Blog sprinkles

Via JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie: Weird News from all over the globe. I'll say! Warning: really weird.

Hipparchia of Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks notes that McCain is a Manchurian candidate:

Yet despite McCain's tough talk, behind the scenes his top advisers have cultivated deep ties with Russia's oligarchy--indeed, they have promoted the Kremlin's geopolitical and economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor. The most notable example is the tale of how McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, advanced what became a key victory for the Kremlin: gaining control over the small but strategically important country of Montenegro.

Eli of Multi Medium notices that Kenya has detained Jerome Corsi who has written a book about Obama filled with falsehoods and innuendos. Awww...

Via Ripley at Zen Cabin: An excellent bumpersticker!

Also via JJ, JABbering Stooge has a list we can refer to if McCain really wants to start throwing shit:

And if that’s the game John McCain wants to play, we’ll be happy to play it. We can talk about his role in the Keating Five. We can talk about his “palling around” with anti-Semitic Rapture Cheerleaders like Rev. John Hagee and Rev. Rod Parsley. We can talk about his time on the board of the United States Council for World Freedom, a far-right fringe group with ties to the Moonies that the ADL castigated as “a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-semites.” We could also talk about McCain’s ties to Italian con man Raffaello Follieri.

Mapaghimagsik's cartoons are always on target.

Cookie Jill at skippy the bush kangaroo has the Tom Hartmann interview with Naomi Wolf.

PSoTD has the scariest Halloween costume ever. I'd worry if you had to provide the sound effects yourself....

Warren Street of They Gave Us a Republic asks a question as he described the activity seen at thrift stores:

Seems like a pretty good anecdotal way to gauge what is going on in the economy. But it could be evidence that Americans are simply living beyond their means. If things continue, a lot of "taboos" about second-hand stores, austerity, and making do are going to fall away. Things like backyard gardens, rummage sales, and actually putting off a major purchase are going to be fashionable. What will the neighbors think? Are we actually going to go from a nation where outspending the Joneses is going to be replaced by seeing who can scrimp and save?

When I grew up, there were plenty of old people who wouldn't throw away string; they had that Depression mentality of saving everything useful. Could it be coming back?

The answer I hope is yes.

crossposted at American Street

Lying must be a reflexive action

With these people...

Oregon Republican candidate Mike Erickson:

Congressional candidate Mike Erickson took a six-day visit to Cuba in 2004 that he called a "humanitarian trip" to aid disabled Cubans oppressed by Fidel Castro, but the trip was instead a vacation that included bars, Havana cigars and the Tropicana nightclub.

Erickson said he visited a medical center, met with doctors and attended a presentation on the plight of the disabled. But travel documents obtained by The Oregonian, others who accompanied Erickson and representatives of U.S. and Cuban charities tell a different story.

For example, the medical center Erickson said he visited does not exist.

Mary Matalin tries to step away from the shit splatter of Corsi's idiotic fictional book:

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, head of Threshold Editions, which published Jerome Corsi's falsehood-laden book The Obama Nation, reportedly wrote in an email to Slate.com's Timothy Noah that her role at Threshold is "more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers." But according to her own website, Matalin "runs Threshold, a new conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster".

Yet then there are those who cannot help but search out and tell the truth.

Thank you, Helen Thomas.

Also unintentionally hilariously wrong

Obama's response. (pdf)

Update 8/17/08: Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman for The New York Times:

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

Frank Rich of the New York Times has the last laugh: (my bold)

Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

Why does John McCain allow Corsi to say what he's spewing in the 'book' when McCain's been smeared by the same shit or does Corsi have something on McCain that him helpless to stop him? And if that's the case, how much is Corsi being paid under the table by McCain?

The 'book' is incompetently written and cobbled together, does this reflect incompetence and sloppiness by John McCain's campaign?

Why does McCain support this 'book' when he vowed he'd run a 'nice' campaign?

Why is McCain silent?

Update: Digby of Hullabaloo:

Sure, people are saying that Corsi's book is full of holes. So what? It's "out there" and it's getting more press every day. And in all of that, nobody's calling out Mrs Carville on the fact that she shepherded these extremist lies into the mainstream. (Or her husband, for that matter.) Yet MoveOn taking out an ad that has the word "Betrayus" in it is worthy of a congressional censure.

As long as the villagers are in agreement that the only people who are truly beyond the pale in American politics are on the left, then this will continue. Mary Matalin will still be considered a perfectly respectable person by both the "right" and the "left" (as if there's any discernible difference among the cognoscenti) and there will be no professional or social repercussions. Meanwhile even staid, old organizations like the ACLU suffer from the myth of being some sort of far left fringe organization and Democratic politicians run for cover when the right wing publicly "tars" them with guilt by association.

This is an ongoing problem that we see being played out once again in a national election. And I don't think the progressive movement has fully come to grips yet with just how powerful this image of scary left wing freaks still is in the national imagination --- or how thoroughly the right's extremist views have been accepted by the political establishment. It's something that needs to be addressed in a much more cohesive way.