I Told You So

First off I would like to commend the BBC for a spot on bit of journalistic excellence.  It seems that Mikheil Saakashvili is indeed culpable in a spat of war crimes and that indeed it was him and not the Russians who were engaged in Genocide

The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia’s supporters in the West.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was “reckless”.

He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi.

The evidence was gathered by the BBC on the first unrestricted visit to South Ossetia by a foreign news organisation since the conflict.

Georgia’s attempt to re-conquer the territory triggered a Russian invasion and the most serious crisis in relations between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War.

They went on firing all the next day without stopping. At some point there was a pause, and we saw Georgian soldiers going along the street in their Nato uniforms Taya Sitnik

And Georgians themselves have suffered. We confirmed the systematic destruction of former Georgian villages inside South Ossetia.

Some homes appear to have been not just burned by Ossetians, but also bulldozed by the territory’s Russian-backed authorities.

The war began when Georgia launched artillery attacks on targets in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, at about 2330 on 7 August 2008.

Georgia said at the time that it was responding to increasing attacks on its own villages by South Ossetia militia, although it later said its action was provoked by an earlier Russian invasion.

. . . .

The Russian prosecutor’s office is investigating more than 300 possible cases of civilians killed by the Georgian military.

Some of those may be Ossetian paramilitaries, but Human Rights Watch believes the figure of 300-400 civilians is a “useful starting point”.

That would represent more than 1% of the population of Tskhinvali – the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in London.

Find Out More Listen to File On 4, Radio 4 Tuesday 28 October 2008 2000 GMT, repeated Sunday 2 November 1700 GMT Or catch up at Radio 4’s Listen Again site Listen to Assignment on BBC World Service Assignment Tim Whewell meets a mother stricken with grief after the death of her son in South Ossetia Newsnight

Allison Gill, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said: “We’re very concerned at the use of indiscriminate force by the Georgian military in Tskhinvali.

“Tskhinvali is a densely populated city and as such military action needs to be very careful that it doesn’t endanger civilians.”

“We know that in the early stages there were tank attacks and Grad rockets used by Georgian forces,” she added.

“Grad rockets cannot be used in densely populated areas because they cannot be precisely targeted, and as such they are inherently indiscriminate.

“Our researchers were on the ground in Tskhinvali as early as 12 August.

“And we gained evidence and witness testimony of Grad rocket attacks and tank attacks on apartment buildings, including tank attacks that shot at the basement level.

“And basements are typically areas where civilians will hide for their own protection.

“So all of this points to the misuse, the inappropriate use of force by Georgia against civilian targets,” according to Alison Gill.

Human Rights Watch will talk only of the “possible” deliberate targeting by Georgian forces of individual civilians, a still more serious charge, though some Ossetians the BBC spoke to in Tskhinvali claim to have witnessed such cases.

Wreckage

Marina Kochieva, a doctor at Tskhinvali’s main hospital, says she herself was targeted by a Georgian tank as she and three relatives were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She says the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, forcing them to crash into a ditch.

The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground.

She showed the BBC the burnt-out wreckage of the car on the town’s ring-road, riddled with bullet holes and with a much larger hole, apparently from a tank round, in the front passenger door.

Ms Kochieva says a nurse from her hospital was killed while fleeing Tskhinvali in similar circumstances.

She says she counted 18 burnt-out cars on the ring-road on 13 August, at the end of the war, suggesting there may have been more casualties.

Many Tskhinvali buildings were damaged during the conflict

Asked if, at night, Georgian soldiers might not have suspected her car of carrying Ossetian fighters, Ms Kochieva said: “Fighters wouldn’t have gone away from town, they would have gone towards town. We were escaping like other refugees.

“The Georgians knew this was the ‘Road of Life’ for Ossetians. They were sitting here waiting to kill us,” she said.

Georgia’s Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili told the BBC, “I can firmly say that the Georgian military, on intention, never attacked directly any civilian object.

“On the surface, the damage to some of the houses in Tskhinvali that can be observed might lead to this conclusion. But to see if some is damage inflicted by direct targeting, for that an in-depth military assessment needs to be done.

“I think the best response is a fully-fledged independent, impartial international inquiry into the issue,” she added.

Her British counterpart David Miliband, who visited Georgia immediately after the war to show solidarity with its government, said he took the allegations of war crimes “extremely seriously” and had raised them “at the highest level” in Tbilisi.

Apparently hardening his language towards Georgia, he called its actions “reckless”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7692751.stm

Keep this in mind when you vote as McCain took one million dollars from the Saakashvili government and keep in mind that this purchased his support for Georgia’s genocidal aggression.

Friday Funnies

A bit of humor to get you ready for the Weekend

In our first clip we find out who is to blame for leaving McCain on his campaign bus all alone

Ironically the press secretary in the Onion’s parody is more direct than any of our recent press secretaries

How messed up is our current political system? Well children are funding attack ads

Trust me this one’s truer than you want to admit.

Bert, the real enemy of freedom and democracy

and finally a tribute to the Miami Dolphins:

Go Bills

John McCain and Barack Obama, Where Were They Born?

A lot of GOPers are giddy over the ever weakening prospect that Barack Obama does not meet the citizenship requirements for the American presidency. To support their claim they suggest that Obama’s father is Kenyan, that he has siblings in Kenya, and that he will not release his birth certificate for public scrutiny. When Obama produced evidence to prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he is an American citizen by birth, the dullards in the GOP hardliner camp said that this document was clearly a forgery. Fortunately, as they always do, FactCheck.Org came through with the final verdict in this matter. Here is the full findings of FactCheck:

Since we first wrote about Obama’s birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?

Doocy: What do you mean they have a “false birth certificate” on their Web site?

Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.

Doocy: Well, couldn’t it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?

Corsi: No, it’s a — there’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

Corsi isn’t the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

• The birth certificate doesn’t have a raised seal.
• It isn’t signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
  
• In the zoomed-in view, there’s a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say “2007,” but the document wasn’t released until 2008.
• The document is a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth.”
  

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller

Alvin T. Onaka’s signature stamp

The raised seal

Blowup of text

You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven’t been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.

The document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.

We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that’s when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and “all the records we could get our hands on” according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn’t release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama’s citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: “[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant for the outside world.” The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 – 010641.

Blowup of certificate number

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama’s information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn’t have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible “scenario” without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.

We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn’t meet the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen.”

We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.”

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama’s birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama “likely” was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn’t tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama’s father’s race listed as “African”? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father’s race and mother’s race are supplied by the parents, and that “we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be.” We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as “African.” It’s certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.

When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said “The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised.” He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for “all reasonable purposes.”

–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller

Sources

United States Department of State. “Application for a U.S. Passport.” Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

State of Hawaii Department of Health. “Request for Certified Copy of Birth Record.” Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

Hollyfield, Amy. “Obama’s Birth Certificate: Final Chapter.” Politifact.com. 27 Jun. 2008.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Regardless of the insipid hopes of the most banal members of the GOP elite -including Pat Robertson, Carl Rove, and Trailer Park Trash across the land- Barack Obama is an American citizen by birth, but what about John Sydney McCain?  The All American grumpy old white guy running for the GOP.  Well, his citizenship is at least as questionable as Obama.  McCain, you see, was born in the Panama Canal Zone which -although at the time was an American territory- is not a part of the United States.  According to the New York Times:

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

Mr. McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that Mr. McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

But given mounting interest, the campaign recently asked Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general now advising Mr. McCain, to prepare a detailed legal analysis. “I don’t have much doubt about it,” said Mr. Olson, who added, though, that he still needed to finish his research.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Mr. McCain’s closest allies, said it would be incomprehensible to him if the son of a military member born in a military station could not run for president.

“He was posted there on orders from the United States government,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. McCain’s father. “If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment.”

The phrase “natural born” was in early drafts of the Constitution. Scholars say notes of the Constitutional Convention give away little of the intent of the framers. Its origin may be traced to a letter from John Jay to George Washington, with Jay suggesting that to prevent foreigners from becoming commander in chief, the Constitution needed to “declare expressly” that only a natural-born citizen could be president.

Ms. Duggin and others who have explored the arcane subject in depth say legal argument and basic fairness may indeed be on the side of Mr. McCain, a longtime member of Congress from Arizona. But multiple experts and scholarly reviews say the issue has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.

Ms. Duggin favors a constitutional amendment to settle the matter. Others have called on Congress to guarantee that Americans born outside the national boundaries can legitimately see themselves as potential contenders for the Oval Office.

“They ought to have the same rights,” said Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma who in 2004 introduced legislation that would have established that children born abroad to American citizens could harbor presidential ambitions without a legal cloud over their hopes. “There is some ambiguity because there has never been a court case on what ‘natural-born citizen’ means.”

Mr. McCain’s situation is different from those of the current governors of California and Michigan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer M. Granholm, who were born in other countries and were first citizens of those nations, rendering them naturalized Americans ineligible under current interpretations. The conflict that could conceivably ensnare Mr. McCain goes more to the interpretation of “natural born” when weighed against intent and decades of immigration law.

Mr. McCain is not the first person to find himself in these circumstances. The last Arizona Republican to be a presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, faced the issue. He was born in the Arizona territory in 1909, three years before it became a state. But Goldwater did not win, and the view at the time was that since he was born in a continental territory that later became a state, he probably met the standard.

It also surfaced in the 1968 candidacy of George Romney, who was born in Mexico, but again was not tested. The former Connecticut politician Lowell P. Weicker Jr., born in Paris, sought a legal analysis when considering the presidency, an aide said, and was assured he was eligible. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was once viewed as a potential successor to his father, but was seen by some as ineligible since he had been born on Campobello Island in Canada. The 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, whose birthplace is Vermont, was rumored to have actually been born in Canada, prompting some to question his eligibility.

Quickly recognizing confusion over the evolving nature of citizenship, the First Congress in 1790 passed a measure that did define children of citizens “born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born.” But that law is still seen as potentially unconstitutional and was overtaken by subsequent legislation that omitted the “natural-born” phrase.

Mr. McCain’s citizenship was established by statutes covering the offspring of Americans abroad and laws specific to the Canal Zone as Congress realized that Americans would be living and working in the area for extended periods. But whether he qualifies as natural-born has been a topic of Internet buzz for months, with some declaring him ineligible while others assert that he meets all the basic constitutional qualifications — a natural-born citizen at least 35 years of age with 14 years of residence.

“I don’t think he has any problem whatsoever,” said Mr. Nickles, a McCain supporter. “But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if somebody is going to try to make an issue out of it. If it goes to court, I think he will win.”

Lawyers who have examined the topic say there is not just confusion about the provision itself, but uncertainty about who would have the legal standing to challenge a candidate on such grounds, what form a challenge could take and whether it would have to wait until after the election or could be made at any time.

In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be “unpredictable and unsatisfactory.”

“If I were on the Supreme Court, I would decide for John McCain,” Ms. Pryor said in a recent interview. “But it is certainly not a frivolous issue.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/politics/28mccain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In my personal opinion Obama, by virtue of his Hawaiin birth certificatem and McCain, by virtue of being born on a United States Military Base to parents who were in the service of the United States government, both meet the citizenship qualifications required of them in the constitution.  However, if you want to make an argument out of it then it would appear that McCain would have a much rougher time proving his citizenship by birth than Obama would.  After all Obama has a birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii -and contrary to the bizaare apocalyptic ramblings of Pat Robertson he has been quite open regarding his birth certificate- whereas McCain has a Panamanian registration.

Hey Saakashvili, South Ossetia is a Sovereign Country

Waaah, Waaaah, Waaaah, in case you are wondering those whining sounds are the words of Mikheil American Neocon Puppet Saakashvili regarding Russia’s latest dealings with South Ossetia. Now, Mr. Saakashvili South Ossetia is a sovereign state -oh sure your handlers in DC have not yet recognized South Ossetia’s independence, but Moscow and many other capitals have- and you need to stay out of their affairs. So Russia has placed 2000 troops in a sovereign state who have requested Russian support.

I understand that from reading Yahoo’s article on this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081023/wl_nm/us_georgia_ossetia_troops#full that you would believe that Russia has launched more aggression, but when you consider that a Georgian wrote this article it becomes little more than an Op-Ed piece and once again the American media has been shamefully biased. Russia is protecting the sovereignty of a state that has been at least nominally independent since 1991 and it would be aggression on the part of Georgia if Russia was forced to remove their protective forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Make no mistake Saakashvili is a neoconservative thug who has attempted to embroil the United States into his anti Ossetian and Abkhazian ethnic cleansing. Even more shameful is the fact that he has quite literally purchased -via one million dollars in campaign contributions- McCain’s support for his genocidal aggression. Saakashvili has cracked down on the freedoms of the Georgian people, he has arrested political dissidents, and he has waged a war of ethnic cleansing on Ethnic Russians. My prayers are with the Russian, Georgian, South Ossetian, and Abkhazian people but Saakashvili is a thug.

According to Article 51 of the UN charter and the recent peace deal brokered by the French, the Russians have every right to remain in South Ossetia to protect the Ossetians from Georgian aggression. It is a disgraceful day in world affairs when Saakashvili gets to dictate, or even tries to dictate, the relationship between two sovereign states. The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are predominantly Russian and they should have every right to secede from Georgia or to merge with the Russian Federation.

Now I realize that some people, who unfortunately only watch the American media (which is dominated by the geopolitical interests of its corporate parents who happen to be heavily invested in oil and military manufacture), will blubber and spout that Russia is the aggressor here. However, this could not be further from the truth. It was Georgia, not Russia, who launched the aggression into South Ossetia. Russia stopped an ethnic cleansing and gets blamed for it? There is something seriously wrong with that and for us, with our record of preemption in the Balkans and Irag, to condemn them is down right hypocritical.

So Sarah Palin Doesn’t Know What She’s Talking About? You Betcha!

Poor John McCain, he thought he would run a positive campaign and make Sarah Palin his attack dog. Unfortunately Palin has come across as clueless. The poor girl is attacking Obama for publicly claiming that if Pakistan knew where Osama Bin Laden was and refused to hand him over to us that he would have no problem going into Pakistan to get him. Really now, what is her problem with Obama restating the Bush doctrine of “you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists?” We have spent nearly a trillion dollars prosecuting a war against a nation that had no WMDs, posed no threat to its neighbors or us, and was quite frankly the wrong war at the wrong time and we fought this in an aggressive fashion. Now Palin comes out and says that it would be wrong to go into Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda even though the Bush administration has recently done the exact same thing Obama has proposed. From Yahoo News here is a series of other things that Palin has appeared clueless in.

In Palin’s view, the potential crises would be sparked by Obama’s own actions. Playing off the Republican ticket’s previous criticisms of the Democratic nominee, she criticized Obama for:

_Advancing the idea of invading Pakistan without that government’s permission. Obama has said he would authorize an attack if the whereabouts of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were known and Pakistan’s government were unable or unwilling to go after him.

Palin’s criticism, however, comes as the Bush administration has authorized attacks on al-Qaida targets within Pakistan, sparking criticism at times from Pakistan’s government. McCain, for his part, has said he would pursue bin Laden “to the gates of hell.”

_Advocating sitting down with “the world’s worst dictators” without preconditions. Palin noted that Obama has said he would meet with the Iranian regime even though it has threatened Israel with destruction. For his part, Obama has contended that the U.S. should not be afraid to meet with its adversaries.

_Opposing the troop surge in Iraq and voting to cut funding to troops, which Palin said left those in Iraq at grave risk. Obama’s lone vote against a funding measure came because the bill did not include a timetable for withdrawal of troops; he followed with a vote for funding and has supported every other funding measure.

_Offering a weak response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, which Palin said would encourage Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to invade the Ukraine. In August, when the two sides were fighting, Obama condemned Russia’s action and called for diplomacy and restraint by both countries.

Palin also repeated familiar campaign slogans, contrasting Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal with McCain as a fiscal conservative who will do more to help struggling families and small businesses. Palin said a McCain administration would create more jobs and lead the country to energy independence.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_el_pr/palin#full

Bottom line is that Palin is capable of spewing the same empty Republican rhetoric we have heard the past eight years, but she is quite incapable of independent thought and policy analysis. Should Palin be sent back to Alaska and into political oblivion? You betcha!

Friday Funnies

As you know we are less than three weeks away from the upcoming presidential election, so lets have a look, humorous of course, into the ideas behind the guys and gals running for elected office. We will of course finish up with a look at sports.

In our first clip GOPers from all walks of life discuss why they are voting Republican:

In our second Clip we learn how to speak like a Republican

Next we learn the difference between a Democrat and Republican in a clip strangely reminiscent of a Mac advertisement.

In our next clip the folks at Jib Jab remind us one and all that its time for some campaigning

In this Video McCain reminds us that he has nothing to offer in No We Can’t

In Our Two Clips, I’m just going to let the two candidates poke fun at each other

And finally as a Bills fan, and because we play San Diego on Sunday, its time to Roast the Chargers

Go Bills.

Last Night You Heard the Lies, Now its time to Check for Facts

Once again I yield to the people at FactCheck.org to analyze the facts and deliver us from the fiction in last night’s debate

McCain:
* claimed the liberal group ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history … maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” In fact, a Republican prosecutor said of the first and biggest ACORN fraud case: “[T]his scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting.” He said $8-an-hour workers turned in made-up voter registration forms rather than doing what ACORN paid them to do.

said “Joe the plumber” faced “much higher taxes” under Obama’s tax plan and would pay a fine under Obama’s health care plan if he failed to provide coverage for his workers. But Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher would pay higher taxes only if the business he says he wants to buy puts his income over $200,000 a year, and his small business would be exempt from Obama’s requirement to provide coverage for workers.

claimed that Obama’s real “object” is a government-run, single-payer health insurance system like those in Canada or England. The McCain campaign points to a quote from five years ago, when Obama told a labor gathering that he was “a proponent of a single-payer health care program.” But Obama has since qualified his enthusiasm for Canadian-style health care, and his current proposal is nothing like that.

described Colombia as the “largest agricultural importer of our products.” Actually, Canada imports the most U.S. farm products, and Colombia is far down the list.

Obama:

repeated a dubious claim that his health care plan will cut the average family’s premiums by $2,500 a year. Experts have found that figure to be overly optimistic.

incorrectly claimed all of McCain’s ads had been “negative.” That was true for one recent week, but not over the entire campaign. And at times Obama has run a higher percentage of attack ads than McCain.

strained to portray himself as willing to break ranks with fellow Democrats. His prime example was his vote for a bill that was supported by 18 Democrats and opposed by 26. Congressional Quarterly rates him as voting with his party 97 percent of the time since becoming a U.S. senator.

more can be found at:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/factchecking_debate_no_3.html

Congrats Bob Schieffer, you have just won my vote or my Critique of the Fourth and Final Debate

What was that? You mean he’s not running on a ticket with Gwen Ifill? Too bad, he could have swept to power because lets be real here for a minute he was better than both Obama and McCain, but because this post is about McCain v. Obama I will, for the final time this election cycle (a brand spanking new one begins on November 5, 2008) I will evaluate the debate on the four old categories of substance, style, delivery, and likability

Substance: Once again we saw a near draw, but Obama came out just ahead as he stayed on message and McCain pulled a Sarah Palin in that he answered the questions he thought he heard and not necessarily the ones that were asked. Obama hammered home the point and looked comfortable on education, the economy, and taxation. McCain looked lost out there. He recycled his disproven lies. He tried to attack Obama, but he looked more like a bitter old man and not one who should be president. Even on the abortion issue, which he should have taken to the bank, he came out second. McCain sounded like he was deferring the issue to the states and Obama calmly said I only support abortion if the woman is going to die. McCain had a shot with Ayers, but Obama just simply brushed it off and succeeded in explaining Ayers and Acorn away.

Style: Obama won because he kept his cool and looked intelligent. In a word he looked presidential. McCain looked like a grumpy old man. He appeared to be at the edge of flying off the handle and much like debate one it looked very much like he was go postal. McCain looked like a deer in the headlights and like he was dazed and confused

Delivery: Obama was calm, collected, and scholarly. McCain looked like a bitter old man

Likeability: McCain looked like he was going to decapitate Obama. Obama looked personable

The bottom line is that while Obama won this debate, Bob Schieffer and Gwen Ifill are clearly the front runners in this election.

Video Wednesday

Today’s Topic is when You know Your Campaign Has no Chance

The First sign is when you go to a sporting event and get booed

The second sign is when you get booed at your own rally

The third sign that your campaign might be finished is when your campaign commercials attack your opponent for doing exactly what the people on your ticket did.

Quite simply Palin was married to a member of a domestic terrorist organization; McCain supported high risk housing loans; Phil Gramm, his chief financial adviser, led the senate committee that drafted the deregulation bills; and McCain has been lying all through the summer

Another sign that your campaign is in trouble is when your idea of an attack ad is black high school kids -keep in mind that only about sixty percent of high school students complete their coursework- saying that because of the example of Barrack Obama they will not end up as vegabonds, dropouts, and failures at life.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Lately all you GOPer types have been up in arms about Obama using ACORN, but don’t feel left out, John McCain supports ACORN Too:

http://74.125.95.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdc.edu%2FHome%2FPress%2Frally.htm

The Idea that McCain is bringing change we can believe in is just plain Nutty.