smooth

I agree, dc dux, it's not something that is likely to be effective this election cycle.
I wasn't proposing that people do a retroactive boycott, if that's how my comments were understood.

But I'd like to start working on this project because I think the thirst is there by many people to do *something* about the state of political adverts and now seems to be the time to reach out to them and start growing a base. Let's keep in mind that in two years we will see some of this crap, and in four years we will definitely have to deal with it again.

I like the sense of your ideas, much more than any kinds of attempts to censor the content of ads via government. I like the duel adverts idea, but layered on top of private censor to ratchet down the mudslinging. I've got to think more....but I am thinking long term.

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Paq

i find it funny that obama basically laid out mccain's campaign plan in july..

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flstf

I hope Obama's security detail is on high alert. It is getting ugly out there. I think even McCain's campaign is beginning to realize that some of the people at their rallys are going overboard. They probably underestimated the amount of hate and rage their negative campaigning would help incite among some of their more ignorant supporters. Shouts of "kill him" and "bomb Obama" at McCain's and Palin's rallys will not help their cause with most voters.

smooth

Do you really think that they didn't expect this level of hatred?
I can't see how they could possibly be caught by surprise by it.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

ratbastid

Well, and it gets worse.

There was this "laudable" interchange yesterday at a town hall meeting in Minnesota:

Lady: "I don't trust Obama. He's an arab."
McCain: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, a citizen that I happen to have disagreements with."

So... Great, a step toward civility. Everybody's talking about how he's trying to reign in the crazies, etc.

But.... How he answered that gives us a little peek into the McCain world view: Arab != decent, family, citizenship. So much for the Arab American vote, I guess. But he probably wasn't going to get that anyway, aside from the US relatives of the House of Saud...

guyy

I'm glad someone else noticed that. It was an essentially racist answer. And no, he's not getting the Arab-American vote. Bush & Cheney burned that up. My Republican Arab friends are either voting for Nader (because he's Lebanese American) or for Obama.

Paq

i thought i misheard or something...I swear, i'm just going to stop giving the benefit of the doubt bc it's never helped when i hear things like that...


it's kinda funny, though, bc the few arabs i know (arab or arab american) are the nicest/closest families i know...haha

i know that's small and anecdotal, but it just strikes me as odd. i was wondering how arab americans were taking the election this year. The ones i know are strictly for obama, but we're talking a sample size of 10 people haha

Still, i get really upset when people forget how much of a hodgepodge of ethnicities our country really is..and how much that has helped us in the past.


aha

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dc_dux

This was part of the invocation at McCain's appearance in Iowa today:
Gotta love those self-righteous "country first" Christians

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Tully Mars

His guy is so freaking erratic I can't figure out if I'm gaining or losing respect for me.

I seriously would have voted for McCain in 2000. Every once and awhile I see the old McCain. Then I see this other guy talking who looks a lot like McCain but doesn't sound anything like him.

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aceventura3

Kinda funny how everyone is so concerned about Obama's feeling being hurt based on people making absurd remarks, but had/have no concern about Palin when it was/is being done to her.

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YaWhateva

I don't remember any remarks about her being absurd. I think calling someone stupid is just slightly different than calling someone a terrorist and that they should be killed.

Also, the comments about Palin at least had some truth to them...

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Tully Mars

Some of them yes. All of them no. I remember a story about her not giving birth recently but claiming a child her daughter had was actually hers. No truth to that one.

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aceventura3

I remeber a comedian saying something about wanting her to be raped by some of her "big black" friends.

I remember some saying she was some kinda Republican porn candidate.

I remember some saying she was neglecting her children.

I remember some saying she lied about giving birth to her son.

Where was the outrage?

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"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

you know, ace, if the election season were not an element of this, and all the figures were in a schoolyard or something like that, maybe i'd agree with you--and there's a way in which i do to the extent that i think about folk like palin as a human being---but the fact is that much of what's happening seems to me shaped by the strategies that the mc-cain campaign has chosen to adopt. so there's a degree of you reap what you sow in all this.

and it doesn't seem to me the sort of situation--the campaign strategy that the mc-cain camp has adopted--that you can factor out, even if you support mc-cain. it seems disengenous to try it.

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filtherton

Is this some sort of meta-defense of calling for Obama's death? As far as I can tell, nobody has called for the death of McCain at an Obama/Biden rally.

I'm sure that if the democrats were in the kind of desperate position that McCain supporters seem to be in, they'd say the same things (the same position a lot of Kerry supporters were in during the previous election). I doubt they'd do so with the implicit encouragement of the party's VP candidate, though.

Edit:

This whole "Well, I don't have a problem with someone calling Obama a terrorist because I heard someone on the bus call Palin a whore" thing is lame.

dc_dux

Tully...I think the difference is comments being made by the respective campaigns and/or surrogates with a direct connection to the campaigns.

Comments by the more rabid supporters of both can be over the top, but the candidates have little control over such remarks.

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Paq

this is the rest of that video with the woman who said obama was an arab...

kinda crazy and ...just crazy

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mcgeedo

I suspect that ACORN associations will do more damage to Obama that Ayers associations.

roachboy

acorn?
gee, helping poor folk get decent housing...encouraging autonomy...how outrageous.

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it make you sick.

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The_Dunedan

I fail to see how rampant voter-registration fraud, intimidation, and frivolous litigation helps anyone become autonomous. And given how badly and in what ways the lending practices ACORN advocated have damaged the economy of the entire bloody world, I fail to see how it's helped anyone get decent housing.

Paq

bc i'm apparently unfamiliar with this acorn thing...:
Fight the Smears: Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN
now i say this bc while looking for info on obama/acorn, the ONLY sites i found making the connection were linked to fox news, johnmccain.com, the washingtonpost, drudge...etc. Now..if this had come up earlier..like.way back when..before mccain's group started coming up with ANYTHING to discredit obama, then i may think it's something to mention. as it is, though, i think most will just see it as a mccain tactic and move on.

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roachboy

well, then, it hardly matters what one thinks of acorn in connection with obama.
s o i suppose we could talk about acorn in another thread.

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it make you sick.

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ottopilot

It is clear that Obama has no connection with ACORN. It's the same old race-based Obama hating strategy we've seen from FauX News and the McSame campaign. I see nothing here.

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guyy

Acorn pulled down the world economy? Please explain.

Frivolous litigation? What do you consider frivolous?

Rampant voter registration fraud? Numbers please.

The_Dunedan

Please note that I said: "lending practices ACORN advocated" damaged the world economy, not "ACORN pulled down the world economy." The policies to which I refer are the laws, among which the CRA is one, which encouraged the development of the "sub-prime" lending market and its' associated sale of bundled loans, the collapse of which has so damaged the global economy over the past few weeks.

I direct your attention to the recent incidents in Nevada, in which ACORN registration volunteers not only signed up pets, resterants, and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys, but were also accused by at least two people of trying to register them to vote fifteen or more times, aggressively in both cases.

I apologize. My prejudices in this matter ran away with me for a moment. I cannot recall any specific instances of ACORN initiating a frivolous lawsuit, so consider my comment in that part retracted until and unless I can discover some proof.

dc_dux

ACORN has registered over 1 million voters nationwide and less than one half of 1% have been questioned by state authorities anywhere.

I guess we have a different standard for rampant voter registration fraud.

You do understand that under most state laws, any voter registration form received by a voter advocacy organization must be submitted to the state for review.
-----Added 12/10/2008 at 12 : 45 : 00-----
added:

oh....as to the CRA and the sub-prime excesses (puilling down the world economy):

the vast majority of subprime loans were made by lenders that were not subject to the CRA and those loans made under the CRA were subject to more oversight than other subprime loans because of CRA requirements

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guyy

It's odd that an advocate for poor people would support predatory lending. If you're looking for a villain there, try the banks or advocates of Reaganite deregulation. Among other things, Acorn campaigns against foreclosures. In light of that, i'd say they're propping up the property market and supporting the health of the global economy.

2 people thought Acorn folks were overly pushy, some absurd registrations were thrown out as they should have been, and no one voted fraudulently. Minor stuff.

Rekna

Here is what gets me about the faux anger at ACORN. They are made that ACORN submitted fraudulent voter registrations and claim that ACORN is trying to steal the election.

Here is what they don't tell you:

1) ACORN is required by law to submit any and all registrations given to them even if they are fraudulent.
2) ACORN flagged the fraudulent registrations, turned them in separately, and reported their concerns about the registrations to the state agencies.


given these 2 facts why are people upset about ACORN?

Paq

it makes for good ratings/headlines?

I mean, heck, you could put up something like MCCAIN LINKED TO MOLAB!!! and write some incendiary stuff..people will pretend to know what molab is when i just made it up

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ratbastid

Oh, I'm sorry, did I miss somebody calling her a traitor and calling for her to be killed?

I don't want her killed--I just want her to go the fuck away.

docbungle

For those who insist on pushing an Obama / Ayers connection:

From Politifact.com:

PolitiFact | Not a radical group, and Ayers didn't run it

Not a radical group, and Ayers didn't run it
Pants on fire!

For most of the election, Sen. John McCain's campaign has been somewhat subtle about trying to tie Sen. Barack Obama to the former '60s radical William Ayers.

No longer. A 90-second Web ad released Oct. 8, 2008, features sinister music, side-by-side photographs of Obama and Ayers, and a series of dubious allegations about their past connections, including this one:

"Ayers and Obama ran a radical education foundation together."

Ayers was a founding member of the militant Vietnam-era anti-war group the Weathermen. He was investigated for his role in a series of domestic bombings, but the charges were dropped in 1974 due to prosecutorial misconduct. He is now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and actively engaged in the city's civic life.

The McCain campaign said the "radical education foundation" to which they were referring is the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity endowed by publishing magnate Walter Annenberg that funded public-school programs in Chicago from 1995 to 2001.

We'll look at whether the foundation was radical. But first we have to grapple with whether Obama and Ayers ran it.

Obama served on the foundation's volunteer board from its inception in 1995 through its dissolution in 2001, and was chair for the first four years. So an argument can be made that he ran it, though an executive director handled day-to-day operations.

Ayers, who received his doctorate in education from Columbia University in 1987 and is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was active in getting the foundation up and running. He and two other activists led the effort to secure the grant from Annenberg, and he worked without pay in the early months of 1995, prior to the board's hiring of an executive director, to help the foundation get incorporated and formulate its bylaws, said Ken Rolling, who was the foundation's only executive director. Ayers went on to become a member of the "collaborative," an advisory group that advised the board of directors and the staff.

However, Ayers "was never on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge," and he "never made a decision programmatically or had a vote," Rolling said.

"He (Ayers) was at board meetings — which, by the way, were open — as a guest," Rolling said. "That is not anything near Bill Ayers and Barack Obama running the Chicago Annenberg Challenge."

Now, was the foundation radical?

The McCain campaign cited several pieces of evidence for that allegation, including a 1995 invitation from the foundation for applications from schools "that want to make radical changes in the way teachers teach and students learn." The campaign appears to have confused two different definitions of the word "radical." Clearly the invitation referred to "a considerable departure from the usual or traditional," rather than "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs."

The campaign also cited two projects the foundation funded, one having to do with a United Nations-themed Peace School and another that focused on African-American studies.

"That is radical in the eye of this campaign and we imagine in the eyes of most Americans," said Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for McCain. "It is a subjective thing, and there are going to be people in Berkeley and Chicago who think that is totally legitimate."

Teaching about the United Nations and African-American studies may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hardly "radical" in the same way Ayers' Vietnam-era activities were. Moreover, most of the projects the foundation funded (more on that below) were not remotely controversial.

The McCain campaign also cited an opinion piece by conservative commentator Stanley Kurtz in the Sept. 23, 2008, Wall Street Journal as evidence of the foundation's radicalism. Kurtz wrote that Ayers was the "guiding spirit" of the foundation, and it "translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice."

But Ayers' views on education, though certainly reform-oriented and left-of-center, are not considered anywhere near as radical as his Vietnam-era views on war. And even if they were, there was a long list of individuals involved with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge whose positions provided them far more authority over its direction than Ayers' advisory role gave him.

Let's look at a few, starting with the funder. Annenberg was a lifelong Republican and former ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Richard Nixon. His widow, Leonore, has endorsed McCain. Kurtz might just as plausibly have accused Obama and the foundation of "translating Annenberg's conservatism into practice."

Among the other board members who served with Obama were: Stanley Ikenberry, former president of the University of Illinois; Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University and assistant secretary of labor in the Nixon administration; Scott Smith, then publisher of the Chicago Tribune; venture capitalist Edward Bottum; John McCarter, president of the Field Museum; Patricia Albjerg Graham, former dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a host of other mainstream folks.

"The whole idea of it being radical when it was this tie of blue-chip, white-collar, CEOs and civic leaders is just ridiculous," said the foundation's former development director, Marianne Philbin.

The foundation gave money to groups of public schools – usually three to 10 – who partnered with some sort of outside organization to improve their students' achievement.

In his opinion piece, Kurtz puts a sinister spin on this: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with 'external partners,' which actually got the money...CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN)."

Rollings said the foundation tried to fund the schools directly, but doing so proved to be a "bureaucratic nightmare." But any external group that received money had to have created a program in partnership with a network of public schools.

And though ACORN is considered a liberal organization, the vast majority of the foundation's external partners were not remotely controversial. Here are a few examples: the Chicago Symphony, the University of Chicago, Loyola University, Northwestern University, the Chicago Children's Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association.

Had Kurtz chosen to accuse Obama of carrying water for the conservative Annenberg, he might have written: "CAC disbursed money to various business-friendly entities, such as the Museum of Science and Industry and the Commercial Club of Chicago."

See how easy it is?

The programs the foundation funded were designed to allow individuals from the "external partners" – whether the musicians in the symphony or the business leaders in the commercial club – to help improve student achievement. They were along the lines of mentoring by artists, literacy instruction, professional development for teachers and administrators, and training for parents in everything from computer skills to helping their children with homework to advocating for their children at school.

This last activity – something suburban parents practice with zeal – is also suspect in Kurtz's view: "CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents 'organized' by community groups might be viewed by school principals 'as a political threat.'" That is typical of Kurtz's essay – relatively innocuous facts cast in the worst possible light. That's appropriate for an opinion piece, perhaps, but hardly grounds for a purportedly factual political ad accusing the group of radicalism.

We could go on and on with evidence that the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a rather vanilla charitable group. For example, under the deal with Annenberg every dollar from him had to be matched by two from elsewhere. The co-funders were a host of respected, mainstream institutions, such as the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Chicago Public Schools.

In short, this was a mainstream foundation funded by a mainstream, Republican business leader and led by an overwhelmingly mainstream, civic-minded group of individuals. Ayers' involvement in its inception and on an advisory committee do not make it radical – nor does the funding of programs involving the United Nations and African-American studies.

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism. That's Pants on Fire wrong.

____________________________________________________

How anyone can continue to push this nonsense baffles me. The degree of willful ignorance involved is astounding. The teeniest bit of research completely debunks this entire preposterous claim of guilt by association.

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Herk

That it is not approaching 100% to 0% in Obama's favor(more quickly) is actually a bit shocking to me.

I'm on business in Minneapolis for two weeks. I had a conversation in the dinning room at the hotel tonight. My conversation partner was very personable, but he was still very mislead on this stuff. It was just crazy. He was claiming that Barack Obama was the assistant director at an organization called ACORN, where the director said that if the kids parents disagreed they should be dead. I almost burst out laughing. I said that I thought he had gotten some wires crossed along the way.

Regarding the war in Iraq that I said was an invasion of a sovereign nation which posed no immediate threat to us he argued. He said we needed to stay to honor the lives of the dead troops. It would be dishonorable to leave. That vexed me. He went on to say, at one point, "What about Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama and Al Queda[sp?]?" (O.o)

...are you kidding me?

All I can hear is doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo(Twilight Zone)

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Paq

chris matthews gained a TON of my respect during the 2nd debate..when someone said "why isn't obama leading more in the polls" "bc he's black.."

seriously, if this was old white guy vs old white guy, it'd be a complete blowout

btw, US Presidential Election 2008 does have it as 99.5:.5 obama/mccain...

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Tully Mars

My minds kind of wondering a little tonight. I'm thinking of something. I'm kind of drawing a blank. Something about eggs, chickens and hatching.

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Herk

Wow, Tully. Now I'm hungry.

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dc_dux

You got that right....or till the fat lady sings.

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Herk

That right, you've got us right where you want us.

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matthew330

Perhaps you missed the last 8 years: Liar, thief, not my president, the biggest terrorist, general betrayus, a movie about the sitting president being assassinated - none of which came from some random extremist (probably a plant) in some public forum - in fact all of which were justified by all of you.

Very big of you to admit you don't want her killed, and it's no surprise you want her to go away. Seems like thats what most liberals want of people that don't agree with them.

Johnny Rotten

I was wondering how long it would take until ACORN pushed back. This connection to Obama is not only fraudulent, but an embarrassing accusation for the McCain campaign.

Don't misunderstand. I don't dislike McCain personally, or Republicans for that matter. The problem is his despicable campaign staff. I can't stand more than ten seconds of Tucker Bounds before I want to throw my TV out the window. A bunch of craven, slithering predators who shame their party and their country. McCain's penchant for saying that Obama will "raise taxes" is tame by comparison to their degenerate, gutter backstabbing and brazen lies.

I haven't been this troubled about my country since the Patriot Act was passed.

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dc_dux

I dont want her to go away after she loses (although she probably will because the leaders of her own party will toss her aside)...she is such a disingenuous lightweight, its almost too easy to pick on her.

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