3/4 of debates done

ok, now we have finished 3 out of the 4 debates. first there was the first debate between barack obama and john mccain. john mccain acted like a complete lunatic the week preceding that debate, contradicting himself constantly about the state of the economy and whether he supported the government taking over aig and a number of other things, and then to try to change the subject off his insanity and sarah palin’s complete and utter stupidity that was starting to be exposed in tv interviews, john mccain announced he was suspending his campaign. of course, that was a complete lie, and he still had campaign operations going all over the country, and still had tv ads on, and his campaign advisers were all over the news praising him and bashing barack obama during the time of this so-called “suspension”. he said he was going to washington, d.c. to fix the economy, but did not at first say whether he supported the $700 billion bailout or not. the house and senate democrats announced an agreement on the bailout with the white house and senate republicans that week, but the house republicans walked out of the meeting and said there was no deal. anyway, they decided to have a vote on the $700 billion bailout on the house floor the monday after the first debate (a friday). as early as friday morning, people still had no idea whether john mccain was going to show up to the debate, since he promised to only show up if there was a deal, and there really wasn’t a deal, because the house republicans had already demolished the deal democrats made with the white house. but john mccain showed up at the debate anyway, because not showing up would mean chickening out. however, the fact that he showed up proved that he was a liar, since he promised not to unless there really was a deal. anyway, john mccain lost the first debate, according to all the polls as well as my own judgment, and barack obama won. it was especially devastating when barack obama listed all the things john mccain had said about the war in iraq early on that turned out to be dead wrong. also, john mccain did not look at barack obama even once, perhaps showing that old john mccain was too intimidated to look at his powerful young foe, or perhaps showing that john mccain had no respect for this young upstart and thought him unworthy of being looked upon.

ok, so that was the first debate... guess what happened next? the monday following the first debate, the $700 billion bailout package failed on the house floor, due to overwhelming opposition from the republican rank-and-file, along with opposition from liberal democrats and fiscally conservative democrats. it was still a close vote, however, since the leaderships of both parties supported the bailout and so did a majority of the democrats, who are the majority party in the house. the opposition of house republicans can be credited to the fact that john mccain had officially come out in favor of their position in the first debate, basically giving them a green light to vote against the bill. but apparently john mccain was calling them up, pleading with them to vote for the bill. so who knows what john mccain was thinking? whatever he was thinking, it turned out to be a massive failure, and right before the bill was defeated, john mccain gloated about his success in passing it and berated barack obama for not being involved. anyway, throughout that week, there was work on the bailout, as well as embarrassing tidbits every day about sarah palin that made her look completely idiotic and foolish. on thursday, sarah palin and joe biden finally had their 1 debate, and sarah palin had set very very low expectations for herself, while the expectations for joe biden were quite high. sarah palin did prove herself not to be a complete and utter moron, and capable of speaking coherent sentences, although they were almost all stump-speech-style sound bites that had been rehearsed in advance, and she kept repeating the same ones over and over. she avoided answering the questions that she was asked if she had not already memorized the answers to them, instead answering questions that she had been told the answers to. she even said that she would not answer questions the way the debate moderator, gwen ifill, wanted them answered, basically admitting that she was incapable of answering questions unless someone gave her the answers in advance. she was full of aw-shucks-style silly folksy speak, like “say it ain’t so, joe”, and while she did not make a complete fool of herself, she did act moderately foolish. joe biden, on the other hand, seriously kicked some ass, taking john mccain to task and helping promote barack obama, while showing off some of his encyclopedic knowledge on every issue of domestic and foreign policy that came up. sarah palin kept calling herself and john mccain “maverick”, repeating the word so often it became absolutely ridiculous, and when joe biden gave his conclusion by mentioning the tragic death of his first wife and their daughter, she did not even express her condolences or anything, but just went back to repeating the word “maverick” endlessly. sarah palin was like a well-trained parrot that just kept repeating things it had heard people say, like “maverick”, etc.

so that debate was on thursday and the $700 billion bailout, a revised version, was signed into law on friday. the stock market has continued to go down constantly. the dow jones industrial average is now below 10,000, and it was above 14,000 a year ago. the dow jones was higher than this in the late 90s! so if someone had invested in the stock market in the peak of the boom of the late 90s, they would actually have less money today! all of the gains the stock market has made since 9/11... wiped out. the credit market is totally nonexistent now. nobody can get a loan, not people, not companies, not banks. the only source of credit now is the government. the credit market is much, much worse than the stock market. that is actually the reason all these companies are going under and why the $700 billion bailout was thought to be necessary (while it was necessary to do something, there may have been better solutions to the problem, but it is too late for that now). the economic crisis has spread all over the world, and hit the major financial institutions of europe quite hard. it has likewise caused loads of trouble in asia and the rest of the world, too. the severity of this crisis has intensified every day for the last month. the stock market plummeted monday and tuesday this week, in apparent distress over the fact that people did not think the $700 billion bailout had solved anything, and how they were seeing the crisis engulf the entire global economy. so what has been going on since the debate between joe biden and sarah palin?

well, barack obama’s support has gotten stronger and stronger, and john mccain’s has gotten weaker and weaker. barack obama is way ahead in the polls now, his numbers skyrocketing since early september when john mccain was ahead. john mccain has had to give up on michigan, which at one point had been a battleground state that could have gone either way, but is now solidly part of obama nation. barack obama now has a huge lead in virginia, which has not voted for a democrat for president since 1964, and he has leads in most other swing states including ohio and florida. his lead in pennsylvania is probably unbeatable, and he will pretty much definitely pick up iowa and new mexico, 2 states that john kerry lost. all the states john kerry won are solidly in the obama column, while a number of key states george w. bush won 4 years ago may vote obama instead of mccain. of course there is still a large number of solidly republican states that john mccain can count on, but they are almost all states with tiny populations and very few electoral votes. only one of them has a huge population, and that of course is texas. all the other states with huge populations are either solidly obama or leaning obama. lately, sarah palin has started viciously attacking barack obama, ever since the day after she lost the debate to joe biden. she has been accusing him of “palin’ around with terrorists”, when she is actually just referring to william ayers, who is only 1 person, not plural. the william ayers thing has been all over the internet since at least last year and it has been talked about for months, especially in august when there were tv commercials about it, and i think the hillary clinton campaign might have used it against barack obama, too. it didn’t work. william ayers was involved in the weather underground when barack obama was in 3rd grade, and they never met until many, many, many years later, and have only met a few times and are not really friends or anything. barack obama served on the board of an organization to help improve chicago’s public schools along with william ayers and a bunch of other people of all political persuasions, both liberal democrats and conservative republicans. i doubt barack obama even knew about william ayers’s past, since i doubt william ayers went around bragging about it all the time, so this guilt-by-association thing is really ridiculous. plus sarah palin is one to talk, given the quality of people she associates with up in alaska. she associates with a controversial preacher from kenya named thomas muthee who led a witch hunt, declaring one woman in an african village to be a witch and demanding that she either accept jesus christ as her personal savior or leave the village immediately. that woman chose none of the above, and then an angry mob came to kill her, but luckily she escaped. then thomas muthee, who led this witch hunt, ends up in wasilla, alaska of all places, and places his hands on sarah palin to bless her so that god makes her governor of alaska, and she ends up giving him the credit for her being elected. talk about crazy! and remember the alaskan independence party? sarah palin has been to several of their conventions (confirmed to have happened in 1994 and 2000) and addressed them a number of times, including this current year, 2008! her husband todd was officially a member until 2002. originally the alaskan independence party leaders said that sarah palin was also a former member until she decided to run for mayor of her town, but they decided to change their tune on that after john mccain chose her as his running mate, and they now deny that she has ever been a member of their organization. the alaskan independence party is a radical far-right anti-american secessionist movement. its founder joe vogler made a number of very radical anti-american statements. for example, once he said “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the american government, and i won’t be buried under their damn flag.” another quote from joe vogler: “i'm an alaskan, not an american. i’ve got no use for america or her damned institutions.” this is from a man the alaskan independence party and the palin family venerate as a hero! yet sarah palin has the guts to use guilt-by-association on barack obama. guess what obama hit back with? he didn’t go after sarah palin, because she isn’t the one running for president. he hit back at john mccain, straight in the nuts, with an exposé of john mccain’s role in the keating 5 scandal. that’s gotta hurt! john mccain was actually best friends with charles h. keating, jr., who is now a convicted felon. this is a million times worse than william ayers, jeremiah wright, or tony rezko, who are are all old news and who failed to win hillary clinton the nomination when she mentioned them. in the keating 5 case, we have an actual instance of john mccain being directly involved in corruption, and this case involved a large bank that needed a government bailout. nowadays, we still have plenty of corruption in government, and more banks needing government bailouts than ever. so, the keating 5 case hits close to home, because it really shows the corruption of john mccain and why he can’t be trusted.

anyhow, tonight we had another debate, the 2nd of the 3 debates between barack obama and john mccain, and the 3rd of the 4 official debates sponsored by the commission on presidential debates. now that barack obama is way ahead of john mccain in the polls both nationally and in swing states, john mccain needed a game-changer, but instead, barack obama ended up winning the debate, according to the polls. what i thought was most notable in this debate was how john mccain said, regarding the $700 billion bailout that he publicly supported and voted for, “my friends, some of this $700 billion ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.” that is a direct quote from tonight’s debate! so john mccain is publicly declaring that he is helping to finance terrorism! that is what HE says! it doesn’t get any better than this! he is attacking himself... we don’t need to say anything other than to replay his own attack against himself and explain how he is accusing himself of financing terrorism. just look at the debate transcript to find that quote! absolutely ridiculous... i can’t believe anyone takes john mccain seriously anymore. he is not a serious contender for the presidency. he proved that a few months ago when he compared barack obama to paris hilton and britney spears. john mccain continues to demonstrate how utterly ridiculous it would be for us to elect him, and what a crazy old man he is. i think john mccain is going through the early stages of senile dementia or maybe even alzheimer’s. i am not joking about this; i am dead serious. john mccain is seriously losing it, and it is sad to see that happen to someone, and downright scary to think of someone with that type of dementia becoming our commander-in-chief. his erratic and inconsistent behavior, his inability to control his campaign staff, his reckless selection of the dangerously underqualified and insane sarah palin, all these signs point to one thing: something is seriously wrong with john mccain, something that was not wrong with him when he ran for president back in 2000. a lot of people who saw him then and are seeing him again now can scarcely believe he is the same person. mostly, these people are professional news reporters who have been trained to report the truth as impartially as humanly possible. so, if he were elected president somehow, here is what i predict would happen: he would be erratic, he would be a loose cannon, he would forget things, he would not be consistent on any issues because he would forget what positions he used to have, and his administration would basically be run by a bunch of other people advising him, who would constantly be fighting each other and jockeying for power in a chaotic mess. if barack obama is elected, which currently has a probability of 89.2% according to fivethirtyeight.com, we will see the exact opposite. barack obama is always calm under pressure and never loses his cool, and internally his campaign has the motto “no drama obama”. he does not tolerate internal fighting or unauthorized leaks to the press, quite the opposite of the mccain campaign. his campaign is slick and well-disciplined because he does not tolerate anything less from them; that is not to say that barack obama is overly strict, harsh, or mean, but rather that he has exceptional leadership capabilities and that his staff are extremely loyal to him. over the weekend, a top mccain staffer said that if the election is about the economy, mccain loses. those types of damaging leaks happen all the time from the mccain campaign, because the mccain campaign is like a sinking ship, all full of leaks. the obama campaign has no leaks, and is much more like a leakproof vessel; you could even compare it to the famously leakproof titanic. despite his current 89.2% projected chance of winning, all it will take to sink that leakproof vessel is a giant iceberg put there by the republicans. so the obama team will need flamethrowers to melt any ice they see in the sea. sorry for mixing metaphors, but it is so fun! anyway, beware the october surprise! i am glad so many states have early voting, because many people will probably vote for obama before election day and before the last-minute mind games that the republicans will inevitably try to pull on everyone. remember 2004 and how a videotape from osama bin laden won george w. bush re-election? maybe the republicans were not behind that al qaeda publicity stunt (i will give them the benefit of the doubt), but there always seems to be some kind of october surprise that helps the republicans out. now, ok, in 2006, the october surprise was the mark foley sex scandal and that won the democrats control of both houses of congress. but usually these october surprises seem to help republicans rather than democrats. i will not let any sort of october surprise change my vote; i am voting for barack obama this november no matter what happens between now and then. there is absolutely nothing that could possibly change my mind on this matter; my mind is more firmly made up than the firm grip of the strongest man in the world.

and you know what? my favorite news network on tv is now msnbc, because they agree with me about supporting barack obama and opposing john mccain. i used to like cnn best, but after years of watching cnn, i got bored with it, bored of wolf blitzer, larry king, and anderson cooper. and don’t even get me started on lou dobbs or on the offerings at headline news of glenn beck and nancy grace! lou dobbs, glenn beck, and nancy grace belong at fox news! what really got me suspicous about cnn is how self-proclaimed conservatives like lou dobbs and glenn beck get their own tv shows, but self-proclaimed liberals, progressives, and democrats do not get anything more than getting to be part of a panel discussion alongside conservative republicans. cnn stacks the deck in favor of the republicans, at least on lou dobbs and glenn beck’s shows, and they provide no balance to this obvious bias. msnbc, on the other hand, has openly embraced liberal bias, but you know what? at least they are honest about it, and don’t go around pretending to be objective and neutral like cnn. i find chris matthews a hell of a lot more interesting than wolf blitzer. now ok, cnn does have one thing going for them, and that is jack cafferty, the grumpy old man who hates republicans. i love watching him. they need more jack cafferty on cnn, to balance out all the lou dobbs, glenn beck, and nancy grace. we need to bring back ted turner and put him in charge of cnn and headline news again. ted turner is someone who i agree with on a lot of things, and he would fix those networks back up so they are as good as they used to be back in the day. and i would never watch fox news; who wants a bunch of right-wing propaganda from rupert murdoch? thanks but no thanks. rupert murdoch already owns a huge number of other media outlets, and i get enough of his propaganda from those. rupert murdoch’s media outlets are only slightly more credible than rev. sun myung moon’s media outlets. and if you don’t know who rev. sun myung moon is, learn how to use google. and then the next time you ever watch tv and see a panelist who is from the washington times, or the next time you see a news story from united press international on the internet or in a newspaper, you will know that it is propaganda from a crazy anti-american korean cult leader who performs huge mass marriages to couples that he selected by looking at photographs of his followers, a cult leader who thinks he is the reincarnation of jesus christ, who is a convicted felon who spent time in jail in the united states for defrauding his followers, who has been honored as the messiah by several republican congressmen, and whose newspaper was ronald reagan’s favorite. rev. sun myung moon symbolizes everything that is wrong with the republican party and its propaganda operations. compared to him, good ole rupert murdoch is a saint.

i would like to finish by giving a shout-out to tom brokaw as well as the moderators of the previous debates: gwen ifill and jim lehrer. aww yeah! those are some serious unbiased journalists right there! while i personally prefer msnbc and its liberally biased coverage, i recognize the importance of having debates moderated by people who are neutral, like them. but it is so cool that now msnbc not only has keith olbermann have his own 1-hour show, but rachel maddow has a show too! she is awesome! i used to listen to air america radio until their organization went bankrupt and the local affiliate switched to espn radio (which is nothing but sports). i can still listen to air america radio on the internet, but it’s not the same as it used to be... they’ve lost al franken, randi rhodes, janeane garofalo, and mike malloy, among others. but rachel maddow has managed to graduate from air america radio to join the elite ranks of cable tv talk show hosts, mostly populated by conservative talking heads. the more remarkable part about rachel maddow getting her own 1-hour tv talk show is that she is a lesbian. now ok, yeah i know, ellen degeneres and rosie o’donnell are also lesbians and they also got their own shows. but ellen lost her job at her sitcom when she came out as a lesbian, and rosie only came out after she stopped having a show, if i recall correctly. i think this might be the first time the people in charge of tv channels actually went out and hired a lesbian on purpose. it is just amazing that our country has come this far. who knows? soon they might even let black people be news anchors on channels other than b.e.t.! oh wait, i just remembered: david alan grier is getting his own black-guy tv news show on comedy central, called “chocolate news”. how could that have slipped my mind? i watch comedy central all the time... for the news. yes, jon stewart and stephen colbert are even better than the folks at msnbc or cnn... better at being funny! they are true professionals... professional comedians! hah! ok, i suck at humor. but seriously, jon stewart and stephen colbert are just as liberal as keith olbermann or rachel maddow; they just turn it into humor instead of having raw outrage like keith olbermann in his special comments. ok, so keith olbermann’s outrage is not as bad as bill o’reilly’s, and there is a great video of bill o’reilly acting insane, and an even better video making fun of it. for some reason the second video got taken down from youtube... maybe bill o’reilly used a team of foxy fox lawyers to get it taken down... but the video is still at barelypolitical.com so that is what i linked to. i guess once you see the video you’ll see why bill o’reilly would want that video taken down off the intertubes. (“intertubes” combines george w. bush’s “internets” with senator ted stevens of alaska’s “the internet is a series of tubes”, for those of you who don’t understand this reference to republican incompetence at understanding the internet.) by the way, if you use the web browser google chrome, type about:internets into your address bar and press enter for a funny joke. it doesn’t work in other browsers, and only works in windows xp, not vista, plus it doesn’t work from a hyperlink, you have to type it in yourself! also, if you want to keep google chrome up-to-date with the latest code, download this utility to switch google chrome to the “dev channel”. for the record, i still use mozilla firefox for pretty much everything, since it has extensions. and firefox 3 has about:robots, plus all versions of firefox have about:mozilla. i can actually link to those and they work in firefox, rather than making you type them into the address bar like about:internets in google chrome. see? firefox is better.