If you watched last night’s debate, you probably saw John McCain claim that he isn’t President Bush. Well, it’s true, they do have different DNA, but here’s the Obama campaign’s response:

The following picture was taken of a recent absentee ballot sent out to about 300 residents of Rensselaer County, New York.

Notice something wrong there? Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, that does actually say “Barack Osama“. I’m willing to accept the word of the officials responsible for this that it was indeed accidental, but there’s just no way that this was a simple wrong key press. “S” and “B” are no where near each other on the keyboard – you don’t even type them with the same finger. Someone clearly was thinking Osama when they typed his name and typed it wrong without realized that their id had overpowered their conscious mind. That happens. There are plenty of times when I’ve wanted to type one word and my mind just typed out something else, but I always catch it with good old fashioned proofreading.

So what’s the lesson to be learned here? With something as important as a Presidential election ballot – especially in the shadow of the 2000 election fraud that elected George W. Bush – any and every ballot being shipped out to early voters or presented to them at the voting booth should be thoroughly proofread by multiple officials.

I’m not normally one to encourage John McCain to make a change that would help his campaign, as I’ve made it pretty clear to regular readers here that I lean left, but he desperately needs to stop using the phrase “my friends”. It comes out of his mouth in just about every other sentence during his stump speeches and, frankly, I shudder every time he says it. During last night’s debate, for example, McCain uttered the words “my friends” nineteen times. He said “my friends” more than he mentioned the middle class, health care, energy, deficit, debt, and change — combined. I know he isn’t going to read my humble and insignificant blog, but someone needs to get across to him, for the sake of his dwindling political career, that referring to his audience as “my friends” makes him come across as sleazy. It is the kind of phrase you expect to hear at a used car dealership, flea market, or pawn shop, where someone is trying to sell you something whose value is clearly less than the price they’re pushing. The argument can be made that what the presidential candidates are doing is selling themselves to the American people, but any good salesman knows that you don’t get happy repeat customers with sleazy tactics. That said, for the sake of his stump speech and so that I can stop cringing whenever I watch the news, someone close to him needs to tell John McCain to stop saying “my friends”. In fact, I have typed the words “my friends” fewer times in this post about John McCain excessively using the term “my friends” half as many times than he said “my friends” in last night’s debate.

He’s visibly full of shit when he refers to voters as his friends, so do you want to know who his friends really are? Here’s the answer:

Although the registration information is hidden, if you swing by the domain VoteForTheMILF.com (Creation Date: 30-aug-2008) you will notice that without passing go and without collecting two hundred dollars, you will be instantly redirected to JohnMcCain.com. If you’ve never been before (or if you cleared your cookies) it will first direct you to Palin’s intro video.

Sure, this could just be some crazy supporter’s idea, so here’s the proof:

• The URL was registered within about two days of McCain’s decision to select Palin.
• The dot net and dot org counterparts also redirect to the McCain site.
• The URL is held by the same registrar as JohnMcCain.com.
• A simple trace route shows that voteforthemilf.com/net/org and johnmccain.com are hosted on the same IP: 64.203.107.149

This campaign never ceases to amaze me with its underhanded political tactics.

I’ve talked before about how McCain’s attempt to paint Obama as an elitist is a joke, and I just found the following picture elsewhere on the web and just had to post it here.

No idea where this originated, so if you have the original link feel free to reply with it.

Politicians love it, the MSM (mainstream media) loves it, and apparently the general public loves it. So, what is the most overused and clichéd political term in the last few decades? The suffix “-gate”. For some reason every single new political scandal, no matter how big or small, needs to be renamed by the MSM to {insertscandalhere}gate. This all obviously stems from the original “gate”, Watergate, and it was funny, witty, and original for a while there, but now it is just plain overused. How overused, you might ask? Wikipedia has a list of 60 scandals which have been given a “-gate” suffix, and that isn’t including the original Watergate. The most recent excessive abuse of this politicized suffix, Sarah Palin’s home grown “Troopergate“, is repeated countless times a day over the last few weeks on every single MSM outlet to the point where a scandal that should have just stayed localized to Alaska is now a household term across the united states.

When will it end? If the MSM has their way, probably never. They seem to love the -gate suffix. Networks like MSNBC and CNN seem to use it more than common words like “the”. What I’m proposing is that we give some dignity back to the English language and instead of just creating a new word for every single scandal ever, how about just going back to using the word “scandal”. Troopergate has nothing to do with gates, so why don’t we just refer to it as something more descriptive like, say, “Governor Palin’s State Trooper Scandal”. Sure, it’s a bit more bulky, but every time the MSM says it that’s just five fewer seconds of worthless filler.

Nothing I can say can possibly prepare you for what Olbermann had to say during last night’s Countdown, so just watch it for yourself.

My wife and I were quite literally laughing out loud through this entire segment. There’s nothing I can say that would properly set up this clip from last night’s Daily Show, so just watch it.

That not enough for you? How about an encore with the Daily Show’s version of McCain’s biography:

1. Back in the late 90’s when she was elected Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she was almost recalled because shortly after entering office, she fired the Police Chief and Library Director for not supporting her in her 1996 race for Mayor. She didn’t even have the Republican courtesy to deny and lie: Her official reason for the firings was that they were “not fully supporting her efforts to govern”. (source)
2. She got away with the above tactic as Mayor, so why not try it again as Governor? Once she got the state’s top job, she promptly fired public safety commissioner Walt Monegan. This time, however, it wasn’t because he hadn’t supported her in her run for Governor. He had the gaul to not follow her administration’s pressure to fire a state trooper – who had divorced her sister. (source)
3. She actually had the chutzpah to go on some joke of a radio show and heartily laugh at accusations by the hosts that her apparent arch nemesis, State Senate President Lyda Green (a cancer survivor) is a “cancer” to the state of Alaska and a “bitch”. This wasn’t when she was just Mayor, either. This was in 2008, while she was Governor. An op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News referred to her appearance on the show as “plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I’ve ever seen from a politician.” (source)
4. Everyone already knows that Iraq was a war for oil, but any republican running for any big office, especially that of the vice president, should probably know not to admit that. That memo, however, apparently skipped over Sarah Palin. In her words, “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.” Where exactly does she want to get those domestic oil supplies? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (source)
5. If you’re think Sarah Palin lacks national security experience, Cindy McCain says you’re wrong. Why? Because Alaska is close to Russia. Yes, you read that correctly, Cindy McCain actually thinks that proximity to Russia makes the governor of Alaska qualified with national security experience. I don’t even know how to react to this, but I guess they’re taking the whole “throw shit against the wall and see what sticks” approach to campaign strategy. (source)

Are there more reasons than these five that make Sarah Palin a crappy choice for McCain’s veep? Of course there are, but these are the 5 that I think will cause the Republicans the most grief. I’ve got no complains whatsoever about John McCain going about his campaigning in a half-assed way without thinking things through or thoroughly vetting important people like, say, his running mate, but he may just want to save the taxpayers money and just call Barack Obama to concede defeat now.

If you’re flying in to my former residence of Minneapolis (or, I suppose, St. Paul), you may notice a large billboard off of I-494 when leaving the airport. It is of the larger-than-life John Stewart along with the rest of his Daily Show crew welcoming Republicans to the Republican National Convention. Want to see it? You’ve got two options. Fly in to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, or just look at the picture below.