smorg

Part of disagreeing is knowing your opponents views. I think it is fair to say that I know as much about John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Conservative platform as I do about Barack Obama and his platform.

Knowledge of the issues and how they relate to your personal views is what this is all about - not a party, not a man, not an ideology. Ignorance is bliss, and as seen below, depressing.

Part One:

Part two:

Part Three:

I’m over this hypocritical bullshit. ‘Who knows who and who benefits’ is the oldest game in politics, and it is complete and utter trash. The McCain camp released a video today regarding Obamas relationship with Ayers on a ‘radical education board’ - guess who owns it? One of McCains top supporters…did you hear that in the ad though?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/08/mccains-trumpets-endorsem_n_132954.html

On Wednesday morning, John McCain’s campaign released a list of 100 former ambassadors endorsing the GOP presidential nominee.

Second on the list, though her name is misspelled, is Leonore Annenberg, currently the president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation and widow of ambassador and philanthropist Walter Annenberg.

Enjoy.

Cute little site that has pictures of Obama doing what politicians do (no, not lie) - holding babies.

via CNET

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign launched an iPhone application on Thursday that turns the vaunted device into a political recruiting tool.

The most notable feature “organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly,” according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

The application anonymously reports back the number of calls made this way: “Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored.

Don’t blame me, *I* voted for Kodos!
Click play…

In detail here, but here are the high points.

McCain and Obama contradicted each other repeatedly during their first debate, and each volunteered some factual misstatements as well. Here’s how we sort them out:

• Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran “without preconditions,” but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for “high level” talks with Iran starting at the secretary of state level and said, “I do not believe that we can make conditions.” After the debate the McCain campaign issued a statement quoting Kissinger as saying he didn’t favor presidential talks with Iran.

• Obama denied voting for a bill that called for increased taxes on “people” making as little as $42,000 a year, as McCain accused him of doing.

Balloon Juices’ John Cole breaks it down:

In every instance he claimed McCain was right, he then went on to either contrast himself with McCain or to show that McCain’s approach to solving the issue is wrong:

“Well, I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility, but we need it not just when there’s a crisis. ”

***

“Well, Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused, which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up.

Getting a little tired of hearing politicians speech patterns being criticized as a deficiency.

Deliberate pauses when speaking are normal - filling them with silence leaves the listener with an impression of ignorance. Filling them with leading sounds such as ‘uh’ or ‘um’ are leading sounds, indicating there is more to come after the pause. The pause is usually brain action that is parsing a statement to make it more meaningful or pertinent.

What’s more psychologically telling to me is those people who can rattle off a string of paragraphs, one after another, without missing a beat.