Soft On Crime

[filkertom]

Oh my FSM, they really have nothing.

The newest line by the Republican party is that Obama is "soft on crime".

Meanwhile, some voters in Nevada have received calls from someone claiming to be from the Obama campaign who offered to help them vote over the phone, i.e., not vote at all.

And this week's New York Times Magazine is going to have an interesting article about the internals of the McCain campaign.

No. Thing.

What interesting campaign stuff have you noticed lately?

ETA: Campaign Comment by Teh Keith.

Comments

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Al Qaeda endorses McCain (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102477.html). Does that mean HE"S a MuslimTerrorist now?

The RNC reimburses a member (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14805.html) who spent $150K on clothes for Sarah Palin. I don't want to hear one more word about $400 haircuts or $1500 suits or Arugula!

[maiac.livejournal.com]

Rachel Maddow was talking about the Al Qaeda "endorsement" and McCain's response to it -- specifically, about the McCain campaign's hypocrisy.

They're saying that Al Qaeda is engaging in reverse psychology: they're "endorsing" McCain because they don't want him to win and they think the endorsement will discourage people from voting for him. But earlier, they used some apparently favorable comments from Hamas about Obama as proof that Terrorists Want Obama To Be President, instead of applying the same logic to those comments.

[skemono.livejournal.com]

I saw the $150K spent on clothes a lot of places, but this MSNBC article had an extra detail:

The RNC is allowed to spend up to $19 million in "coordinated expenses" with the campaign. In September, it spent a a total of $4.4 million. The clothing and styling was part of that, but most was spent on postage for campaign mailings.

150,000 / 4,400,000 = 3.4%

So over three percent of the money the RNC spent on the McCain campaign in September was spent on clothes for Palin.

Yeah, when your opponent is out-funding you by leaps and bounds, you really can afford to spend a percentage of your funds on wardrobes.

[his-spiffyness.livejournal.com]

Those "Al Queda Endorsements" are all about stirring the hornet's nest anyway.

[dubheach.livejournal.com]

stunned by this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

...

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That is fucking astonishing. Seriously, gang, check out that vid. But have your barf bag ready.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

"I'm proud of the people who come to our rallies." --John McCain

[maiac.livejournal.com]

Not campaign, but election-related.

I just heard a news report on WRCJ that 98% of eligible voters are registered in Michigan. NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT. I know not all of them will actually vote, but still.

(Conventional Wisdom is that higher turnout favors Democrats.)

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

It's good to read some good election-related news!

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

One of my friends forwarded something to me by email in which the writer maintained that the polls are all wrong because the polling organisations are all based in predominantly liberal areas and therefore they're all biased against the Republicans. I didn't keep it, unfortunately. The sender hoped it was true.

The same person sent me this, which he seemed to think was funny. I have the most amusing friends.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Heh. Not. If the writer is "last of the few", good riddance.

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

I know that post is supposed to scare us, but having worked in the lower echelons of retail for a few years, it sounds pretty good.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything but I fully expect to have an issue when I try and vote early this week.

We have electronic voting machines in our district. *rolls eyes*

I also fully expect people to be outside the polling place giving "helpful directions on how and where to vote". That's what happened at our last polling location. (We've moved since then.)

A note about the electronic voting machines - most of the time if they are touch-screen machines they can take up to 5 seconds or more to register a "click" so select things slowly and carefully and you should be able to get your vote in as you want it.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

It's not just touch screens that can be quirky. The electronic voting machines in my area use physical buttons down the left and right side of the screen, with lines on the display drawn to the buttons. They're not quite perfectly lined up though. On one of my selections I managed to select the write-in option by mistake. It took me a second to figure out how to fix it, as just backing up and selecting another candidate didn't work.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

I saw a donation ad on the intertubes today. A big blue box with the Obama logo, Obama's name in big latters, and in a small box at the bottom it said "Paid for by McCain-Palin."

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh man. Seriously? Link?

[alverant.livejournal.com]

At a North Carolina college, someone shot a black bear, put Obama signs on it, then dragged it to the middle of the campus.

The other campaign news I hear is from Keith Olberman (sp). I find a lot of it disturbing like how the Justice Dept will rush to investigate anything related to Acorn, but drag their feet when it comes to the Young Republicans doing things like slamming and other attempts to disenfranchise voters. I hate to say it, but despite Obama's lead in the polls his victory isn't assured and if he looses, I'm sure there will be justified claims of voter fraud.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that if he wins there will be justified claims of voter fraud. They'er going to try either way. The question is just how willing the GOP is to be really egregious about it to try to prevent him from winning, especially since enough of them seem to have convinced themselves that the literal physical survival of western civilization hinges on Palin - er, I mean McCain - winning this time. 2004 was ugly enough in some places.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Got a chain mail today saying to disbelieve Snopes because it's owned by a hyper-liberal and that it lies about some of the *true* stuff about Obama, calling it a hoax when there are YouTube videos proving it to be true (things Obama is alleged to have said) ... but without any links to anything to substantiate this allegation.

I really hate either side using insinuation, lies and disinformation to try to say their guy is better, particularly the "our guy is better because the other guy is worse" ... I don't care how good/bad the other guy is, *your* guy has to win my vote (well, me being British means he has no chance of my vote but you get the idea ...)

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

I suspect the folks running Snopes are thrilled about that chain letter. It means they've become sufficiently mainstream (and respected) that people feel the need to discredit them.

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that none of this really surprises me anymore. It angers me, often offends my sensibilities but none of it is terriblly surprising.

Consider a recent flyer the RNC's been sending out with the approval of teh McCain campaign: A jumbo jet flying toward a building, inside it says "Barak Obama isn't who you think he is."

I think I'm pretty much justified in writing off the Republicans. I encourage conservatives to create their own party, or heck go liberterian. You can only go up from here.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit miffed that the other three voters in my family and I all sent for our mail ballots on the same day, the other three have received theirs but I have not. I'm the only one with a change of address though, maybe I made them work harder. If I don't hear anything by Monday I will try to figure out where to call and shake it loose.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

The McCain campaign seems mostly about throwing as much mud as possible -- in public and underhanded -- and hoping some sticks.

I read a recent article about voters in Ohio. It quoted quite a few as saying that they didn't like the job the Republicans have been doing, but under no circumstances would they vote for a black men. (Some added that they'd never vote for a Moslem, either.)

Quite a bit of the mud -- Republican and Mericain -- is sticking.

[skemono.livejournal.com]

This is a bit old, but I remember seeing an Olbermann bit (probably one of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" pieces) where someone was saying that McCain had foreign policy experience in Latin America... because he had slept with a Brazilian model decades ago.

Okay, here's a link to the video. It's the silver medal for worst person in the world: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27057244#27057244

[sazettel.livejournal.com]

I remain in good spirits, and I'll tell you why.

One hundred thousand people in Missouri turned out for the black, Democratic candidate. ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE IN MISSOURI, the deepest part of the Deep South.

All the major national polls, not just some of them, but all of them show Obama ahead with less than two weeks to go. Most of them have him ahead outside the margin of the "Bradley" effect, estimated at 5%.

No state trending Democratic has started to trend Republican. Several states that trended Republican are now trending Democratic.

Republican legislators are letting it be known publically that Palin was a mistake.

Independents are citing Palin as a reason for NOT voting for McCain, so are large numbers of women.

The Joe the Plumber campaign is not shifting the poll numbers, at all.

People are waiting for hours in line to vote early. The vast majority of them are voting Democratic.

McCain can rail all he wants. The Reps. can pull out every dirty trick they know. The odds of him winning this campaign are getting slimmer by the day. The Republicans are already pointing fingers at each other about who lost and the talk has gone from how many seats in the Senate the Dems. might gain to how close they are to getting the filibuster-proof majority. I actually heard a couple of commentators on NPR wondering in shocked voices whether they should consider calling the election for Obama now, because the math simply wasn't working for McCain.

[kayshapero]

I keep remembering the Dixiecrats, and giggling, faintly...

[kayshapero]

Not on the presidential campaign, but a local California measure, proposition 8 has inspired a series of ads by the antis claiming that, OMG, if gay marriage is legal, the schools will tell the kids. That it's legal. That's right - we're supposed to take away someone's rights so nobody will tell the kids that they have them. Head/desk...

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

I had to turn off the TV so that I didn't throw something through the screen when I saw that ad. (No remote = no mute button, our TV is somewhat all-or-nothing.)

[kayshapero]

One party on a mailing list I'm involved in has a habit of "informing" us of scandals about Obama that I'd never heard of... and that if they were real would be flooding the airwaves. Sigh...

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

OK so I'm a little late to the party...

Here's a picture of Ms. Palin that I my dad found. It sure is an "interesting" fashion statement for a Republican:

http://blog.newsweek.com/photos/gagglepix/images/735358/original.aspx

(I'm not hot-linking in case it changes)