Griper Blade: After Stimulus Vote, Republicans Demand More Rope

When the stimulus passed in the House of Representatives, it did so without a single Republican vote. When it passed in the Senate yesterday, it earned a whopping three Republican votes. Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins broke ranks with their party, voting for a watered down version of the bill. Not content to fiddle while the nation burns, these three senators recognized that we're in an honest-to-goodness emergency. Something needed to be done and, despite pressure from their own party, these three senators did something. Not enough, but something.

How real is this emergency? So real that the world economy came close to literal collapse in late 2008. It was then that there was an electronic run on banks "to the tune of $550 billion dollars" within "an hour or two."

According to [Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA)], on September 18, 2008 the Fed tried to "stem the tide" by pumping money into the financial system but it didn't work and decided instead to announce an immediate increase in deposit insurance to $250,000 per account to stop the panic.

Said Kanjorski: "If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

But, of course, when the market and the economy are this bad, the Republican party decided that it would be a perfect time to do a little grandstanding, score some cheap political points with their base, and put on a show of wingnut solidarity. Three senators didn't play along... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Not an End, but a Beginning

Like anyone who followed the 2008 election closely, the inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow seems as much like the end as it does the beginning. If this were a movie, the audience attending the inauguration would applaud wildly as the new president takes the oath of office -- hugs and tears and hats in the air and swelling music -- Barack would look at Michelle and say, "We did it," she'd cry and laugh, and the credits would roll. If it were an especially bad movie, a frustrated John McCain would get tangled up in the bunting and fall off something.

But this isn't Hollywood. History continues endlessly, the credits never roll, the audience never shuffles out of the theater, inspired and made wiser by schmaltzy lessons learned. We're in for four years at least where Barack Obama will both disappoint us and give us reason to celebrate. The movie would end where the presidency begins because the promise of perfection is plausible, depictions of perfection are not. Barack Obama will disappoint -- that's an absolute guarantee -- but it's not unreasonable to hope that the balance of his presidency will lean toward wisdom.

Today, Obama is still "the future president" and all that promise is already showing a ding or two. The choice of Rick Warren to give the convocation is disappointing to many -- myself included. There are some aisles which you shouldn't reach across. Getting this particular wizard to shake the medicine rattle over the proceedings can't be seen as anything other than a mistake. He's homophobic now and he'll always be a homophobe. I always say that meeting someone who's crazy halfway is halfway crazy. There are some compromises you should never make and some prejudices you should never forgive. While you pull them up in prominence, they drag you down with their idiocy... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: 2008 All Over Again

Last night, I wrote that I hate year-end lists. I knew this would somehow come back to bite me, but in my defense, I don't give myself a lot of space to explain myself in the roundups. What I meant was the typical news media lists, which almost always consist of pop culture fluff bound to be completely forgotten as early as the very next year. The other kind of list is the Roster of the Fallen. I hate these, too. Yes, it's sad that we lost people like Studs Terkel and Paul Newman, but their memories are polluted when we pretend that Paul Weyrich was a wonderful and loving lamb of God and that Charlton Heston was anything other than an actor with his emotional meter pegged at "histrionic" and his volume cranked up to eleven.

That said, here's my year end list of things during the presidential campaign that are actually noteworthy. Besides, it's pretty short. As year-end lists go, this one isn't much work for the reader... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: The Exit Interview

Some have called it the "exit interview." President Bush sat down with ABC News' Charles Gibson for an interview, to be broadcast during the nightly news. A few moments are getting all the coverage and they probably should. Bush continues to live in a world all his own, completely isolated from the facts and reality. Still, there are cracks in the bubble and reality seeps in in small quantities. Asked by Gibson, "Was the election in any way a repudiation of the Bush administration?" Bush answered:

I think it was a repudiation of Republicans. And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy. In other words, they made a conscious choice to put him in as President.

I like that last sentence. That ought to kill all that speculation that we elected Barack Obama by accident. We made a conscious choice. Good to know. You ever notice how Bush will say something obvious, then say "in other words" and say something just as obvious? Sometimes the "other words" aren't even other words, just the same words in a different order and in a different tense. It's like he's thinking he's got to say more, so he pads his word count. In other words, he's padding his word count because he thinks he needs to use more words...

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Griper Blade: The Terrorist Candidate

During the election campaign, it definitely got out of hand. Losing and desperate, the McCain campaign tried to capitalize on Barack Obama's weak connection to '60s radical William Ayers. That people confused this attack with a separate email smear campaign saying that Obama was a Muslim and, perhaps, a terrorist himself was probably less than coincidental. Barack Obama was the "soft on terrorism" candidate, which in turn became the "terrorist candidate" in many people's minds. The far right and the racist crowd aren't known for their deep intellect. I know that most people immediately suspect claims that are too good to be true, but I'll never understand how people can fall for claims that seem too bad to be true. If a claim about a candidate is so bizarre that it seems absurd, then guess what? It probably is.

Still, as I said, there are always plenty of dopes who'll fall for anything and it's probably safe to assume that most of those people voted McCain-Palin. But the McCain campaign needed every vote they could get and they weren't extremely picky about where they came from. If someone would cast a ballot for McCain-Palin because they were terrified that Barack Obama was going to sell out America to al Qaeda, then so what? A vote's a vote.

But they were playing with fire. Stupid people can be brutal people and gullible people are about 90% stupid people. The decision to believe that Barack Obama was an actual, honest to goodness terrorist betrays a bad decision-making impulse that goes farther than just that one choice. That decision led to other decisions and those decisions were just as idiotic. Earlier this month, the Telegraph reported that, as the William Ayers talk increased on the stump, there were entirely predictable consequences.

Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

It got so bad that Michelle Obama asked a campaign aide, "Why would they try to make people hate us?"...

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Griper Blade: The White Christian Party

The religious right are crazy. That was the big news broken by conservative columnist Kathleen Parker yesterday. For those of us who've been watching the right wing evangelical movement for decades, this revelation didn't come as much of a shock. In her column, Parker called the religious fanatics on the Republican side of the aisle "the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP."

"Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party," she wrote. "And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that."

But this is a party that has made intellectualism a criminal offense called "elitism." Deep thinkers are not welcome, mostly because they tell uncomfortable truths. The party has made heroes of reactionary dopes who do a "gut check" to make their decisions -- George W. Bush and Sarah Palin both come to mind. The GOP has become a party of high-concept thinkers; if the explanation for a position won't fit on a bumpersticker, it's too complicated. Smarty-pants know-it-alls are not welcome. This has gone beyond anti-intellectualism and has become anti-intellect.

"[T]he GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows," said Parker. "In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle."...

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Griper Blade: Rebuilding the Republican Party

After Tuesday's rout, the Republican party finds itself in pretty bad shape. Beaten and bloodied, rejected and discredited, the task for them is to make the party viable again. The swings states have swung blue and Democratic party head Howard Dean's fifty state strategy saw many of the reddest states turn a little more purple. In John McCain's home state of Arizona, Republicans saw Barack Obama come within shouting distance of winning. At the end, the battleground states weren't the midwest, but in traditionally conservative states. Republicans could take nearly nothing for granted.

So today, top Republicans are meeting to sort out what to do. Rebuilding the party is going to be a long, hard slog, but rebuild it they will try to do.

Jonathan Martin, Politico, Oct. 28:

Two days after next week’s election, top conservatives will gather at the Virginia weekend home of one of the movement’s most prominent members to begin a conversation about their role in the GOP and how best to revive a party that may be out of power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue next year.

The meeting will include a "who’s who of conservative leaders -- economic, national security and social," said one attendee, who shared initial word of the secret session only on the basis of anonymity and with some details about the host and location redacted.

The decision to waste no time in plotting their moves in the post-Bush era reflects the widely-held view among many on the right, and elsewhere, that the GOP is heading toward major losses next week.

Nothing better than to get all the people who screwed everything up in the first place together to find a way to straighten it all out. So far, their band-aid solution has been to repeat that the US is a "center-right" country ad nauseum. Barack Obama -- formerly accused by these same people of being Marxist -- has supposedly won the election by running as a conservative. This new line is everywhere on cable and op-ed pages.

If this is any indication of what they'll come up with from their strategy meeting, then we can expect them to assume that their previous line of BS wasn't any good; they need a new line of BS...

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Griper Blade: Creating a New Mandate

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
-Franklin Roosevelt, comment to reformers

Yesterday, I wrote that the winners of the 2008 election were the people and that the winners shouldn't go home. We can count on Obama to work on the agenda he spelled out on the campaign trail, but there is still a place for activism after your guy wins. While the right is trying to launch an "Obama doesn't have a mandate" narrative, this seems doomed to failure to me, since it requires you to believe BS about what it is you want. I kind of think you're the expert there. You really don't need some jerk explaining to you what you think. As spin jobs go, this one seems a little pointless.

But Obama only has a mandate to do what he proposed in his presidential campaign; restoring tax fairness, reforming health care, rebuilding the economy, getting out of Iraq, investing in infrastructure and green energy, etc. These are the things we can expect the new president to address in his first term.

But there are issues that weren't brought up on the campaign trail. In discussing the president-elect, we tend to forget the sitting president. George W. Bush hid out during the campaign, an invisible president who avoided the public spotlight the way a vampire avoids sunlight. One big issue was fairly successfully avoided by John McCain and that was what the hell to do about George W. Bush and company...

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Griper Blade: Yes We Did

The world is celebrating this morning. In Kenya, there's dancing in the street and a national holiday. In Japan, the toast of the day is "President Obama, Banzai!" (I say we take that one). But it's Chicago that's the temporary center of the universe and they were cheering last night as Barack Obama and Joe Biden lost the title "Senator" and became "President-Elect" and "Vice President-Elect."

The fight didn't last very long -- when Ohio went Obama, it was over. He had more than 200 electoral votes in his pocket at that point and a solid 77 west coast votes in the bank. When Virginia went blue, the extremely improbable became the all-but impossible. AP gave Obama Florida, McCain conceded, and it was over...

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Griper Blade: What Did You Do Today?

It's one of those election day traditions. Every four years, a bunch of media remote trucks show up at Dixville Notch, New Hampshire to report the earliest election results in the nation. The polls open at midnight and everyone in town casts their votes right away. The results? Barack Obama by a nearly three to one margin. Every single Dixville Notchian -- or whatever the hell you call them -- has voted and the results of this 100% turnout is McCain 6, Obama 15. It's the first time in forty years that the town has chosen a Democrat. Only a gazillion more votes to go.

Dixville Notch always has 100% turnout -- I think if you don't show, the Children of the Corn come by your house and stone you. The media gods must be appeased. Nationwide, many have already cast their ballots in early voting. Voice of America reports that "more than 28 million people in 34 of the 50 states" have already voted. The turnout for election day is expected to be even bigger.

"We have statistics that we can point to right now that suggest that 28.8 million people have so far voted in this election," Michael McDonald, an elections expert at George Mason University in Virginia told VOA. "We are expecting 40 million people when all the numbers are compiled. And that will be about 30 percent of the 136 million people that we are expecting to vote." If that 136 million figure is correct, that would represent a turnout of 64% of all eligible voters.

"We may quite literally see turnout of a magnitude that we have not seen in a century of American politics," he said...

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Griper Blade: Vote or be Dicked

Some endorsements mean more than others. For example, I don't know who Jay Leno is voting for and that's probably because I'm just like everyone else -- I don't care. Celebrity endorsements don't mean too much, because anyone who looks to celebrities for guidance is probably not going to vote. Other endorsements may help a little, because it bumps the candidate up in the news rotation. The more a candidate is mentioned in a positive light, the better.

But some endorsements can't possibly be seen positively. For example, John McCain scored the less than coveted al Qaeda endorsement. Turns out that having the US dumping money and blood down the drain in Iraq is pretty much exactly what the terrorists want. "Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," reads an internet posting from the organization. "[We] will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America."

But it seems that Americans are done with giving a damn what terrorists want. Good on us. They're freakin' insane. We should've stopped making decisions based on what crazy people want or don't want a long time ago. Al Qaeda's endorsement probably didn't do much to change anyone's mind. In fact, most media sources reported it as a "News of the Weird" piece, if at all. It wasn't the sort of thing that anyone really took seriously...

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Griper Blade: All the Smart Kids Vote

I said I was going to continue to post reasons to vote until election day and that includes the weekend. I'm not going to knock myself out with a real long post, but I'm putting aside my writer's sabbath nonetheless.

So, here's today's good reason to vote -- you're not stupid.

ABC News:

Early voting and absentee ballots are a hot topic this political season, but scientists say some folks are laying the groundwork for voting really early -- say from kindergarten.

"Little is known about the association between measured intelligence and how people participate in democratic processes," says a current Intelligence journal study led by Ian Deary of Scotland's University of Edinburgh, in a wee bit of an understatement. "There is debate about the importance of intelligence in relation to whether people vote in elections, and there is currently little information on how people with different levels of intelligence choose to vote in elections," according to the report.

So Deary and company took a look at a decades long study of 17,200 people born in 1970. According to the article, "The researchers check up on them every few years and included intelligence tests at age 5 and 10, as well as voting affiliation and occupation at age 34."...

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Griper Blade: The Other Side of the Story

Let's take a look at the economic situation. Never mind the naysayers, the gloom-and-doomers, the glass-half-empty types, some of us are doing just fine. If you look hard enough and long enough, you can find good, simple, hard-working Americans who are managing to get along. Good people, with good, honest values, who know the value of a dollar because they've got a boatload of them:

Associated Press:

Riding record oil prices in the third quarter, Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted the biggest quarterly profit ever for a U.S. company: $14.83 billion, or about $112,000 a minute.

The results, amounting to $2.86 a share, beat the Irving, Texas, company's previous record and shattered analysts' average expectation of $2.38 a share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Consumer groups and politicians saw reason for anger in those numbers.

"Our economy is suffering from many factors, but one of them is the price of oil and our nation's dependence on it," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Markey said that "investments in renewable energy continue to lag with the world's most profitable company, and as an industry as a whole."

"Consumers got credit card debt and empty wallets, while Exxon got double-digit billions," says Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog. "Citizens deserve to be mad. They should demand that government get back in the business of protecting them from corporate greed."

Those simple country folk with their good ol' fashioned common sense and small town values continue to make more money than any company in history, quarter after quarter, year after year. Yay for them!...

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Griper Blade: The Fight After the Fight

I've decided to spend the remaining days until the election coming up with reasons to vote. But the best laid plans yada-yada-yada... I started out writing this as another post about why you should vote, but after editing, it turned out to be more about after the election. Still, you go vote. We've got to win the big one before we take on the following little battles. So vote to take the grand prize and here's a little preview of what'll happen afterward.

The right isn't going away after Tuesday. They're going to work to rebuild their movement and to tear down Barack Obama. A lot of people think that Obama's ad last night was overkill -- after all, he's far enough ahead in the polls that he can just run out the clock and do fine. But a big part of Obama's continued campaigning isn't about November 4, but November 5 and beyond.

The good news is that the most recent example we have of the right's attempts to discredit a president didn't work at all. Bill Clinton was supposedly everything from a serial killer to a cocaine smuggler. In the end, the right managed only to inoculate the public against BS and instill skepticism in the electorate. When Clinton was finally impeached for a crime with all the seriousness of an unpaid traffic ticket, his approval rating actually increased. Most disapproved of the impeachment effort.

So that's the good news; Republicans suck at this stuff. The bad news is that it's 100% guaranteed that they'll make the effort anyway. William Ayers isn't going away either. Nor is Rev. Wright. The Republican party will go into full damage control mode -- which usually means that, rather than build themselves up again, they'll try to damage Obama to an equal extent and level the playing field that way...

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Griper Blade: Vote Dammit!

The McCain team got some news yesterday. It wasn't good. I imagine that they drew straws or flipped coins or played rock-paper-scissors to find out which adviser would break it to the candidate and get an up-close look at his legendary temper -- the Senator from Arizona stands a damned good chance of losing Arizona.

AZCentral.com:

A new poll from Arizona State University shows the presidential race too close to call in Sen. John McCain's home state.

The Arizona senator is leading Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama by 2 percentage points, 46 to 44, down from a 7-point lead a month ago and a double-digit lead this summer. Factor in the poll's 3-point margin of error, and a race that was once a nearly sure thing for McCain is a statistical dead heat, pollsters say.

"One would think McCain would still carry Arizona, but anybody who says they can predict the state this time, they can't. It's going to depend on who goes to the polls," said Tara Blanc, associated director of the poll by ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and local PBS affiliate Channel 8 (KAET).

Not surprisingly, the pool of remaining undecideds there is small, at about 9%. There's a real chance that Arizona could go blue this year, but only if Obama voters get out and vote...

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Griper Blade: 'We're Getting Ready for the Biggest Culture War Battles Ever'

Last week, I wrote that Sarah Palin believes the election is "in God's hands." Despite this, I predicted that the right wouldn't sing the Hallelujah Chorus when the Almighty chooses Obama. Consistency isn't the strong point of the religious right. When what you want to happen happens, God has rewarded you. When what you don't want to happen happens, God is testing you. When disaster visits your opponents, it's the judgment of the Almighty. When disaster visits you, you're freakin' Job.

So, the religious right -- who had previously warned of doom for America if McCain was the GOP nominee -- are now great big fans of the Senator from Arizona. Given the adaptive nature of their beliefs, McCain (but mostly the super-Godly Sarah Palin) is now America's Great Hope. Woe be unto America if God's chosen be not elected.

The reliably lunatic Janet Folger (who had previously warned that Hillary Clinton would round up Christians and put them in re-education camps) tells us in a column at WorldNetDaily that "You cannot be a Christian and vote for Obama."

To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning. Not only is our nation in grave danger, according to the Word of God, so are you... [T]his election is not about race. It's not about the economy. It's about obeying God.

[...]

Be forewarned: If you willfully disobey God on life and marriage because of race or false hope for the economy, you will usher in the kind of change that brought the Soviet Union to collapse.

Wait, the Soviet Union collapsed because it finally stopped being Christian? You sure about that Janet? Because that seems like an insane misreading of history to me. But that's not the really crazy part. The crazy part is that if you vote for Obama, you're going to hell. Really, it's right there in the Bible.

"To those who call themselves by the name of Christ who ignore what God says about life and marriage, who and are clinging to a fantasy of economic gain, think again..." she says. "Then obey Him in the voting booth and out of it. If not, do us all a favor and quit calling yourself a Christian."...

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Griper Blade: Shameless in Pennsylvania

Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. Barack Obama is secretly socialist. Barack Obama secretly subscribes to "black liberation theology." Barack Obama's secretly not a US citizen. Barack Obama is secretly a terrorist. Barack Obama is secretly the antiChrist.

Just when you thought the fearmongering couldn't get any more stupid, Pennsylvania voters received an e-mail telling them that Barack Obama is secretly Hitler.

A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania this week falsely alleged that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,’’ and equated a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”

At first blush, it was typical of the sorts of e-mails floating around with false, unsubstantiated and incendiary claims this year.

But where most of the attack e-mails against Mr. Obama have been mostly either anonymous or from people outside of mainstream politics, this one had an unusually official provenance: It was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee.

The email was "signed" with the names of prominent McCain supporters. It's since been pulled and the Pennsylvania Republican Party as repudiated it, firing the strategist who helped draft it. The important word there is probably "helped." He wasn't the only one involved, he was just the only one fired. Someone had to take the blame and it was this strategist, Bryan Rudnick, who was going to do it...

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Griper Blade: I, Robocaller

Robocalls. If you're a voter in one of the "battleground states," you're familiar with them. Right when you're in the middle of doing something liberal -- say, destroying the family by making cakes for same sex weddings -- the phone rings and a voice tells you "the truth" about Barack Obama.

Who makes robocalls? That should be obvious from the name -- robots. Clearly, they see the McCain-Palin ticket as being stronger for their radical robot agenda. The metal men, with their fierce laser beam eyes and computer brains, want nothing more than to see McCain elected.

Why?

I looked up the Three Laws of Robotics and discovered a chilling fact. See for yourself:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

My discovery? That there's nothing barring a robot from lying. You could argue that losing an election would constitute "harm" for Barack Obama, but robots -- with their merciless calculations -- could see McCain losing as an equal harm. The second law could be overriding the first, since offense and defense are merely different positions in the same game. Team McCain orders the robots to make the calls, so the robots do it. The harm caused to Obama by doing it is rendered neutral by the harm caused to McCain by not doing it.

And doing it they are. Oh, yes indeed. Doing it they most certainly are...

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Griper Blade: The Electoral Gods are Displeased

Describing herself as a "hardcore pro-lifer," Sarah Palin sat down for an interview with right wing nutjob James Dobson. You can pretty much imagine how that went. Palin, who blows questions posed by elementary school kids, seems only to be able to handle the "why are you so awesome?" or the "why does Barack Obama suck?" questions. She found a sympathetic microphone in Dobson's studio. Let it not be said that Sarah Palin doesn't do the God talk as well as anyone, but -- to be honest -- that's not extremely hard to do.

Although, even in this interview, she screwed up a little bit, saying that John McCain supports the entire GOP platform -- he doesn't. Then again, the way he reverses position constantly, maybe he does. Who knows? Still, the last time anyone checked, he was against three of the planks:

The platform calls for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, an issue McCain says should be left to individual states. Similarly, the platform seeks a constitutional ban on all abortions; again, McCain supports allowing states to decide the question. McCain supports research using embryonic stem cells, which the platform opposes.

Palin called it a "strong platform" and told Dobson, "They are there, they are solid, we stand on them and, again, I believe that it is the right agenda for the country at this time."

What the hell, what's three more flip-flops? Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she's right. For all we know, she is. It wouldn't be the first time McCain had reinvented himself...

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Griper Blade: Two More Polls, Two More Coffin Nails

Things aren't going all that well for Team McCain. After a brief shining moment, when it seemed that the polls were tightening up a bit, things have gone south on them. That brief moment came this weekend, when a CNN/Opinion Dynamics poll showed that Obama's eight-point lead had dropped to a five-point lead -- 51%-46%.

Of course, with only two weeks to go, that may have given McCainsters some solace, but on November 4th, 5 points might as well be 99. Losing by less than you'd expected is still losing. The McCain camp has been saying their only way to win this was in a tight race, so these numbers probably seemed like good news.

But the bad news is that other polling isn't bearing these numbers out. In fact, two subsequent polls show Obama gaining, not McCain...

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