "You guys are way behind. We took a man with no brains out of Texas, put him in the White House and now half the country is looking for work."

Kissing cousins

Here's a new ad from Moveon.org showing how much alike George Bush and John McCain are.  It's part of their Bush-McCain Challenge:

Joe Biden, keepin' it real

Via There... Already, here's audio of Joe Biden quite literally calling bullshit on the Chimp's efforts to slap the "appeasement" label on Barack Obama:

Biden is the Chris Matthews of the United States Senate - one day he'll say something so dumb that you just want to choke the guy, then the next day he'll redeem himself with a statement like this. I still fondly remember his classic slam on Giuliani a while back: "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11."  Kudos to Biden for saying what so many others were thinking but didn't have the balls to say quite so bluntly.

Obama responds to Bush & McCain's attacks

Barack Obama lays the smackdown on McSame and the Chimp, speaking at a campaign event in Watertown, South Dakota:

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(via DCLaw at Daily Kos)

Where were you on August 29, 2005?

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(via BeckyH at Burnt Orange Report)

Olbermann to Bush: "Shut the hell up!"

Keith Olbermann gives the Chimp holy hell in a special comment tonight, excoriating him for, among other things, lying about giving up golf to (get this) show solidarity with American servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq and their families [note: the video is posted in two parts]:

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Playing politics with the FEC

The Bush administration on Tuesday submitted a list of nominees for the four vacancies on the six-seat Federal Election Commission, including a Republican nominee, Hans von Spakovsky, who is opposed by Senate Dems due to his poor work enforcing civil rights laws during his time at the Justice Department.  But more notable is a name that was left off the list of nominees: David Mason, current chairman of the FEC, who in February raised questions about the McCain campaign's compliance with campaign finance laws.  John McCain had committed to using public matching funds for the primaries when his campaign was flagging and he had no money coming in, which involves committing your campaign to spending limits.  He then used the promise of matching funds as collateral to obtain a loan for his campaign.  After his campaign began to turn around, so did his fundraising prospects, and he no longer needed the public matching funds so he attempted to withdraw himself from public financing.  However, since he had already used matching funds to get a loan, Mason raised questions about whether he would be able to withdraw from public financing, and said that the full FEC would have to approve his request before it could be granted.  Unfortunately for McCain, 4 of the 6 seats on the FEC are vacant, and the commission cannot take action until it has at least 4 members to constitute a quorum.  Since McCain has never been given aproval to withdraw from public financing, he is still bound by FEC spending limits, meaning that when he surpassed those limits he was in violation of campaign finance laws - laws, by the way, that he helped to write.

As a reward to David Mason for doing his job, President Bush has rewarded him by declining to renominate him to the FEC, in effect firing him.  You've gotta hand it to Bush & company: they've got a lot of chutzpah, doing this after all the flak that they got for firing US attorneys for political reasons.

Arianna Huffington: McCain and his wife didn't vote for Bush in 2000

In an article posted yesterday at the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington blasted John McCain, and made a surprising revelation about the Republican nominee and his wife:

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. "I didn't vote for George Bush," the man confessed. "I didn't either," his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush -- both literally and metaphorically -- he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000.

Not surprisingly, Grandpa John's campaign issued a flat denial:

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain, said "It's not true, and I ask you to please consider the source."

Asked why Huffington would make up her story about McCain not voting for Bush, longtime McCain aide Mark Salter -- who has previously tangled with the Huffington Post -- ripped into her. "Why would she make something up? Because she's a flake, and a poser, and an attention seeking diva. And that's on the record."

But despite McCain's denials, Arianna is sticking to her guns, pointing out that the Straight Talk Express has ended up in the ditch more than a few times recently:

[...] John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true.

He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry's '04 running mate -- then later admitted he had, insisting: "Everybody knows that I had a conversation."

He denied admitting that he didn't know much about economics, even though he'd said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun.

He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record.

He denied that he'd ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He's also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, "consider the source."

What doesn't make sense to me about this whole kerfuffle is that, now that McCain has locked up the Republican nomination, if anything, the revelation that he may have voted against Bush in 2000 probably doesn't hurt him much with the base, and might help him with independents and even some Dems.  He doesn't even have to confirm it, he can just let it float around as a rumor, reinforcing his undeserved image as a maverick.

Nelson Mandela flagged as a terrorist by the Bush administration

Because America hasn't been made quite enough of a laughingstock in the eyes of the world community:

Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation “embarrassing,” and some members of Congress vow to fix it.

The requirement applies to former South African leader Mandela and other members of South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC), the once-banned anti-Apartheid organization. In the 1970s and ’80s, the ANC was officially designated a terrorist group by the country’s ruling white minority. Other countries, including the United States, followed suit.

Because of this, Rice told a Senate committee recently, her department has to issue waivers for ANC members to travel to the USA.

Sometimes I wonder if we'll ever be able to undo the damage that George Bush and the Republicans have inflicted on this country over the last few years.

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(via Oliver Willis)

The Bush-McCain Challenge

From MoveOn.org, the Bush-McCain Challenge:

Try the Bush-McCain Challenge—our new online quiz—and see if you can tell the difference between Bush and McCain!

It's sort of like the Coke-Pepsi challenge from a few years back, except that in this case, both flavors taste like stale horse piss.