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By Elliot D. Cohen $17.14
By Robert Scheer $10.00
$20
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 Wikimedia/Gryffindor
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By Robert Fisk — Let us now praise famous men. And after yet another U.S. presidential candidates’ debate of awesome sterility I’m referring principally to one of the first journalists to understand war and, so far as he could, to check his sources: Thucydides.
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 youtube.com
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Thus far this election season, we’ve witnessed a number of scare tactics cooked up by conservatives hoping to scare the bejeezus out of voters who might even consider choosing Barack Obama over John McCain, and the fun isn’t over yet.
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Venerable Britcom star John Cleese has a thing or two to say about the U.S. election, speaking on behalf of the world, or at least Europe, or at least himself, about George W. Bush, Barack Obama and a certain vice presidential candidate who reminds Cleese of “a nice-looking parrot.”
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Uh, in what way does putting Barack Obama on a food stamp mock-up, surrounded by fried chicken, ribs and watermelon, not read as racist?
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 blog.wired.com
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By way of a response to the McCain camp’s claims about Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN, Obama’s campaign has put in a request to Attorney General Michael Mukasey to “turn over any investigations of voter fraud or voter suppression to Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy, the same special prosecutor recently appointed to investigate the U.S. attorney firing scandal,” according to CNN.
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 stealbackyourvote.org
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As John McCain and GOP operatives rattle their sabers about ACORN’s alleged “voter fraud” tactics, tag-team investigators Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have released some truly scary findings, in the latest Rolling Stone, from their investigation into Republican efforts to steal the 2008 presidential election.
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s debate performance almost certainly did him good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe the Plumber’s view that Obama is some kind of socialist.
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When Sen. John McCain finally appeared on “Late Night” on Thursday, David Letterman didn’t let him forget that he had stood Letterman up last month. Later, McCain joked, “I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation.”
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After enduring many grueling weeks of campaigning and three tense debates, John McCain and Barack Obama turned up in tuxes for Thursday night’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to cut loose and try out some lighter material on a crowd ready to laugh, and they laughed as well—at themselves and (especially) at each other.
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By Amy Goodman — The 2008 presidential election may see the highest participation in U.S. history. Voter-registration organizations and local election boards have been overwhelmed by enthusiastic people eager to vote. But not everyone is happy about this blossoming of democracy.
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By William Pfaff — Military and economic disasters have caused Europeans and European governments to view the United States in a new, unflattering light.
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 unconfirmedsources.com
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During Wednesday night’s debate, Barack Obama told John McCain that the McCain campaign’s intense focus on Obama’s ties to former Weatherman Bill Ayers “says more about your campaign than it does about me.” Updated
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The term “health of the mother” is a coded term used by extreme pro-abortionists to mislead the public about their nefarious intentions, as John McCain suggested during Wednesday’s presidential debate. Or it could just mean “health of the mother.”
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Warrantless wiretapping makes for a rollicking good time at the National Security Agency, according to moral crusader Stephen Colbert, who’s not above a little dramatic re-enactment of his own biblically inspired carnal fantasies (for illustrative purposes only).
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Bill Boyarsky — After Wednesday’s big debate, McCain-Palin volunteers celebrated what they considered a big victory for their presidential candidate. But the real action was taking place in courts miles away.
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 AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Things really aren’t going well for John McCain, but then he has only himself to blame. Take Joe the Plumber, whom McCain mentioned more than 20 times in Wednesday’s debate. For the record, Joe’s name is Sam, and he’s not a plumber.
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 AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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Although the pundits were impressed with John McCain’s debate performance, the polls showed another win for Barack Obama, who once again kept his cool against an angry, negative opponent.
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By Marie Cocco — The last thing we need is another “economic stimulus” package. What we need is a jobs package. And we ought to start calling it that.
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 solvingpoverty.org
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Conservatives are on the march against the community organization ACORN, but what exactly is it and who pays for it? Actually, it’s many, many things, and it’s funded by a mix of labor union money, government grants (which really drive conservatives crazy) and charitable contributions from large foundations.
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Sarah Palin was supposed to attract women to the GOP ticket, but her charm hasn’t worked with the Feminist Majority, which is running this ad to tell voters that “a McCain and Palin win hurts women.”
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Here’s what one McCain-Palin supporter had to say about Barack Obama: “I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash, because we’re not.” No, the people who think that may not be trash, but they are full of nonsense, as are those in this clip who declare that Obama is a terrorist.
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Now we know where John McCain has been getting his campaign ideas: 1960s camp television. My friends, who is the Batman? And why is he always palling around with criminals?
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 360 gamer Jeffson
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If it seems that you can’t escape Barack Obama’s ubiquitous smiling mug no matter where you go, be careful to not turn on your Xbox. Obama has become the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a video game. Among the games are the popular “Madden ‘09” football and “Burnout: Paradise” racing.
Posted on Oct 15, 2008
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 AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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By Bill Boyarsky — From the Southern California suburbs to Ohio’s Appalachia, places that have not been especially friendly to African-American candidates, Sen. Barack Obama seems to be convincing a substantial number of whites that their votes should be determined by their economic troubles rather than race.
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Keith Olbermann took time on “Countdown” Tuesday night for a “Special Comment” about the outbreak of hostility toward Barack Obama at recent McCain-Palin rallies, holding John McCain directly responsible for stirring up the crowds. “These people are speaking for you,” Olbermann insisted.
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“I wrote a posting—I guess they’re called,” says neophyte blogger and newly discharged National Review columnist Christopher Buckley, describing the first step in a process that began with his confession that he was breaking with the GOP to vote for Barack Obama and ended with his resignation from the conservative magazine his father founded.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — And the winner is … Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Remember him—the great Democratic president who saved capitalism from the capitalists by reining in their exorbitant greed? Forget the Reagan Revolution heralding a new era of small government, which turned out to be nothing more than a fig leaf for legalized corporate crime. The hero of the hour is FDR.
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 Flickr / buddhakiwi
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The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank found many former Hillary Clinton supporters in Pennsylvania who had a hard time switching to Barack Obama—until Sarah Palin joined the Republican ticket. One Gail Silverberg captures the sentiment: “Hockey moms and lipstick on a pig and six-packs? I don’t want that stuff.”
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Christopher Buckley has resigned from his father’s magazine, with the help of a stiff boot to the rear, thanks to his recent endorsement of Barack Obama. The satirist says he has no hard feelings, but “I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me.”
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“What makes America special is what’s in this room tonight,” says the keynote speaker in this video clip from February 20, 2006. Who was speaking that night? None other than Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Where was he speaking? At Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida, at an immigration rally sponsored by—wait for it—ACORN.
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So, everyone has a relative, or perhaps a neighbor, who has spread warnings in hushed tones about Barack Obama’s years of secret indoctrination at a Muslim madrassa (gasp!) in Indonesia—as though affiliating with a Muslim community of any description is cause for concern—a rumor that has been disproved many times. Here’s a fun look into the origin of the chain e-mail that started that particular smear.
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The parents of “Gossip Girl” stars Blake Lively and Penn Badgley might have considered pulling the lever for Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Nov. 4 ... if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
Posted on Oct 14, 2008
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 Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has laid out his plan for how he would help Americans recover from the recent shocks to the domestic and international markets. He took the action on Tuesday, a day later than he initially said he would and a day after Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama released his own economic plan—and McCain’s timing was not lost on the Obama campaign.
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 AP photo / Jim Mone
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?
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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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Christopher Hitchens has reached an endorsement by process of elimination. John McCain, he writes, isn’t up to the job, while “the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.”
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 Flickr / Allison Harger
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Barack Obama unveiled his $60-billion economic rescue plan on Monday and urged Washington not to wait for a new president to take up his proposals. The Obama plan includes tax breaks for companies that hire new workers, a short moratorium on foreclosures and, with an eye on job creation, federal financing for public works and infrastructure projects.
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You know it’s troubs when McCain campaign spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer turns on The New York Times’ resident McCain campaign strategist, William Kristol—and on Fox News, no less—claiming he’s fallen for the Obama party line. Over to you, Bill.
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 Collage: commons.wikimedia.org / senate.gov
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After Team McCain’s negative strategy over recent days seemed to hurt the Republican’s campaign more than help it, John McCain took a new tack on Monday, calling off the attack dogs—or at least reining them in a bit—during a speech in Virginia Beach, Va.
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 Flickr / BohPhoto
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William Kristol was becoming apoplectic, Hillary Clinton was sounding optimistic, and the McCain campaign was being perhaps a tad unrealistic—or so read Monday’s political barometer as an ABC/Washington Post poll indicated that the Obama campaign had taken a 10-point lead in the presidential race.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
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David Axelrod and Rick Davis of the Obama and McCain campaigns, respectively, dispensed with the niceties on “Fox News Sunday.”
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America has come a long way, says Democratic strategist and CNN personality Donna Brazile, so if Americans don’t vote for Barack Obama, it had better be because of his policies.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went on the attack today, claiming that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has long-standing ties to The Weather Channel.
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 npr.org
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His famous father is now gone, but Christopher Buckley, son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, still apologizes to his “pup” directly for—as Matt Drudge would say, “SHOCK!”—deciding to vote for Barack Obama in this year’s presidential election.
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 youtube.com
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In this time of confusion and strife, it’s a good thing there’s FactCheck.org to shine a light through the political fog that surrounds us all. Or something like that. Anyway, the FactCheck folks took a close look at the McCain campaign’s shadowy little commercial number, “Ayers,” and found it to be problematic on several counts.
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Here’s the video footage of John McCain attempting to calm his riled-up audience by calling Barack Obama a “decent” person (and also not an “Arab,” as one bewildered audience member claims) during a campaign stop in Minnesota on Friday.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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Looks like John McCain is attempting to put a lid on the hostility directed at his rival, Barack Obama, during McCain-Palin rallies, but some of the Republican presidential candidate’s supporters aren’t happy with this suggested change of tone.
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