Rick Davis is tired of people implying that he's somehow trying to further the notion that 'Barack Obama is just here for the white women.'

"His campaign actively has been feeding to journalists, all night last night and all day today, the notion that somehow something that we have done in our campaign — which I could not identify to you today — somehow had racial overtones," he said, in an apparent reference to the claim — seen on liberal blogs — that pairing Obama with two oversexed young white women carried a racial edge.

Rick Davis' complete disbelief over the implied racial implication of the ad is not shared by William Barron Hilton, billionaire benefactor of the Republican party and grandfather of implied-Obama-lust-object Paris Hilton. He is, in fact, rather upset:

I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton’s grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

That's our Walnuts!

Plead for me, Lanny.

In the final analysis, to repeat, this is Sen. Obama's personal and political decision and he must be comfortable with the choice. I respect that. I honor that. These are my best arguments that it is in his political interest and his future administration's interest to have Hillary Clinton by his side on the ticket as vice president -- as a cheerleader and articulate supporter, as a candid adviser, and as a friend inside the White House with eight years of frontline experience of what it's like.

It's not that Tim Kaine--who eats the souls of the unborn--or Evan Bayh--who is a deranged sex criminal--would be bad Vice Presidents. It's just that Hillary would be better than all of them, because, well, whatever. Now don't worry, I'm just going to put my hand on your thigh, like this.

Let Lanny do his thing.

Wouldn't it be ironic if he ended up in Ted Stevens Federal Penitentiary?

From May 1999 to August 2007, prosecutors said Stevens concealed "his continuing receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of things of value from a private corporation." The indictment released Tuesday said the items included: home improvements to his vacation home in Alaska, including a new first floor, garage, wraparound deck, plumbing, electrical wiring; as well as car exchanges, a Viking gas grill, furniture and tools.

Stevens has since pleaded 'not guilty'. And everybody totally believes him, which is why they're desperately giving away the dirty, dirty money he's contributed to them.

There's dignity and honor to reporting. I mean, real reporting--interviews, source cultivation, research--that informs readers, and which leads to well-reasoned analysis. I love reporting,
and find it to be an addicting habit; not unlike hard drugs or public exposure.

Which makes it hard to write here, as there's no actual reporting going on. Thus, I've edited the layout slightly to allow for bigger pictures and shorter entries, the majority of which will feature hallowed leaders of our nation looking senile. For instance, in the above picture, John McCain looks like an unhappy turtle.

Thankfully, it's almost a given that running for national office seems to ensure that you look kind of ridiculous, so there will be no lack of content. Now, I'm going to go back to reading The Best of IF Stone. And to cry a little bit.

“John McCain is a great man.”

The speaker’s name was Bill Metzger, a retired captain dressed in a dowdy blue suit, his voice carrying over the crowd sternly. He knew John McCain was a great man because he had been a POW alongside him in Hanoi. He knew because, even as they both suffered daily from untreated injuries, John McCain had given up his chance for early release.

“John McCain has been tested. John McCain passed the test. I know, I was there.”

Up to this moment, as roughly fifty people gathered this morning in the Remembrance Garden outside of Benaroya Hall, for the kick-off rally of Washington Veterans for John McCain, Metzger had the crowd in the palm of his hand. It was the kind of ‘band of brothers’ rhapsodizing that drives grown men to tears.

And then he went off message.

John McCain running against Barack Obama was like “Ronald Reagan running against Fidel Castro.”

Oh well.

This event was held on the first day of ugly weather in recent memory and emceed by another member of the steering committee for Washington Veterans for McCain, former Navy captain Doug Roulstone. Roulstone was picked in 2006 to run against Congressman Rick Larsen and had been joined on the campaign trail by Dick Cheney. It went about as well for him as you’d expect.

Now Roulstone was declaring that this was “the first skirmish in a war! Become part of this McCain army!”

It brought cheers from a crowd that was a mixed bag of older veterans and younger servicemen. Shout-outs to McChord Airforce Base and Fort Lewis were big applause lines. Roulstone informed me that he intended to use that reservoir of veterans to flip Washington to McCain. “There are 640,000 veterans... There’s this huge demographic of military people potentially supporting McCain. We’re out here to build up that coalition.”

All of this (aside from the less-than-obvious parallels between Senator Obama and Fidel Castro) stayed close to the patriotic script, obviously passed down from McCain headquarters.



The real prize, for me, was an interview I got with a former Clinton supporter whose only problem with Barack Obama is “his lack of a clue.”

Her name is Brandy Fraser—“No ‘i’ and no ‘z’!”—and she had been waving a sign reading “Democrats for McCain” enthusiastically throughout the entire event. She smiled broadly, her eyebrows drawn on thickly.

“A lot of Hillary supporters cannot, in good conscience, support Obama,” Fraser told me, a small crowd of McCain supporters circling us. She was a “lifelong Democrat,” though admitted that she’d occasionally cross over to vote for a Republican. “I’m a candidate voter.”

The journey of Brandy Fraser started in the caucus in her native Monroe, where she had made the decision that she would never support Barack Obama for the presidency. She wouldn’t go into specifics, but his policies were, across the board, a turn-off for her. His books frightened her, hearing them read in his own voice frightened her more.

“I grew up in the Vietnam-era,” she explained. Wait, what?

Distinctly aware of the people listening in on our conversation, I asked her if she was pro-choice, and if she was aware that John McCain had said he would appoint judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“I do have an issue with that. And I am willing to take that risk, for the benefit of the country on all the other issues… My choice is to look at the bigger picture.”

That bigger picture now encompasses voting for Dino Rossi as well, as Fraser said she wouldn't vote for Gregoire, "If she was the only one running."

The Democrats apparently have quite a hill to climb if they want Brandy Fraser's vote back.

Campaign Lackey: "Senator, the latest polling from Montana looks disastrous! What should we do?"

(Pause. A look of consternation passes Senator McCain's face. His eyes suddenly come alive. Is he going to call someone a cunt?)

J Mac: "I'll tell you what we're gonna do... we're going to Mexico! Everybody in the plane! Find me Lieberman!"

Campaign Lackey: "But sir, why?!"

J Mac: "Don't you question me, you fuck! This campaign will be won in Mexico! YEEHAW!"

(Senator McCain draws six-shooters, dancing wildly while firing into the air.)


His polling aggregates are at the point of collapse, and his opponent is touring his base states. What the fuck is he doing in Mexico City?

Ralph "Thug Lordz" Nader wants to take Barack Obama back to the hood, and remind him that you can get shot just for breath'n.

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said. "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards."

The problem is, Obama has laid out his stance on urban poverty. While it comes in the same form as most campaign policy proposals (heavy on the one sentence pitch, light on the details), it's still there, where a presumably literate Ralph Nader could read it.

But when you came up from the gutter like Ralph Nader--or, watched it on The Wire like Ralph Nader--the only thing that matters is credibility. Ralph Nader: a new spokesman for black people everywhere.

The 527s—those frisky, often fact-free independent campaigns that brought us the tragic verb 'swift-boated'—appear to be coming undone at high speed, and for two very different reasons. On the left, Senator Obama is cutting off their traditional sources of funding, hoping to direct his campaign's message down to the syllable. On the right is Senator McCain:

The truth is that, less than five months before Election Day, there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group.

Conversations with more than a dozen Republican strategists find near unanimity in the belief that, at some point, there will be a real third-party effort aimed at Obama.

But not one knows who will run it, who will pay for it, what shape it will eventually take or when such a group may form.

Jonathan Martin's write-up focuses big on a couple of reasons why John McCain doesn't seem to be winning the affections of those who would target Obama.

The first appears to be John McCain's open derision of independent political organizations, even those that aired ads on purely positive terms for him during his primary campaign. Early in the process, when Romneys and Giulianis walked the earth, McCain had called for outlaw 527s in their entirety, and made it known that he wouldn’t tolerate them working on his behalf. While his position has softened, nothing says, 'Advocate for me!' like knowing that the man you're making ads for thinks you're a kind of mean, ethically-challenged reptile that should be thrown in prison.

The other missing cog is Senator Clinton: They really, really wanted to run against Hillary.

“We spent 18 months and millions of dollars making Hillary: The Movie," laments David Bossie, head of Citizens United and a longtime Clinton tormentor. “We’re incredibly proud, but the problem is the film has no relevance anymore.”

I bet Hillary: The Movie would have been pretty fantastic. Bossie says he intends to make an Obama film featuring such beloved cast members as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but Obama doesn't have the same vintage appeal to the id of the conservative right.

How many bodies are in Arkansas landfills because of Barack Obama’s clandestine cocaine-smuggling ring? My guess would be considerably less than those deposited by the Clinton family. And how do you make a film out of that?

Women-hating extremist Barack Obama (and his band of fellow women-hating staffers) strikes again, this time during feminism-activist John McCain's conference call regarding campaign finance. You see, Obama's spokesman tried to interrupt the call and state Obama's position, and... forget it. Just read the quote, and die a little inside:

UPDATE: [McCain Communications Director] Hazelbaker writes in to add an even tougher shot at Burton's gambit, raising the gender card.

"This type of boys-club bullying embodies an arrogance better suited for a frat house than a serious campaign about serious issues," she says.

The context is kind of hard to explain: Somewhere down the hideous rabbit-hole of this campaign season, the conventional wisdom became that the best way to disseminate information to the press was via endless rounds of conference calls. Which is perfect, in a 'most-of-the-campaign-workers-already-seem-to-be-disembodied-voices-of-malice' sense.

So, an Obama staffer attempts to interrupt McCain's conference call, and the most disgusting, lurid kind of sexism seeps through. The kind of sexism directed from one man to another, on an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with either party's gender. Also, it's like a fraternity, in that fraternities have given up on GHB and moved into the more nuanced field of disrupting political phone calls.

Am I right, ladies?

A quiet note for those of a political persuasion: obsessions over subjects like Obama's hiring of former Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis-Doyle within the media are because we're in a lull in real campaign news, and because that's the incestuous world that they live in.

Unless you're being paid to do so, if you've spent ten minutes thinking about what the implications of her hire are, get a hobby. Have you tried dropping a weight on your genitals?

I hear it's fantastic.

The 'Top Two' primary is to third party activists what The Rapture is to vengeance-enthused Evangelicals.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Ryan. The Paulbearers know some things that you obviously don't, because they are very close to taking over the GOP in quite a few Legislative Districts and counties in this state, including King and Pierce Counties.

How do I know this? I won't tell you. Pretend that you're a reporter and do some digging.

Here's a hint: It has something to do with the Top Two primary.

Paulbearers. This fucking country.

The recent NBC poll on Hispanic preference for the next president isn't just interesting for the fact that a major piece of conventional wisdom appears to have been based on mind-blowingly inane supposition—it's also interesting for the fact that the NBC political team is using the kind of language that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to continue using Obama's Hispanic problem as a talking point and retain any kind of credibility.

In addition to our recent NBC/WSJ poll, which showed Hispanics breaking for Obama 62%-28%, a new survey of 800 Latino voters from 21 states finds that 60% of them plan to vote for Obama versus 23% for McCain. That is down considerably from the 40%-plus Bush received in 2004. It’s no longer fair to say that Obama has a problem with Latino voters; McCain does. This was a case of conventional wisdom that was never based on fact, just semi-informed speculation based on primary exit polling and bad stereotypes of Latinos.

Polling is a really shoddy way to make a fact-based argument, unless the polling indicates a seismic 37% gap between two candidates. In which case, it is probably safe to say that Hispanic voters favored Clinton over Obama, but overwhelmingly favor Obama over McCain.

It's also worth noting that in a post-Russert world, this is another Caveman Dunk for Chuck Todd's NBC political unit, who have been ripping the still-beating heart out of dumb, fact-free narratives for almost the entirety of primary season.

Give the man the job.

Unsuccessful runs for the presidency—and especially campaigns that show that faint glimmer of success, only to be stomped on by the realities of the process—seem to adhere to a kind of ghoulish, ‘high school yearbook signing’ orthodoxy. Everyone promises that this is only the beginning of a lifetime friendship, and then they form a political action committee, and then they slowly cease having any relevance in your life.

It would appear that Ron Paul wants to sign your yearbook.

The Revolution was officially suspended last Friday night, and has now contorted itself into The Campaign for Liberty, which will carry forth the Paul message of limited government, airships, and tearing down the elaborate Rothschild-created banking structures that secretly run our lives from cradle-to-grave.

Here are some of the choicer ‘grassroots’ moments from their “Strategy” section:

• Encouraging the formation of discussion groups and book clubs at the local level to help people learn more about our ideas.

• Establishing a speakers bureau to give presentations around the country about the great principles we champion.

• Developing materials for homeschooling families, to help them educate their children in history, sound economics, and related fields.

Obviously, what doomed fellow Texan Ross Perot’s independent efforts to reshape the American electorate was his unwillingness to declare to his followers that it was finally time to yank their children out of school and give them a Perot-based education on the cruel realities of history and economics.

To digress slightly, there is a precedent for what Paul is hoping to do here: you don’t need to look any further than Howard Dean’s perch as Chairman of the Democratic Party to see that movement-based politics, if applied with enough enticements for the existing power structure, can actually change things.

But the problem is, Paul doesn’t want control of something as minor as the leadership of some National Committee. He wants to tear down the party and reshape it into a cross between an oddly noble brand of Jeffersonian literalism and shrill pamphleteering for backwoods militia groups. And unlike Dean, the Revolution isn't interested in incremental change. Its brand of politics is as unpalatable to the Republican Party as the Green Party's is to the Democrats.

When you combine that with Paul’s decision to toss out his real leverage, which would have been a third party run for the presidency… well, it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future prospects of the Revolution. Which must be of some relief to the Rothschild-Rockefeller banking axis, and a cruel arrow to the heart of the the nascent zeppelin industry.

It's an important time in every young journalists life when he's told by a member of the 9/11 Truth Movement that maybe he should just go work for FOX NEWS!!!!

Not a bad start, Ryan, if your goal is to work for Fox news.
You have to always push the masses further to the right by selecting the most progressive political figures and making them appear crazy. Carefully select images and soundbites that plant this message in the minds of the viewers. Make sure to grossly exaggerate and place out of context anything that supports your view.

For instance, when McKinney tried to sidestep a metal detector (as congress is legally allowed to do) and is stopped and felt up by a police officer, make it sound like she "punches people who get in her way".

When she questions an official conspiracy story and calls for a more thorough investigation of 9/11, just say she thinks "you'll find Dick Cheney at the bottom of 9/11".

When she makes the personal observation "Gore's 'Negro Tolerance Level' has never been too high." in response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of 250 black Secret Service Agents who alleged that they have been systematically discriminated against and a report that a quota was placed on the number of black Secret Service officers who would protect Vice President Gore, just say she "believes that Al Gore has a deep-seated hatred for the black race."

If you ever consider becoming a real journalist you might consider actually reading the sources of rumors you post about and perhaps expanding your sources beyond mainstream corporate American media such as the NYT and "Slate". Perhaps balance it out with foreign and independant sources for different points of views which can help you be a little more objective and intelligent in your own reporting.

My apologies to congresswoman McKinney. 9/11 might well have been a conspiracy, Al Gore really does cringe at the sight of black people, and the correct posture when confronted by the Capitol police is disbelief over them even making eye contact with you, and then violence.

Also, Slate? Run directly from the White House. From Dick Cheney's fucking brain, man.

(Maybe just Mickey Kaus.)

For weird reasons of fate and career posturing, this publication is going to be slowly resuscitated, run through the paces, and eventually unleashed like a dumb, angry animal...

... again.

And no, this time I'm not allowed to fall off the wagon and do something more interesting, as a great deal of the content here will be syndicated from sources which will be paying me.

In short: I have a little internet cage, from which I will pace back and forth, developing nervous disorders before your eyes. As for you? You've got a fantastic perch from which to watch personal desperation and ribald political commentary in equal measure. Soak it in, baby.

Now, with that out of the way, let's snort some adderall and get started!

The eXile—the much hated/beloved Moscow biweekly that launched the career of Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi and continued to publish the works of Russian dissident author Eduard Limonov well after it had become dangerous to do so—has reached its fatal end with the censorship authorities in the new Medvedev government.

From the English language daily The Moscow Times:

Mark Ames, editor and founder of The eXile, was scheduled to meet Thursday with inspectors from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, he said by telephone Wednesday...

Ames said he did not know which articles were of interest to the inspectors, but he suggested that one possibility were columns by Eduard Limonov, founder of the banned National Bolshevik Party and a vehement Kremlin foe.

He conceded that many other eXile editions could have riled the authorities.

The eXile, which publishes Gonzo-style journalism on topics such as drugs, prostitution and Moscow nightlife side-by-side with political analysis, has often pushed the limits of decency -- not to mention libel law.

The speculation was later confirmed by Mark Ames himself in Radar—wherein he notes the special joys of running a collapsed business venture co-owned by a member of the notoriously unkind world of Russian organized crime.

It's not to say that The eXile was always an insightful or even a particularly well written paper; when Taibbi departed for life back in America, Ames often covered for a shortage of ideas with the laundry list of things he'd inject into himself to better enjoy listening to Husker Du, or his successful transactions with Moscow’s prostitutes. But quality dips aside, The eXile was an important document chronicling the descent of Russia from Yeltsin's wild, lawless kleptocracy to Putin's new police state. They called 'bullshit!' loudly and earnestly on America's aimless privatization plan for the post-Soviet Russian state, and when the going got rough, they settled a dispute with New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines by hitting him in the face with a horse semen pie.

They were occasionally demeaning and stupid, but they were never dull—and that has to count for something in the grand scheme of media. The paper is holding a fundraiser to help get their website infrastructure hosted somewhere off of Russian soil, and probably to keep Ames from being murdered by his business partners.

[As originally published for The Stranger]

While this weekend may have officially ended Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, for some the battle still rages. The time invested was too long, the emotional toll was too high, the hours of hard drugs and internet message-board rage too pure: nothing can make them cast a ballot for a woman-hating fanatic like Barack Obama.

Women are expected to only care about abortion - not their self respect.

The cries for “Unity” are heard in abundance, in full shout, from those that sowed the seeds of division. However, the seeds of division have borne a bumper crop this year.

Democrats like Obama/Dean/Brazille/Pelosi think they can wave the red flag of ‘Supreme Court’ or ‘Abortion’ and women will come running to the aid of the Democratic? Party and forget the misogyny Obama/Dean/Brazille/Pelosi never spoke against while Hillary and her supporters were belittled and denigrated.

But, why McCain as a protest candidate? If, as many are claiming, the misogyny of the Obama campaign was driving them to vote Republican… wouldn’t it be kind of a hypocritical back flip to vote for a hardened opponent of women’s reproductive rights? A guy who left his previous wife in the midst of crippling medical problems, and who handed out the following impromptu fashion advice to his present wife during his first run for the Senate in 1992:

"At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Who knows, maybe her makeup was really badly put on that day. Or maybe Senator McCain was just having a really bad day. But honestly, isn’t it a little discomforting to know that your protest vote is going to a guy who doesn’t seem to respect women all that much? Or, at all?

Which brings me to a kind of suggestion for a Grand Compromise: why not vote third party? Specifically, why not vote for Cynthia McKinney? You’ve already made the decision that you want to put John McCain in the White House, but why not do so carrying the metaphorical trash bag of righteous indignation that voting for the Green Party candidate grants you?

Cynthia McKinney isn’t some humorless leftist like Ralph Nader or Dennis Kucinich, were you know that what they’re saying is probably the right answer, but the hopelessness of the political reality makes it come across as a certain shade of obtuse and sad.

McKinney punches people who get in her way.

McKinney believes firmly that when you cut away the conspiracy, you’ll find Dick Cheney at the bottom of 9/11.

McKinney believes that Al Gore has a deep-seated hatred for the black race.

Does she have the rhetorical flair of a Ron Paul Revolution? Of course she doesn’t, but you can’t expect every political outsider to develop a well-funded cult around them with a flair for Depression-era political theater. What Cynthia McKinney offers is crazy. Crazy in bulk. Crazy in oil tanker-like excess.

The kind of crazy you can believe in. The kind of crazy that justifies a protest vote against Barack Obama.

What Slate's new 'Hillary Deathwatch' feature lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in being a mercilessly accurate portrayal of the gorgon in her last days on the presidential stage.

To start off, we're putting her odds at a generous 12 percent. (Last week, a Clinton campaign official gave her one-in-10 odds.) At the moment, polls indicate that Obama has survived the Jeremiah Wright flap (for now). Clinton's Bosnia blunder has metastasized from a headache into a five-day circus. Bill Richardson finally climbed down from his fence onto Obama's side. And a Michigan court yesterday deemed the state's Jan. 15 primary unconstitutional and declined to order a revote, effectively smothering the last glimmer of hope for a deus ex Michigana bailout. Meanwhile, a new poll puts her favorability rating at 37 percent—its lowest since March 2001

Sadly, we may never know what her 'Solution for America' really was, though it seems a kind of inarguable certainty that some hapless demographic was going to be sluiced through merciless juicing machines: turning them into a kind of high-nutrition slurry that could be then bought for unreasonable amounts of money at your local Whole Foods.

Who am I kidding? She's a woman who looks for answers along the path of least resistance, and the Victims of the Juicing would almost certainly be the same 65-year olds who she relies on as her electoral shock troops.

Wait, what?

Paul Krugman's new NYT column: Everything about this election is like 1992 exactly, except things that are not.

It’s starting to feel a bit like 1992 again. A Bush is in the White House, the economy is a mess, and there’s a candidate who, in the view of a number of observers, is running on a message of hope, of moving past partisan differences, that resembles Bill Clinton’s campaign 16 years ago.

Now, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which had a strong streak of populism, beginning with a speech in which Mr. Clinton described the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed.” Still, to the extent that Barack Obama 2008 does sound like Bill Clinton 1992, here’s my question: Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?

Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.

And that sad tale? Bill Clinton, who was Barack Obama except in 1992 and not black, was elected as a beloved and talismanic figure, then clubbed/skinned like a baby seal by right wing demagogues because, well, Vote For Hillary, that's why, fucker.

As eminent scholar Jim Newell of Wonkette notes, this is way, way dumber than Bill Kristol's Times op-ed. That takes a special level of print media daring too, because Kristol is cavorting in the whole South Carolina racial issues thing this week.