Ghosts of Joe Slovo

This one has a link to the ACORN Action Center at the end so people can take action to stop the smears and make sure that everyone who is eligible can get to the polls on Election day.



The other one is over 60,000 views and was the 71st most viewed video on all of YouTube on Wednesday October 21 and the 3rd most favorited in the News and Politics section.

Take a minute and change your link to this one instead so people can fight back as well as learn the truth.

Kick ass and take so very many names.

Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow get it right on ACORN.

You can find out the real truth here: The Real ACORN.


Here's Keith.



Here's Rachel.



Kick so much ass and take so many names.

Sarah Palin is by far the hottest Vice-Presidential pick in U.S. history, unless you really dig powdered wigs and knee-breeches. (And if you do, well more power to you. Try finding that at the Power Exchange.) All you haters who slag off beauty contests as nothing but a celebration of male beauty standards and some patriarchy-defined notion of "femininity" are looking pretty silly now, huh? From second runner-up to VP candidate. I was the captain of my Quiz Bowl team in high school and look where I am now. And for sure I have never shot, skinned, and eaten a caribou. It's like Xena Warrior Princess is running on the GOP ticket.

So my WTF? moment isn't really about her.

It's about John McCain.

It should come as no surprise to readers of this journal (though it would surprise the author to know he had readers) that I probably wouldn't have supported John McCain if he was running against Lyndon LaRouche. So taking the opportunity to criticize him is par for the course. But I think there's a good chance that this pick lost him the race.

I think that the best course for McCain, in a year with a GOP brand that is stinking worse than a Long Beach refinery, is basically to make the voters so uneasy about Obama that he is the natural, safe default vote. In other words this election has to be about Obama, not about McCain. However, while the thing that makes McCain the one Republican who could plausibly pull this off in 2008, his perception of independence and his "maverick" credentials, is also the thing that makes him uninspiring to the GOP base. While he needs swing voters to break his way as the safe candidate, if he can't get his base excited, then the breaking swingers (why does that sounds like some kind of hip-hop free-love mashup?) may not make up ground for a margin of victory. Not in an enthusiastic year for the Democrats.

Sarah Palin sure fires up the base, no question. Even with the whole "my daughter is pregnant at 17 even though I taught abstinance-only sex ed to her" is working in her favor as the kid has decided to enter into a wholesome, loving shotgun wedding with the father. Family values in action! Taking responsiblity for one's actions! Defending marriage as the refuge of teenagers making bad decisions!

But.

But, umm, a Washington Post reporter, quoted on Talking Points Memo yesterday, recounted an interaction with the Wasilla City Clerk in which the reporter was asking to see a bunch of city records from Palin's days as city councilor and mayor. Turns out that reporter was the first person to ask for those records. Ever.

Now I don't pretend to know what "vetting" really means. I've never been vetted (I'm sure my supervisor continues to wonder how I got this job) and the most vetting I've done for soneone else is calling their references on a job application. But if I were in charge, I'm pretty sure I would have done a pretty thorough review of at least the candidates public service record.

And, in reality, it's not even getting into the nitty-gritty of past votes that seems to have provided the most interesting tidbit so far. Much more interesting is her past membership in the Alaskan Independence Party. The AIP, a fun bunch of nutjobs who would be right at home with the American Independent Party and their far-right version of friendly fascism, believes that the whole statehood thing was rigged from the beginning and that Alaska entered the union illegally. They'd like to secede and do their own thing. And Sarah Palin was a member. Now she's the VP candidate for the GOP.

Awesome. In 148 short years, the GOP has gone from a party fighting secession to one with secession advocates at the top of the ticket! Oh the ironicalness.

But I digress.

My point here is that no one was looking at what Sarah Palin has been up to in her past lives. Which seems to me to be a fairly big knock on the whole "John McCain is the one you can trust" narrative. You know, McCain, ready to be commander-in-chief! This kind of decision is not reassuring. I'm less excited about having McCain's finger on the nuclear trigger.

Which kinda blows McCain's strategy of laying low and creating uncertainty about Obama out of the water. Because now the race is a lot more about McCain and his decision-making and his temperment and his judgement than it is about Obama and Obama's (scary! uncertain! risky!) vsion of the future. And I don't think that's good at all for McCain.

And I'm pretty happy about that.

Kick ass and take names