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This one’s for you Rich Miller…
Adam over at Progress Illinois catches Rep. Mark Kirk bending facts, and toeing the Republican line, while trying to explain his vote against unemployed folks.
Bottom line, Rep. Kirk (and his chief, minority leader John Boehner) are claiming that somebody could subvert the intent of this legislation to try and collect unemployment checks after only working for two weeks. While technically that’s possible, as Adam explains such a person would also have to subsist for nearly 9 months on “income” far below the poverty level.
In other words, they’d have to work at not working, and live off literally a few dollars a month to do it. Yet this is Rep. Kirk’s excuse for voting against unemployed Americans. That’s not what I call being a moderate or standing up for Main Street.
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Full disclosure: I’ve met Rep. Kirk on occasion. He’s a nice enough fellow but I clearly disagree with several of his positions and his record in Congress. I have volunteered for his challenger Dan Seals in the past and may do so again in the future.
[bumped]
Rich Miller published the snailmail address for a relief fund created to assist those caught in the Wabash River flooding in central Illinois. Help if you can.
Apparently this fellow named Larry Temple thinks that some regular ol’ workaday dad from the suburbs, who plays catch with his kids and grows veggies in his backyard, is “radical”.
Or maybe he thinks that whole “all men created equal” stuff that our country is founded on is “radical”….
Or maybe he’s just confused. And unsure. And insecure. 
What is clear, however, is that Larry hasn’t figured out that fighting for fairness and standing up for justice, equality and honest-to-goodness, pure-as-sunshine love is actually the right thing to do — hardly “radical.”
That said, I wonder if Larry goes to gay bars with Petey LaBarbera and Dave Smith to help with “research”.
Perhaps Larry would give folks the honor of explaining why guys such as himself so loathe people that are in love with each other that they’re willing to denounce and discriminate against them — and hypocritically call their anti-family stance “family values”.
Regardless, thanks for the compliment and the link, Larry.
The setup from a Newsweek interview with Republican presidential nominee John McCain:
Q: Want to back up a little bit and talk about press coverage. One of the things that you mentioned in your speech in New Orleans was that you felt that the media hadn’t recognized or had overlooked some of the attributes that Hillary Clinton had brought to the race. And I wondered—
MCCAIN: I did not [say that]—that was in prepared remarks, and I did not [say it]—I’m not in the business of commenting on the press and their coverage or not coverage…I can’t change any of the coverage that I know of except to just campaign as hard as I can and try to seek the approval of the majority of my fellow citizens.
It is something that the American people will judge, and I won’t complain about it and I won’t praise it. I will just run my campaign and hope that the American people will make a judgment.
(emphasis added for clarity)
The reality, courtesy of Republican nominee John McCain’s own mouth (video clip):
Senator Clinton has earned great respect for her tenacity and courage. The media often overlooked how compassionately she spoke to the concerns and dreams of millions of Americans and she deserves a lot more appreciation than she sometimes receives.
So… Sen. McCain did say exactly that the “media often overlooked” Sen. Clinton’s attributes.
Oh, and Sen. McCain has also complained plenty about media coverage that he doesn’t like.
So which is it: Is Sen. McCain lying or is he really that forgetful about something he said not even a week ago?
And will the BBQ-fed lapdog media bother noticing?
The flooding throughout the Midwest is bringing the Iraq War right to our front doors…
From a fellow in Iowa:
I am in Mason City. Our levees broke Sunday morning. Flood stage is 7 foot and waters are now at 19 feet. Hundreds of homes and businesses are underwater. The City’s water plant was flooded and the entire city of 30,000 is without potable water. A couple of hours ago the main electric substation flooded and failed and much of the city is without power. People remain in flooded homes. Early tonight I saw people wandering the streets not knowing where to go. There are entrie areas of the city with NO emergency personnel on hand.
NOBODY from the outside has come to help. Our local first responders are exhausted and overwhelmed. Small rural towns downstream tonight are being devasted. Levees everywhere are failing. Calls for help in these small towns have been unmet. Portions of our local guard are in Iraq.
The homeland has been left unprotected and people are suffering horribly.
(emphasis added)
And from further down in that blogpost:
The reason we organize ourselves into communities is to deal with the vagaries of man and nature we can’t effectively handle by ourselves.
Just like the wildfires in California and the bridge collapse in Minneapolis were likely made worse because “tax relief” won the day over public safety, this is the effect of small/no government attitudes and backassward policy priorities.
Nobody’s perfect but anyone should be able to predict that, at some point in time, a river will flood and we ought to be prepared. Each state’s National Guard is supposed to be a part of that preparation. When the Iowa Guard is off in the Middle East instead of at home, Americans are put in harm’s way.
It’s the Iowa National Guard, not the Iraq National Guard.
Umm. What?
I must’ve been changing a diaper or getting a jar of pureed pears ready when McCain (who agrees with President Bush that healthcare for kids is bad) said this because I don’t remember this from his speech at the suburban New Orleans ‘high school gym’.
I have to say, I disagree with McCain on giving bottled hot water to babies — thirsty or not. I don’t believe in scalding infants; not my thing.
(Yes, people. He clearly misspoke. It’s a Friday funny.)
Break out the Courvoisier…
The Trib had a front page article today describing how presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain might be able to pick up some women who are former Hillary Clinton supporters. Indeed, there are now groups of former Clinton supporters vowing to back McCain simply out of spite.
That’s too bad because, knowing Sen. McCain’s record on women’s and family issues, it’s a bit difficult to imagine that anyone who had previously supported Hillary Clinton would willingly support McCain.
If the intent is simply to spite the Dems then piching support for Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney I could understand… but John McCain?
The Trib quotes a professor who explains why some may be so persuaded…
“To the extent that McCain can make Obama look like a big risk—make them feel a little leery about the change he might bring about—he might be successful in attracting them,” said Susan Carroll, senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “He does have that independent reputation and that reputation of thinking for himself and not necessarily going along with the Republican Party line, which I think a lot of people find appealing.”
Ah, so that’s it. The media-propped myth that Sen. McCain somehow has an “independent” aura and doesn’t toe the Republican party line…
Sure. Once one actually looks at the facts, it’s clear that this “reputation” is not deserved but is instead carefully manicured with a mix of sweet and sour: tasty bbq ribs when the media is good and does something McCain likes but belligerence against the media when they dare tell an unflattering, but true, story.
That’s why he voted with the Bush agenda 95% of the time last year and 100% of the time so far this year. Might independent there.
I’m sure that’s also why McCain decided that Bush’s veto of healthcare for kids was a good idea. Little kids don’t ever get sick or hurt, do they? So what if their moms and dads can’t afford health insurance. It’s not like moms care about their children anyway, right Senator?
John McCain’s “not necessarily going along with the Republican Party line” must also be why he supported his party’s filibuster and eventually sinking of the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act. The Lilly Ledbetter Act was named after a woman who found out her employer, Goodyear Tire, was paying her less then men. It would’ve rebuffed the recent conservative Supreme Court’s legislation from the bench decision to essentially allow companies to continue paying women less, so long as they don’t get caught. Instead of being concerned about whether or not women were being paid less for doing the same work as men, McCain was instead so concerned about companies being sued that he completely skipped the vote.
Speaking of paying women an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, McCain also voted against increasing the national minimum wage. What one demographic has far more people at minimum wage than any other? Women. Yet John McCain voted to filibuster an increase in the minimum wage.
Finally, it’s also abundantly clear that, after much flippity-floppity dilly-dallying, John McCain finally came out and admitted he’d like to overturn Roe v. Wade. After all, who best to decide what a woman should do than (no, not her and her doctor) some Senator from Arizona? It is quite surprising that supposedly liberal women who were supporting a pro-choice such as Sen. Clinton are now planning to switch gears and work for an anti-choice and anti-privacy candidate like McCain.
So, right here, in the span of just a few paragraphs and a few minutes of research are four pieces of legislation directly affecting women which clearly illustrate McCain’s positions — positions that are decidedly in line with his party and against women.
Unfortunately, this sort of research appears to be too much work for Trib reporters who comment on this stuff on the front page of a national newspaper. (To be fair, the Trib did devote a baker’s dozen words to McCain’s opposition to equal pay and the minimum wage… buried in the second to last paragraph… after Obama supporter Sen. Claire McCaskill [D-Missouri] apparently mentioned it.)
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UPDATE: So-Called Austin Mayor notes that there is likely to be little to worry about. I agree (Clinton Supporters for McCain had all of about 5k members nationwide … If they all lived in Florida 
it might be one thing, but let’s be honest: 5000 people out of the millions who will vote in November is a drop in the bucket.
Still, I find the boiling threats of “but we’ll vote for McCain” to be hokum given how his adherance to the Bush legacy and failed conservative policies is completely antithetical to all the issues for which Sen. (and Pres.) Clinton stand.
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UPDATE 2: London’s Daily Mail newspaper notes that McCain’s own associates consider him to be a womanizer:
‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.’
Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled [first] wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons [...]
Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.
‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.
‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.
‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’
With leaders like these, why is it that the partisan conservatives keep (falsely) blathering on about “family values”?
