The Line

Thank you, dear most right-wing of Republicans, for broadcasting your intent so very clearly. Those of us paying attention to the nascent line of attack are already imminently aware. He doesn't hire guys who you like, or who have any Washington experience? "So much for change!" He calls for national service? "Socialist!" He demonstrates the ability to rally people with charisma, at a grassroots level? Either "Empty Suit!" or "Dictator!" (The HuffPost called this "intellectual violence" - as in, attacking logic/reality itself).

But then, when you decide you're just trying to tear down the new administration just to help your party either save face or rekindle a culture of fear? I call you pathetic.

Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship
By BEN EVANS – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

Obama's comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation's foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps "to renew our diplomacy."

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," Obama said in July. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Broun said he also believes Obama likely will move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national police force.

Obama has said he respects the Second Amendment right to bear arms and favors "common sense" gun laws. Gun rights advocates interpret that as meaning he'll at least enact curbs on ownership of assault weapons and concealed weapons. As an Illinois state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on firearms generally.

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

Obama's transition office did not respond immediately to Broun's remarks.

What a ham-fisted, pathetic attempt to publically and very loudly call Obama Hitler. You do this in private, you're just a douche. You do this in public, you're a certified nutjob who's playing to the shreds of the hardest-right wing of his party. By this chunderloaf's reasoning, ANYONE he disagrees with could "potentially" be Hitler. Sometimes, it's the "real America;" other days it's "Red Commies." The politics of desperation, the politics of the lost party, though, never changes.

If the Republicans can learn anything from this election, rather than lining up in the circular firing squad (McCain aides blame Palin; Social conservatives blames McCain for not being right enough; Palin blames the policies of George Bush), they should learn this: the time for that shit is over. That card has been played. The people are sick of it. This race was won by the independants, the definition of the political middle, and they voted against the mudslinging and gnarly half-truths and outright distortions and the return of the culture wars. Find your platform. Figure out why you lost, why you REALLY lost, rather than pointing to everything else and blaming that. You messed it up. Learn, or get used to the cold, cause you'll be out there quite a while.

Shameless, Filthy Stinking LIARS.

I say again...what happened to John McCain of 2000? If this works...well, it's not the first douchebag liar we've had in the white house this century, and maybe that's all our country deserves.

From FactCheck:

There He Goes Again
September 18, 2008
McCain ad misrepresents Obama's tax plan. Again.
Summary
The McCain-Palin campaign has released a new ad that once again distorts Obama's tax plans.

The ad claims Obama will raise taxes on electricity. He hasn't proposed any such tax. Obama does support a cap-and-trade policy that would raise the costs of electricity, but so does McCain.
It falsely claims he would tax home heating oil. Actually, Obama proposed a rebate of up to $1,000 per family to defray increased heating oil costs, funded by what he calls a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

The ad claims that Obama will tax "life savings." In fact, he would increase capital gains and dividends taxes only for couples earning more than $250,000 per year, or singles making $200,000. For the rest, taxes on investments would remain unchanged.

The McCain campaign argues in its documentation for this ad that, whatever Obama says he would do, he will eventually be forced to break his promise and raise taxes more broadly to pay for his promised spending programs. That's an opinion they are certainly entitled to express, and to argue for. But their ad doesn't do that. Instead, it simply presents the McCain camp's opinion as a fact, and it fails to alert viewers that its claims are based on what the campaign thinks might happen in the future.

Analysis
In what has become an ongoing theme, the McCain-Palin campaign has released yet another ad that makes false claims about Barack Obama's tax plan. The ad, which was released on Sept. 18 and which the campaign says will air nationally, claims that Obama will raise income taxes and will tax "life savings, electricity and home heating oil." As we keep saying, Obama says he'll raise income taxes and capital gains taxes only for couples earning more than $250,000 per year or singles making over $200,000. He has proposed no plans to raise taxes on either home heating oil or electricity.


Electric Charges


McCain-Palin 2008 Ad:
"Dome"

"Narrator: When our economy's in crisis, a big government casts a big shadow on us all.

Obama and his liberal Congressional allies want a massive government, billions in spending increases, wasteful pork.

And, we would pay -- painful income taxes, skyrocketing taxes on life savings, electricity and home heating oil.

Can your family afford that?

McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.The ad opens with standard-issue Republican warnings of the economic dangers of big government before proclaiming that Obama and his liberal allies want to bring back "a massive government" complete with billions in spending increases and waste. We are then told that Obama would raise income taxes and would increase taxes on "life savings, electricity and home heating oil."

This isn't the first time the McCain-Palin campaign has claimed that Obama would raise taxes on electricity. The claim is just as false now as it was when it first came up. The campaign bases its charge on a single comment Obama made in an interview with a San Antonio columnist. Obama did in fact say, "What we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas." But, as we said then, the comment is grossly out of context. Obama's remark comes after he was asked whether we ought to tax renewable energy sources. This was not a general call for increasing taxes on coal or natural gas, and Obama certainly does not have any such proposal as part of his public platform.

One could argue that Obama's proposed cap-and-trade program constitutes an indirect tax on electricity. But McCain proposes cap-and-trade, too, and we haven't heard McCain say that he wants to tax your electric bill. These programs are designed to reduce carbon emissions by requiring companies to pay for pollution credits. Since most electricity in the U.S. is generated via coal and natural-gas plants, both carbon-emitting fossil fuels, a cap-and-trade program will result in higher electricity costs.


Overheated Claims


Contrary to the ad's claim, Obama has not proposed raising taxes on home heating oil. In fact, just the opposite. Obama is proposing rebate checks of up to $500 per individual or $1,000 per family for what he calls an "emergency energy rebate." Obama says the rebate would be large enough that a typical family in a northern state could offset the full increase in home heating costs that have resulted from rising oil prices. Obama plans to fund the rebate through a five-year windfall profits tax on oil companies.

The McCain-Palin campaign counters that a windfall profits tax on oil companies will raise the cost of heating oil. The campaign points to a Washington Post editorial which charges that the cost of the five-year tax:

Washington Post (Aug. 6): would be passed along in forgone investment in new production, lower dividends for pension funds and other shareholders, and higher prices at the pump – thus socking it to the consumers whom the plan is supposed to help.

This is a fairly standard view in economics. Corporations don't really pay taxes. Any taxes levied on a corporation are passed along to one of three places: shareholders, in the form of smaller dividends on their investments; employees, in the form of lower wages; and consumers, in the form of higher prices. The McCain-Palin campaign's argument is that increasing taxes on oil companies amounts to increasing the price of heating oil and that that increase really is just a tax being levied on home heating oil. But the tax could also fall mainly on the stockholders of the oil companies, in the form of reduced after-tax profits, dividends and stock prices. That is actually how both the Congressional Budget Office and the independent, nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center allocate the benefits of tax changes on corporations.

We'll leave it to you to decide whether or not a windfall profits tax on oil companies makes economic sense. But it is misleading to describe Obama's view as a tax on home heating oil when Obama is actually proposing a rebate for home heating costs and a tax increase for oil companies.


Life Savings


The ad's claim that Obama will raise taxes on your "life savings" is only true if you're an individual making more than $200,000 (or a couple earning more than $250,000) and paying capital gains and dividend taxes. (We've said this many times now.) The "ad facts" that the McCain campaign released to reporters state very prominently that "Barack Obama would raise capital gains and dividend taxes" and that 26.7 million Americans received capital gains income while 31.5 million received dividend income. That's all true. But the very article that the campaign cites to support its claim also says quite clearly that Obama will raise capital gains and dividend taxes only on couples making more than $250,000 per year. We'd also note that more than 80 percent of all capital gains income in 2006 went to those earning more than $200,000 a year. See our Ask FactCheck on the subject for more.


McCain's Magic 8 Ball


The ad says sweepingly that "we would pay" the increased taxes, even though what Obama has proposed would produce tax cuts, not tax increases, for about 80 percent of all workers and families and about 95 percent of those with children, according to independent analysis by the Tax Policy Center. To justify its claim that "we" would pay, the McCain campaign is making a new argument. In an "ad facts" document, it cites two opinion columns which argue that Obama's new spending proposals would require him to break his pledge, and to raise taxes on couples making less than $250,000 per year. That's a prediction, which the McCain campaign states as fact in its ad. Viewers are given no indication that the ad is based on opinion about what could happen in the future.

It's certainly true that Obama's proposed spending is lower than his projected revenues, and Obama has made no secret of the fact that his plan will not result in balanced budgets for the next four years. According to the Tax Policy Center, without spending cuts elsewhere, Obama's proposals could lead to between $3.6 trillion and $5.9 trillion in new debt over 10 years. The McCain-Palin campaign is certainly entitled to argue that that level of debt is unsustainable and that Obama would therefore have to raise taxes.

That, however, is a dangerous argument. The same Tax Policy Center analysis shows that McCain's proposals would raise the debt by between $5.1 trillion and $7.4 trillion over 10 years. And while McCain has promised to balance the budget by 2013, the Tax Policy Center notes that doing so would require a 25 percent reduction in federal spending. Few economists outside the McCain-Palin campaign think that is a feasible goal. So, by the ad's logic, Obama could just as easily claim that McCain supports a massive tax increase. But if he did he would have no more justification than McCain does for this ad.

In fact, it's impossible to know for certain what either candidate will actually do if elected. Both sides are free to speculate. But unless they possess really good Magic 8 Balls, they are not free to present those speculations as settled facts.

– by Joe Miller

Sources
"Tapping Tired Wells." Washington Post. 6 August 2008.

Herman, Tom, "Your Tax Bill: How McCain, Obama Differ." The Wall Street Journal. 18 June 2008.

"The Lexington Project: Breaking Our Dependence on Foreign Oil." 2008. JohnMcCain.com. 30 July 2008.

S.139: The Climate Stewardship Act of 2003. 9 January 2003. 30 July 2008.

Guerra, Carlos. "Q&A With Sen. Barack Obama." 19 February 2008. The San Antonio News-Express. 30 July 2008.

Burman, Len, et. al. “An Updated Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans: Revised August 15, 2008.” Tax Policy Center, 15 Aug. 2008.

Swift Boat from Hell

Well, we have to hand it to McCain's campaign - they finally found their angle of underhanded attack on Obama combined with a way to scare evangelicals to voting for McCain. All it took was painting Obama as the Antichrist.

Watch then read on:



Read a good analysis at Time.com. The amazingly insidious power of this ad is both that it's tapping an established vein of evangelical Christian pop culture which most of us who would vote Democratic never even heard of. That way, we don't raise objection to the underpinnings of an attack dressed up as another goofy, out-of-step McCain campaign attack ad, and it subliminally connects with that evangelical base who is already nervous about Obama's liberalness, Muslim-ness, or whatever-ness that's being gratitiously sprayed all over the Interwebz.

I would call politics like this the lowest of blows - and serves to galvanize my opposition to the McCain candidacy whereas I was sort of neutral before. He's obviously inherited some of the best GOP handlers out there, and is being bent the same folks who bent Bush (though it took far less with W) to their will over the last 8 years. You want to talk about the Illuminati? Look to the neo-con block of our government. Look to the $25/barrel oil of 2000 vs $150/barrel oil of 2008 and look who owns the stock. Look at the opinions of consumers, squeezed by a rampantly corrupted lending structure and high energy prices, throw their support to a government that will prop up those same corrupt lenders and use their desperation to erode rather than preserve our planet as it teeters at the edge of possible climactic shift. There's are lots of them, they live among us, and they have a plan.

This is why fundamentalism - no matter the faith or cause or excuse - is always wrong.

ALWAYS.

Lou Dobbs is Off His Rocker

So, for those of you who don't know who Lou Dobbs is, he's CNN's chief anti-establishment pundit who has made his career around attacking immigration in the United States. Anyone who drifts even close to allowing "amnesty" to undocumented workers in the United States is righteously flamed by Dobbs. He's a one-issue commentator, but that doesn't stop him from beating that drum over and over and OVER again.

So in today's Dobb's screed, he stated that "George W. Bush is a one-world neo-liberal." WTF? The man who chose unilateral action over UN approval; the man who came to define "neo-CON", is now both one world and neo-liberal? But of course, it comes down to one issue:

"President Bush has pressed hard for the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the first step toward a North American Union that will threaten our sovereignty. This administration has permitted American businesses to hire illegal aliens, encouraged the invasion of 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and has given Mexico and corporate America dominion over our borders and our immigration policy" and;

"A vote is likely in the weeks ahead, and this Democratic-controlled Senate is the same institution whose leadership sought passage of the disastrous comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation."

Sure, I hate the president just as much as Dobbs (or the next guy) but does it always have to be about assaults on our sovreignty? We are a nation of immigrants, and while I favor clarifying and cleaning up immigration law, I don't think dedicating all our law resources to kicking any undocumented worker out of the States is addressing the root cause or going to fix the problem. Punish companies who exploit undocumented laborers, offer an path to citizenship for undocumented workers (because that will secure rights for them and ensure the tax money is coming in for the gov't - good for everyone) and most importantly ABANDON THE XENOPHOBIC, ISOLATIONIST MENTALITY IN THE FACE OF GLOBALISM that characterizes both the Bush adminsistration and Dobbs himself.

Welcome to the twenty-first century Lou.

Hey Folks

In case you've been wondering where the hell I went (at least, the few of you that aren't Spycraft fans already), I've spend the last month and a half building up the new Crafty Games website. I'm pretty happy with it, but it's eaten my brain and blogging time alive. Now that we've been up for about 2 weeks, things are starting to calm down and hopefully i can get back on the blogging track. And the reason I came back...insanity in the White House.

First up - President 'defends constitution' by refusing to follow constitutional law. Seriously, WTF? Nation's top executive saying, 'nah, I don't think I want to follow the law today." Sounds like Saddam to me - oh wait, Saddam followed the law in his country. The only strategy I can figure is they know they can delay the inevitable exposure of their crimes by forcing all requests through the courts. If they get lucky, maybe the newly hand-selected Supreme Court will find for its master, thus chaing the Constitution forever.

Next up - welcome to Planet Cheney, population 1. Vice president argues he is not part of the executive branch. ...words escape me. Let's do a little research, shall we?

Article Two of the US Constitution states:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Of course, it also states:

The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Food for thought. Treason is not directly visible, but bribery (Haliburton conflit of interests) and plenty of other high crimes (torture, domestic spying, violation of habaeus corpus rights, illegal wars) and misdemeanors too numerous to count are day to day occurances in the White House.

I'll leave this one to John Stewart:



And this is just funny/depressing/scathing.