This is a losing argument for Sen. John McCain and the GOP and it just shows how both are completely out of touch with the American people. They are basically admitting that either is going to lose so vote for me.   We have absolutely nothing in terms of policies to help you and the policies proposed by our democratic opponents are far superior than anything we can come up with so vote for us because we don’t want them to be successful.  Rediculous closing argument. 

To be effective, a Democratic president needs the support of a Democratic congress.  We need a real break from the last eight years and a completely new direction.  Lets do what we need to do in order to make that happen.  This will be a very close race, so please VOTE and encourage others to vote.

And by the way, Joe the plumber, who makes over a quarter million dollars a year, is not your average Joe.  To compare this plumber who is making over $250,000 a year to Joe sixpack or your average Joe who makes under $50,000 a year is insulting to our intelligence.  The McCain campaign believes that because his name is Joe and he is a plumber that they can bamboozle voters into believing that this guy is your average American struggling to make ends meet in this floundering economy.  Well Joe is quarter millionaire Joe.  Yes, Joe who makes more than 95% of Americans will have to pay the same tax percentage that was paid by that tax bracket during the Clinton administration……you remember, when the economy was flourishing.  The amazing irony, as highlighted by Sen. Obama, is that had Joe the plumber been receiving the tax cuts for the middle class that Obama proposes when Joe was working 12-hour days and trying to save enough money to buy his plumbing business, Joe the plumber could have bought his plumbing business alot sooner than he has under the Bush-McCain tax plan.

In the end, I couldn’t do it. My California ballot arrived in the mail today, and I opened it fully intending to vote for John McCain. I filled out the state propositions first — yes on 8, no on everything proposing a new bond or new spending — then the local offices, straight Republican excepting Kevin Johnson for (nonpartisan) Sacramento mayor. Finally, the vote for President of the United States: an academic exercise in California, where Barack Obama will surely win by a crushing margin. But good citizenship demands voting as if it matters. Do I believe in John McCain? Not as much as I used to. Do I believe in Sarah Palin? Despite my early enthusiasm for her, now not at all. Do I believe in the national Republican Party? Not in the slightest — even though I see no meaningful alternative to it. So, my choice for President in 2008, scrawled in my ballot as an act of futile protest, is Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. If nothing else, I am confident this is the first of several votes I will cast for him in years to come.

I guess that we should not be surprised by McCain or the Republican party when it comes to the level of distraction in which they will engage in order to steal this election.  The swift boatee has now become the swift boater.   The fact that the McCain is banking on a not so silent whisper campaign of racism as it’s primary campaign strategy is dishonorable and pathetic.  It also speaks to the erratic, ridiculous, and spasmodic  nature of the Arizona senator’s managing style.  For example, lets discuss the transition plans of both candidates shall we?  McCain’s transition team is nonexistent…McCain has decided not to worry about such things now because he doesn’t want to jinx it.  Yes, that is actually his true reason and spoken like a true gambler I might add.  This is unprecedented.  No primary candidate in history has ever not had an elaborate and intricate plan of transition into the White House for when the current occupant exit.  Why…because the new occupant has to hit the ground running and will not have time to engage in the very detailed vetting process of making appointments, staffing key positions, developing policy positions, etc.  Obama on the other hand has developed an elaborate network that is staffed with dozens of key people with very impressive resumes to help prepare for his possible move to the White House in January 2009.   It has never been more critical that the transition from one administration to the next is as seamless as possible given the current state of our nation’s affairs.  I guess McCain’s plan is to just wing it.

Finally, this is a time that we as a people need to come together and unify the country to try and navigate our way out of our current economic adversity.  However, McCain and his campaign has decided that divisiveness and winning at all cost is much more important.  Apparently, the current state of our nation in crisis is a distant last when it comes to the unbridled desires of John McCain.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is offensive. 

As for McCain’s claim that he wants to buy up home mortgages and renegotiate those mortgages at the ”face” value of those homes….really?  Is that why McCain’s own party tried to prevent and intimidate the citizens of Michigan affected by foreclosures from voting?   Yea…somehow it is doubtful that McCain or his party has the interest of  citizens caught up in the subprime debacle at the top of their priority list.  And by the way…this is a proposal that has already been passed by Congress and is existing law.  And guess what, Sen. Obama endorsed a similar, better idea two weeks ago and the proposal is included in the $700 billion dollar bailout package.  So McCain’s claim that it is his idea is completely false.  The a better proposal and law is already on the books and had McCain did a search on “the Google” he could have found out that information before claiming the bad idea as his own.   McCain has been in Washington for 26 years, where was all the concern or effort to help “put Americans back to work” during his 26 year tenure?  All of a sudden, now that he is running for President, McCain is a friend of the working class.  Sen. McCain is again trying to mislead the American people.  We do not trust you to do what you claim because of the history of you and your campaign misleading the public.  

As for McCain’s claim that we are sending $700 billion dollars a year to countries that do not like us very much…he repeats this false claim in most of his speeches regarding energy independence.  Factcheck.org had this to say:

“We’ve got to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t want us very – like us very much” ([McCain] actually used the figure three times in the debate.) He’s talking about what we spend importing oil, and he’s said the same thing at the last debate and numerous other times. At current oil prices, the correct figure is about $493 billion. About a third of that goes to Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom, which were still on the friendly side of the ledger last time we looked.

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

A McCain aide confirmed the move and chalked it up to the state’s Democratic tilt and the resources Obama had put in place there.

“It was always a long shot for us to win,” said the aide.  

McCain will now turn his attention to bolstering his defenses in Ohio and Florida while putting more resources into Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and the second congressional district of Maine, where there is a sole electoral vote available.  

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We’re not the ones trying to blow this up; it’s the House Republicans.”

“I know, I know,” Paulson replied.

Until McCain air-dropped down onto Capitol Hill, after an almost six month absence, and caused a break down of the negotiations, Congress was on its way to sealing the deal.  The fundamentals of the deal had been agreed upon and both sides were on their way to a developing consensus.  Then McCain showed up.  A blind man can see through this very obvious and desperate attempt to resuscitate an ailing campaign that is caught in a downward spiral.  The consensus of Republicans and Democrats on th Hill is that McCain severely disrupted the negotiation process by dropping in and injecting presidential politics and partisanship into an almost completed bipartisan effort.  The Arizona senator did not propose an alternative plan, McCain came to DC to cause chaos for the sake of causing chaos.  He was silent almost the entire time during the meeting with Bush.  No offering of solutions or even possibilities.  But it is essential that he be on Capitol Hill at this time (snark). 

House Republicans, consistent with McCain’s belief and tacit support, propose that the bailout be funded through private money.  They also propose a suspension  of  “mark-to-market regulatory rules for long-term assets.”  More deregulation!! Seriously!  The proposal has already been rejected as not feasible by Secretary Paulson, a member of the Republican party by the way.  Free-market, free-market, free-market, free of all government regulation was McCain’s public mantra before last week.  The proposal by the House Republicans is a completely ridiculous non-starter and an obvious ploy by House Republicans to help McCain with his excuse not to show up at the debate tonight and face the American people.  Such Republicans claim that Paulson’s plan “fundamentally alters the nation’s free-market system in that it broadly socializes firms’ money-losing mortgage assets and places the U.S. on a slippery slope whereby profits will also be nationalized.”  Last week, McCain listed his conditions for a bailout plan, the bipartisan proposal included such conditions.  Apparently,  McCain looked at his falling poll numbers and changed his mind.  Lets call it what it is, McCain is gambling with the American economy in order to rehabilitate his campaign.  He is willing to gamble America’s standing in the world to win this election.  And by the way, the world is listening.  The German Minister of Economics is now saying that America will no longer be a powerful nation.  McCain has always been a gambler but now he is a gambler gambling with someone elses money.  McCain first, Country second.

The debate on Friday was to focus on Mr. McCain’s perceived strength, foreign policy. Mr. McCain had not planned to devote large blocks of time to debate practice as did Mr. Obama, who was holing up with a tight circle of advisers at a hotel in Clearwater, Fla., on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to prepare. Mr. McCain had a preparatory session on Wednesday afternoon at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, but advisers said it had been interrupted by his decision, announced immediately afterward, to suspend his campaign 

For the record, though McCain claims that his suggestion is an effort to rise above politics, his decision to delay the debate could not be more political.  The polls came out yesterday showing Sen. Obama with a growing lead and McCain and his campaign panicked.  Obama is within four points of McCain in West Virginia!!!!!!  West Virginia is solid red country!!!  They realized that Sen. Obama has the wind at his back and the McCain campaign are trying to turn off the fan with a political stunt because they can’t do so with a good economic plan (they don’t have one).   Not only does McCain think that the current situation warrants a delay of his debate but warrants a canceling of the vice presidential debate.  Seriously?????  Do they really think that the American people are going to put Palin in the White House without hearing her debate and speak in a non-McCain staged environment.  McCain does not sit on any of the relevant committees that are currently in deep negotiations.  Several Congressmen have come out and said that McCain’s presence would actually hurt the process.   The crisis began a week ago..you remember……when McCain said that “the fundamentals of our economy is strong.”  Why didn’t McCain cancel the debate at that time?  McCain appears frantic and erratic……he does not appear to be the steady leader we expect of a future President.   If we had a debate in 1934 during D-Day we think that McCain can make his way down to Ole Miss without the the nation falling into a vortex.  You need to be able to multitask as the leader of the free world.  What’s next…..should we suspend the election until McCain catches up?  The main stream media has rejected McCain’s latest ploy as pure politics. 

It was stated best in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:

Last we checked, the President of the United States was still George W. Bush, the Secretary of the Treasury was still Henry Paulson, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was still Ben Bernanke, and Congress still had 533 members not running for President who are at least nominally competent to debate and pass legislation.

So count us as mystified by Senator John McCain’s decision yesterday to suspend his campaign and call for a postponement in Friday’s first Presidential debate so that he and Barack Obama can work out a consensus bill to stabilize the financial system. This is supposed to be evidence of leadership?

 Washington Post

Can McCain pull this off - persuading the public to forget how he and his fellow Reagan Republicans changed the nation’s economic rules in ways that allowed Wall Street to run amok, and refocusing its attention on his decisiveness at this moment of crisis? I doubt it…….McCain’s ploy was transparent.

The Dallas Daily News

Democrats accused Mr. McCain of pulling a stunt to halt a slide in the polls. They also tweaked him for declaring the economic situation so dire it requires suspension of his campaign, a week after he declared the fundamentals of the economy are sound.

Some independent analysts agreed. “It is a stunt. It is a ploy,” said David S. Birdsell, dean of the school of public affairs at Baruch College in New York, an expert on presidential debates.

He called it a “very high-risk strategy” for Mr. McCain to take responsibility for brokering a solution to the economic crisis. “He’s not president yet,” Dr. Birdsell said, adding that pulling out of a debate is unprecedented. “That notion that we take one of the most sacred obligations and rituals of American politics and suspend it because there’s an urgent national question is highly problematic.”

Rocky Mountain News (CO):

If Winston Churchill could leave London in December 1941 and travel to America to address a joint session of Congress even as British troops in the Far East were reeling under Japanese attacks, somehow we think John McCain can make his way down to Oxford, Miss., for a debate Friday evening without imperiling the future of America. In this case, Barack Obama is right.

New York Times Editorial

We don’t know if Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama will do any good back in Washington. But Mr. McCain’s idea of postponing the Friday night debate was another wild gesture from a candidate entirely too prone to them. The nation needs to hear Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain debate this crisis and demonstrate who is ready to lead. 

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential”

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed? “

McCain was also one of the Senators who helped pass the deregulation bill that caused the current crisis.  McCain had this to say about the bill’s passing on 60 Minutes last night:

Q: In 1999, you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?

McCAIN: No. I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.

If you had any doubt as to how a McCain administration would handle the current financial crisis, the above quote is your answer. Incompetence and denial, denial, denial, denial.  McCain is a pure free-market ideologue.  He believes that the government should get out of the way and let the private sector regulate itself….well it is that exact ideology that is directly responsible for the greatest collapse of the financial industry since the Depression.  To put the cherry on top, the McCain campaign refuses to rule out that Phil Gramm, architect of the deregulation bill that caused this crisis and referred to Americans as a “nation of whiners,”  will be the Treasury Secretary in a McCain administration.  Also, remember McCain’s plan, until last Friday, to privatize social security?  Imagine the state the nation’s social security program had we followed McCain’s advice and invested in stock market.  Thanks for everything Senator McCain but it is really time to turn the page.

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

……..

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Sen. Chuck Hagel said to the Omaha World-Herald 

“But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.” 

So is Palin qualified to be president?

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

Ross Douthat agrees at the Atlantic:

Now that we’ve seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there’s no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it’s just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.

And in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen lets loose on McCain:

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though….

His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

In the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward

In the current Weekly Standard, conservative Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Sarah Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

“If John McCain’s top economic advisor doesn’t think he can run a corporation, how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis? Apparently even the people who run his campaign agree that the economy is an issue John McCain doesn’t understand as well as he should,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.