Government Goons & Who’s a Citizen

Those crazy “Birthers” are getting an awful lot of ink and air time lately, offering good comedy fodder for late night television while occasionally making regular people turn away in revulsion. Like the “Teabaggers” weren’t hilarious enough to use the name of a sexual weirdness as their moniker, or to publicize their racist rants and ridiculous charges against the President, after being the very same wackos who accused those who questioned any illegal act of the last administration by calling them traitors.

CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

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As the Cookie Crumbles…

Financial news of Wall Street meltdowns, Fed takeovers of big insurers and mortgage giants, and some serious death and destruction on the Texas coast from Hurricane Ike (which we’re finding out about piecemeal after 6 days of “Heckuva Job, Skeletor”), it has become more and more obvious that the country is in such terrible trouble that this will be one of the most important Presidential elections of our lifetimes.

So perhaps it’s not so surprising that both friends and enemies of Republican candidate John McCain are beginning to become alarmed at what appears to be some sort of serious mental decline that has taken hold and accelerating rapidly. What’s going on?

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Pretty Little Pig Y’got There…

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. An old adage of folk wisdom akin to not buying a pig in a poke, not happening until pigs fly, and teenager’s bedrooms likened to a pig-sty. It’s been a coon’s age to a gnat’s ass, he needs to buck up and take it like a man, you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

Republican John McCain’s campaign flunkies are all over this observation about the situation in Iraq, claiming that Obama called VP hopeful Sarah Palin a “pig” because she likened herself to a “pit bull with lipstick” in her RNC acceptance speech. What a total load of hooey! Looks to me like John McCain’s campaign thinks of Sarah Palin as a pig wearing lipstick, and wants everyone to notice.

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Doesn’t Get Any Weirder than This

Well, I was going to report on the St. Paul RNC this week like I did the DNC in Denver last week, but it never quite caught my attention. Hardly anybody went (including the President and Vice-President of the United States, who are the party’s figureheads), Weather was lousy in Louisiana so the first day got put off altogether, and Fred Thompson makes me go to sleep.

But I’ve honestly gotta say, this whole Alaska Momma mooseburger beauty queen thing with Sarah Palin has me utterly and completely befoozled. Bamboozled. Conundrumated. WTF???

First thing out of the gate was that she’s been governator for less than two years, and before that was mayor of a town the same size as Wilburton, Oklahoma (where Granny lives). Then she violated military regulations and operations security by telling everybody her 18-year old son is deploying on September 11. Then she lied about her close relationship with indicted AK senator Ted Stevens and his “bridge to nowhere”, and ‘forgot’ to tell anyone that her own state Senate has her under current investigation for abuse of power. Oops.

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Barack’s Historic Speech and… Palin???

The Democratic National Convention wrapped up last night with the most inspiring, detail-filled, well-delivered acceptance speech ever, and I can remember all the way back to Ike’s. Obama looked, as usual, cool and collected as he ran down the list of what needs doing, while hitting hard on the past 7+ years of failed leadership, insane paranoia of the American people, legalized torture, and their bid for a third term with Lt. Commander McMansions.

Presuming that readers wouldn’t have missed it for anything, the speech needs no quoting here. I’d just like to remind everyone that on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have A Dream speech, Barack Obama amply underlined his soaring rhetorical skills in front of 84,000 people in Mile High Stadium and millions worldwide. The Repuglicans are right to be afraid of him. The dream lives on, might even become a reality in November.

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What If They Threw a Convention…

…and Nobody Came?

Looks like we’ll be treated beginning on September 1 to the spectacle of what happens when the Party of Bush/Cheney meets in St. Paul, Minnesota for their quadrennial bash and the inside-the-beltway crowd of insiders decides to stay home, closer to their call-girls (and boys). I mean, Minnesota is so… so… midwestern.

Instead of an all-star lineup and four long days of never-ending party, the focus has been on the number of Republican senators and such who have decided to skip the formalities this year and spend their time trying to save their jobs from increasingly disgusted voters in their home states.

The Associated Press reports that at least six Republican senators are opting out – Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was indicted on felony graft charges last month, won’t be there. Gordon Smith of Oregon has been touting his close working relationship with Barack Obama and John Kerry to his constituents, hoping not to get tossed in the anti-Bush backlash against McSame. Liz Dole of North Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine are both facing challengers who are entirely likely to win. Wayne Allard of Colorado and “Wide Stance” Larry Craig of Idaho won’t be there either. They’re retiring.

George Bush and Dick Cheney will of course be there to speechify their increasingly dispirited troops. Looks like ‘independent’ Joe Lieberman will be attending, probably to accept the VP nomination from McSame that will do more to seal the doom of the modern Republican Party than anything Democrats could possibly think up.

Should be interesting to see who else decides to stay home this year. I’ll report on no-shows as they don’t show.

Links:

Wonkette: Even Republicans Don’t Want to Attend Convention
Six Republican senators to skip GOP convention

When You’re Sick of Surrogates

…making a total ass of their candidate…

Getty

Time Magazine informs us that the Debate Monitors for the upcoming (and never too soon) Presidential debates have been announced. Now we can look forward to more one-on-one between Barack Obama and John McCain without having to roll our eyes on campaign surrogate gaffes enough to go blind.

For the first debate on Friday, September 26 at the University of Mississippi in Oxford the moderator will be Jim Lehrer, executive editor and anchor of the PBS NewsHour. Always a delightful presence, calming influence and rational analyst.

The second debate will be between Vice-Presidential candidates – whoever those turn out to be – on Thursday, October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis. Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for the NewsHour and managing editor of PBS’s Washington Week will preside. Another excellent choice.

The second debate between Obama and McCain is a Town Meeting format on Tuesday, October 7 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Our fave Tom Brokaw of NBC News will officiate. Should be fun!

The third and last Presidential debate (and you thought McCain was serious when he offered to do Town Meetings every week back in the day, didn’t you?) will be held on Wednesday, October 15 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York with Bob Sheiffer presiding. Sheiffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent and host of the weekly Face the Nation broadcast, is a bit more partisan than the others, but should turn in a good performance at that very late stage of the campaign.

Anybody want to offer odds on what the point spread will be by October 15th?

Now That We Have a Nominee…

Hillary gracefully conceded the race to Barack Obama this past Saturday, finally allowing us Democrats to get down to the nitty gritty of picking on John McCain instead of each other. While Clinton liked to brag about the 18 million who voted for her as if she could sell them on the market, or issue vague threats that they might not vote for Obama in November, her ‘army’ of feminist voters are indeed moving to support the party’s nominee as expected.

So, just to get us started focusing on what needs to be focused on, here’s Johnny McCain telling us why it’s “not too important” to get our troops out of Iraq any time soon…