Sloganomics, not Economics!

Winning American elections is not about who has the better understanding or the better intellect or the better argument, It is about who has the better slogans.  Period.

McCain is contradicting himself when he challenges Obama's patriotism by claiming he would rather lose a war than lose an election. This implies Obama is foresighted enough to see what strategies would lose a war and which would not - i.e. win. He is therefore fit to be Commander in Chief because he possesses this capability.

SlOBama the high and mighty

You know I try and remain optimistic.
Everyone says not to speak ill of the Clintons for purposes of unity. Well I cant hold my tonuge any longer. HRC doesnt really want to unify.

You know its one thing to claim unity to a group of Obama supporters...but what is she doing to bring her supporters over?

Heres the latest:

Sorry everyone - all signs point to a Clinton announcement on Saturday in Illinois.  Everyone else is writing VP diaries, so I had to write mine.  Today Obama was heard saying "he" when referring to his vice president.  Howard Fineman said if he had to bet his life on it, "it's Joe Biden."  But who else would you need to wait to announce until the last minute like this?  Who else could dominate a week of coverage and overshadow anybody that McCain picks?  Who else has already been given two nights of the convention?  I'm sorry, but I smell unity at the convention...

Recent polls show Obama slipping versus McCain.  How can that be when we can all see how much smarter and better Obama is?  The answer might be in the instincts that we inherited from our stone age ancestors.

When men choose a president, at least some part of our thinking is probably those stone age instincts we used in selecting the leader of the war party.  Women probably didn’t do much of the stone age war, so they might have some other kind of default hardware—mate choosing, for example.  It’s entire plausible that the criteria that served for those stone age war leaders are less than perfectly applicable to modern circumstances, but aspiring politicos need to keep those old instincts in mind.

What did you want in your SA war guy?  Courage, leadership, trustworthiness, initiative, pugnacity, vigor, celerity in judgment and action, decisiveness, and good judgment.  Conversely, you didn’t want cowardice, meekness,  passivity, lassitude, vacillation, or bad judgment.  Looking at the list it’s easy to see places where McCain scores well.  Obama is a listener and a consensus builder, and these can be mistaken for lack of initiative, leadership, and decisiveness.  Similarly his thoughtfulness and nuance.  

Do you feel a draft? Apparently John McCain does.

My God, this is entertaining. All the lefties freaking out; all the righties squealing with joy. Holy macaroni, McCain is up five percent in a national poll of several hundred likely voters! Argh!!

ARGH, I SAID!!!

No one wants to keep the Republican out of The White House more than I do.  I support Obama and I will vote for him.  

McCain has won praise from the media for all of his bluster and tough talk on Russia.  These are the folks he refers to as "my base" and that have cozied up with the Senator for bbq at his private residence, so it's not surprising that they're eating up neocon John's act.
http://www.cnn.com/...

However, people that are looking objectively at the Georgia conflict are reaching a different conclusion.  Had we pursued the policies recommended by McCain in the past years regarding Russia, we would have forfeited most of the means we currently have at our disposal to put pressure on them.

Lately, again, in an attack that is hardly link-worthy, John McCain took Barack Obama to task for taking his presumptuous trip to Iraq... and for not visiting Iraq since, get this, January 2006! How stupid Obama must be, to mount a 50-state strategy in a year where, yes, there are 51 states. With a July 2006 population of 26,783,383 (and falling), I'm pretty sure the McCain camp is counting on Iraq's 40-50 electoral votes in November, even though Iraq's "Caliph" endorses our guy.

John McCain, it seems, is running for Emperor. And perhaps that's a fitting issue to address in this campaign, the first (to my knowledge) where neither candidate was born on mainland U.S. Two candidates from colonial reaches of empire strive to address its overextension. With PNAC's progenitors putting their tail between their legs and running, let's take a look at the election through colonial lenses, as you travel with me to the once-sovereign nation of There'sMoreland.  

If there’s one thing we know about John McCain, it’s that he’s a stratight-talkin’ maverick ex-POW.  (Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know the POW thing; he doesn’t like to talk about it much.)

Because he’s a straight-talkin’ maverick ex-POW, those who criticize what McCain says or, worse, disagree with him reveal themselves to be flip-flopping, politically correct anti-patriots who are willing to lose a war in order to win an election.  Talk about an embarrassing faux pas!  And a difficult one to avoid in light of the fact that much of what McCain says appears at first glance to be, how to put this delicately? incredibly stoopid, certifiably insane or both.

There is, fortunately, a fairly easy way to avoid such humiliations.  I explain after the break.

Lately John McCain has been talking tough: first about Iran, then about Osama and more recently about Georgia.  There's a common theme to his logic:  
bomb them here, bomb them now.  I'll go into more detail below about why I believe he has adopted this blustery tone.  But the more important question someone needs to ask him (especially Obama) is this: given our current military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, how would a Pres. McCain logistically respond to an incident in any of these countries.  One can talk tough all one wants to about them (lord knows Bush has for years), but when it comes down to it, do we really have the military capacity to respond right now to a Russian invasion and/or annexation of a former Soviet Republic?  Can we really militarily stop Iran from getting the bomb?

Image: Blank Black Screen for 3 seconds
Audio:Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick (Old alarm clock/bomb style ticking sound twice per second. Ticking continues thru ad.


Announcer(soft non-attack voice): "Which John McCain are you going to vote for?"


Image on screen for 15 seconds: Boots/Helmet/Rifle fallen soldier image.
Text overly: 4144 american heroes dead
Audio: only the audio clips of John McCain: "Bomb bomb bomb Iran" "Iraq" "Russia" "War" "War" "War" "That's not too important. What's important is the casualties" "Q:Troops in Iraq for 50 yrs? A:Make it a hundred...that would be fine by me." "...cold war. This is an act of aggession"


Image on screen for 9 seconds: Distraught 50yr old couple at kitchen table with bills image.
Text overlay: # Jobs lost
Audio: only the audio clips of John McCain: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood" "Q: At what point do you move from middle class to rich A:How about $5 million"


Image on screen for 3 seconds, split screen: One side McCain hugging Bush, other side McCain and Bush holding birthday cake.
Text overlay: Large ? mark in middle of screen.
Audio: Old alarm clock goes off ringing loudly.

Hi Guys!

As you, no doubt, know by now, I own a retail store.  And, being uberblue, I carry blue merchandise, and not red merchandise.  So, for example, if you want a coffee cup where all the red states turn blue when you pour in hot water, you can buy it from us.  If you want a coffee cup where all the blue states turn red, you'll have to buy it somewhere else.  

As it happens, we also have the widest selection of jigsaw puzzles in Chicago.  So, when the new Obama and McCain puzzles came out, we bought the Obama puzzles, and not the McCain puzzles.

JUMP!

This should be viewed as research.
As I watched the McCain ads and then saw the change in the polls, the fever, the chills, the abdominal pain and the "oh crap" feeling started; I had been struck by the 2000 Gore-Bush anxiety virus. Instead of just listening to the pundits explain the significance, I decided that it was time to see what the research says about negative campaigning and campaign ads. Do they make a difference? Are they effective? Does McCain have a chance of success if he continues to use them? Is it wise for Obama to refrain from using them? Here are the results. It's a long one.

I have distilled the basic conclusions of each and I have included a more detailed explanation if you wish more information and the source. The first set of numbered items correspond to the items that follow below. Just match them.

I have made my own conclusions about the research but I would really be interested in what others think; thus, I have not given mine. They’re in my head rattling around looking for some logic and common sense. So, does Obama have anything to worry about? Should he join McCain in negative campaigning?

There are some items up on News Unfiltered that may interest the community.

DNC calls on the FEC for a new investigation into McCain's campaign finance violations:

With the Federal Election Commission scheduled to address John McCain's decision to unilaterally withdraw from the federal matching funds program on Thursday, the Democratic National Committee today called on the Commission to remove that item from its agenda and instead proceed with a full investigation of the charges made against McCain in the administrative complaint filed by the DNC in February. In a conference call with reporters this morning, DNC General Counsel Joe Sandler discussed a letter he sent to the FEC last night that argued that the Commission should not consider McCain's decision to withdraw from the matching funds program because there is no request for permission pending and the Commission hasn't yet conducted an investigation as required by the law.

Read more.

I was over at Factcheck.org today. Unfortunately their analysis of Obama and McCain stretching the truth lately hits both of them about the same. There is this letter John McCain wrote Barack Obama in 2006, however:

McCain (letter to Obama) Feb. 6, 2006: I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. ... I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again.

Straight talk?