She claims that McCain admitted this at a dinner party that Candice Bergen hosted in LA not long after the 2000 election, and that he was pretty proud of it. Indeed, he was so abused by the infamous treatment he received at the hands of Karl Rove during that primary season, it would have been somewhat shocking to hear that McCain did vote for him. And it would hardly hurt his maverick image to say such a thing.
Anyway, McCain's people flatly deny Arianna's claim. Now there is an eyewitness claim from two other guests at the party, Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, both actors from "The West Wing" TV show, that back up Arianna's account of the evening. McCain's people continue to deny it emphatically.
Surely all of us, conservative and liberal, right and left, people of all colors, faiths and nationalities... surely all of us will join together as one and stop this abomination from ever happening!!!
Madonna is hoping to remake classic movie Casablanca, but update it for a modern-day audience by setting it in Iraq...
"She wants to update the story and maybe set it in a modern war zone such as Iraq. There is no script yet.
The point is, just when it seems like the Bush Administration can reach no further nadir in competence, another jaw-dropping abomination hits the news.
The story here is that a 22-year old kid won a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.
Obviously, I hang around the Daily Kos site and have a high regard for many of the things I read here. Some of the writers here are rock stars to me. I also believe that a person writing a diary here with mistakes of fact tends to get called out with amazing speed.
However, I recognize that this site is far more amenable to some points of view than others. I would not expect a writer or columnist for a major media publication to cite a diary on the Daily Kos as the sole evidence to something he is publishing in his periodical. While a diary, or even a front page item, might be a great lead for an item or column, I would expect that journalist or columnist to do a bit more digging to confirm the veracity of what they read here, which, after all, has a partisan axe to grind.
I am mystified at all the whining and hand wringing that Hillary is not popular on the Daily Kos. Hillary has always been lowly regarded on Daily Kos even before the campaigns started. She has always been seen as not progressive enough for most Kossacks' tastes. She has been very low in the pack in all the straw votes here in the last year, polling far lower than she does among the general Democratic rank and file. Look at them! She has never gotten more than 11% of the Kossack vote, and this when she was a massive frontrunner in the national polls.
So why are Hillary advocates looking for love here? She wasn't popular here when she was winning. Why would we want her more now that she's losing??
Assuming the January vote were to stand, in Florida, Hillary would receive 105 pledged delegates, Barack 67 and John Edwards 14. This presents an edge to Hillary over Barack of 38 delegates.
In Michigan, Hillary would get 73 pledged delegates, with 55 uncommitted. Since John Edwards and Barack removed themselves from the ballot, it is reasonable to conclude that people who voted "Uncommitted" were likely going to vote either for Edwards or Obama.
If we seat both delegations per these results, Hillary would have a delegate advantage of 111. If we shift all 55 uncommitted delegates in Michigan to Barack, the advantage is down to 56.
Clearly there are minimum standards that Florida and Michigan must attain in holding a revote, but it could be done at a fraction of the cost of a regular vote.
Why? There would only be one contest on the ballot - Obama or Clinton? There would be no third candidates (throw in Gravel for a giggle, if you must), no down ticket races, no bond issues, no referenda. All you need is a piece of paper with two choices - Obama or Clinton?
Because there is only one race on the ballot, a voter's time in the polling place would be a fraction of the time spent in a booth for a full ballot. It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to vote. So because the lines would move much more quickly, the revote would require far fewer polling sites. This would cut costs drastically.
Okay, people, the first words of the sketch -- the VERY FIRST WORDS OF THE SKETCH -- are as follows -- "I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approve this unfair and deceptive message."
I have a question about IL-14 that seems like a very obvious question to raise, but I haven't seen anyone mention it yet.
Why on earth is the NRCC, woefully underfunded and going through an appalling financial scandal that will make fundraising even harder going forward, dumping $1.3 million, almost a third of their cash, into a single congressional campaign on behalf of Jim Oberweis, whose only positive asset to recommend him is the fact that he is RICH ENOUGH TO SELF-FUND????
If this is what we're facing in November, we are so in.
Obama did not "lose momentum." Barack lost two states where Hillary's strengths were profound and readily perceived. Texas is at best a split - she won the popular vote and he won the delegate vote. The votes in states like Maryland and Hawaii had no impact on Ohio and Rhode Island, just as Ohio and Rhode Island will have no impact on Mississippi or Wyoming, where Barack will win, and they won't have any impact on Pennsylvania, which Hillary will win.
Voters tonight did not have "buyer's remorse" over Obama. Such a stupid metaphor. You can't have remorse over a purchase somebody else made. This was just a different set of voters making their preferences known for the first time.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, despite the national name recognition that being a senator provides, only one person has been elected directly from the U.S. Senate into the White House -- John Kennedy.
Would you like to know why? It's things like this...
On the stump, Sen. John McCain often cites his work tackling the excesses of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff as evidence of his sturdy ethical compass.
A little-known document, however, shows that McCain may have taken steps to protect his Republican colleagues from the scope of his investigation.
22 years in the senate leaves an unavoidable and uneradicable trail of bills, votes, actions, letters, conversations, recommendations and sometimes accidental coincidences that can be revealed bit by bit to destroy a presidential campaign.
My last diary was pretty snarky and quite insubstantial. So I thought I'd try a diary that actually had something to offer.
I crunched some numbers. The polls have been underestimating Obama's vote by an average of 7% to 9%, compared to Clinton's vote being underestimated by 3% to 4%. One would expect the actual vote to be slightly higher than the polls, as undecideds finally decide. But Obama's bump cannot be explained merely by the break of undecideds.
I hereby predict... a 12 page pictorial spread of Vicki Iseman in Playboy by Summer 2009. Heavily airbrushed.
This scandal is unfolding daily. The quote from Bud Paxson that he spoke directly to John McCain and that Vicki Iseman was at the meeting was devastating. Paxson obviously has no reason to lie about such a thing. The unraveling of McCain's campaign starts now.
I also predict at least 45 states for Obama in the general.
The winner of the primaries will win the nomination.
I was very concerned about this massive block of superdelegates that could reverse the decision of the primary votes. But as of now, any superdelegate who feels strongly about either candidate has already declared. So the others who are holding back are probably doing so not out of indecision, but out of either a craven or a principled decision to back the primary winners.
So assuming these 400 superdelegates will move to the winner of the primary elections, they will give that candidate a favorable lead in total delegates that Michigan and Florida can be admitted to the convention even with their primary results, and the final result would remain unchanged. Then we can have the Kumbaya Convention we really want, and everyone will be happy.
I live in Oak Park, Illinois, a lovely inner ring suburb of Chicago. My voting place today offered a choice between paper and electronic machines. I tried the electronic machine.
It was just as easy and worked as smoothly as it should. In addition, before you push the button to complete your vote, the machine prints out your ballot choices in a kind of register tape that runs along the right side of the machine, showing you your choices and scrolling up into a takeup reel. You can review your votes through a window to make sure they're accurate. If it's wrong, you can correct it. The machine registers your vote and shows you the audit trail that you're leaving behind. And if the machine is down, they still had paper ballots as backup.
It's not easy having to be honest with ourselves, especially past a certain age. Our mindsets are established, the world is arranged in certain patterns based on our experiences, preferences and best analyses. We acquire a filter through which events get sorted and interpreted. In order to trust our own instincts and tendencies, we have to believe in own fundamental goodness.
It's very difficult to have your own words and actions brought to your attention and be shown a heaping, meticulously-documented pile of evidence that, after what we thought was a lifetime of good intentions, perhaps we aren't as open-minded and open-hearted as we thought we were.
Chris Matthews presents us with a unique case. He is not as obviously partisan as, say, Hannity or Olbermann. At times, his political compass seems to point in all directions. To a conservative, he can seem disgustingly lefty, and to us at DK, he seems appallingly conservative. Most journalists see bipartisan flak as proof that their public postures are right in the middle, where they ought to be. But Matthews really does seem utterly apolitical, that he cares nothing of the aims and goals of politicians and cares only of the political sparks they set off. He relishes only The Game. This Political Junkie is ironically apolitical.
Michael Kinsley nudged his way into the Familiar Quotations world when he noted that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." Barack was caught in just such a gaffe at the Nevada debate.
His worst flaw??? Are you kidding me??? Every entry-level interviewee knows that you never answer that question with a genuine flaw! You say something like, "My biggest flaw is that I work too hard!" "Sometimes I fight too strenously to defend the innocent!" "I sacrifice too much for the common good!" You never say something like "I lose everything."
And naturally, everyone jumped on that after the debate to make it sound like he may accidentally Push the Button when the cartoonishly huge stack of papers in his in-box collapses onto it. And so Tim Russert readies his penknife to carve another notch into his belt, counting up another victim to his inane line of questioning.
Did you ever meet someone who had so little self-awareness that he really had no idea how offensive he was? A guy who is so confident in his likability, that it just doesn't compute in his head that the things he says are utterly inappropriate?
Contrast and compare:
and Michael Scott (You may have to watch a short ad before the clip starts)
