Can Sarah Palin unite the Democratic Party? Yes she can! I have been trying to watch the Republican National Convention this week and really the only thing I could force myself to take in, whilst heavily medicated, was McCain's speech. I did choose coffee and chocolate as the main part of my regimen, but I am still on pain killers, and taking one was a serious error.

John McCain's speech was the most boring, annoying, and inadequate speech I have ever heard a nominee of either party give. The only thing that helped me remain awake, was the chatter on mydd and the green screen. I had visions of all of the things Colbert will do with that green screen, and it made me smile.

That was good, because I must say McCain's biography and Fred Thompson's introduction scared me to death. McCain was thankfully boring and not frightening. However I did get these horrible images of Fred Thompson, Joe Leiberman, and John McCain in the White House for the next four years, and had a very nasty zombie nightmare early this morning. I loves me some zombie movies, but perhaps I need to cut back.

I did not watch Palin, as I was out Thursday night. I am not yet prepared to subject myself to Mrs Palin. What I find odd, is that many of the people who tried to say that Obama or Clinton are not experienced or qualified to be POTUS, are giving Palin a total pass. I feel that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP to be a terribly shameful objectification of women for the purpose of winning the White House. Sarah Palin is the only person running on the national tickets that has not earned her spot. For the republicans to use the worst kind of tokenism is disgusting. Does McCain think he could not die? How does he really think a President Palin would do for America?

Also posted on DailyKos.  Will be on Senate Guru and SwingState when my membership goes through...

Folks,

Hopefully this diary is timed slightly better than the last.  The halo of the RNC is starting to wear off, and McCain-Palin is going into the country to try and keep up what momentum they can.  Meanwhile, we've still got to deal with the state-by-state duels to take the Senate.

I will post my usual upfront fundraising plea here before getting into the meat of the topic.  Right now, Jim Martin has almost reached the $20k mark on ActBlue.  Is a goal of reaching $50k by the next week too high a mark to set?

Alright, now to the heart of the matter.  This is part two of a two part series.  In the first part, I brought out the first set pieces of Saxby Chambliss in the coming two-month TV slamfest.  The second part is about our side, with Jim Martin.

Every minute we spend debating palin's misstatements at the RNC and her missteps in Alaska is one minute we don't spend whacking John McCain on his own plethora of misstatements at the RNC and missteps everywhere.

Here is a simple sentence we all need to drill here, and drill now, deep into our brains:  We are running against John McCain, not sarah palin.

We are running against John McCain, not sarah palin.

Did you know McCain is a veteran? Did you know McCain is a POW? Did you also know he cannot tell the largest army hospital in DC from a middle school in Hollywood?

not sure anymore

The national tracking polls are already starting to show a modest 2-to-3 point bounce for the Palin/McCain McCain/Palin ticket.  That's a smaller bounce than Obama/Biden got from the Denver convention, but we won't know the full extent of the GOP bounce until Monday once voters have had time to process McCain's speech.

The national trackers will likely show that Palin McCain has pulled even with Obama, or at least gotten the same bounce Obama got.  That will be hardly surprising: after all, if an entire political party gets away with telling lie after lie and pretending it's exactly the opposite of the scum that it is without significant media pushback, it's likely to sway a few votes.

(Crossposted at <REDACTED>)

Let's be serious for a moment.

What is John McCain's path to victory?  Does he even have one?  If you look at Pollster.com's state of the race, you'll see that the numbers currently stand at 260 EVs for Obama, 179 for McCain, and 99 tossup.  In order to win the election, a candidate must have at least 270 electoral votes.  In other words, out of the 99 tossup EVs, Obama needs 10, while McCain needs 91.

It isn't completely hopeless for John McCain, though.  Let's examine how he might win this election.

Obama was a good president.   Despite all predictions, he managed, in the four years of his term, to win over a good number of Republicans, mostly from conservative rural counties which appreciated his efforts to lower taxes on struggling "Walmart" families, as families came to be known which depended on the retailer not just for shopping but increasingly scarce jobs.   The predatory China importer, after construction of the hotly contested NAFTA superhighway, perfected a supply chain of cheap goods off-loaded in Central America and Mexico, going straight to the superhighway and rail system, running to the major distribution point in Kansas City.  From there goods were shipped to mega-retailers across the country.  With human rights and work conditions in China worse than ever, no American goods could compete with its rock bottom wages.  Many Americans now worked anywhere they could just to survive.  Those employed by Walmart often gave back a good part of their wages to the cheapest source of food and goods, Walmart.  Thus it became the equivalent of the company store of old.  

Obama had fought vigorously, against the supra-national trade agreements which made massive economic transformation possible, but in the end was betrayed by his own party.  As with Jimmy Carter, it turned out the party's incumbents were not interested in reform after all, but in their own hold on power.  Too late did the American people understand that reform was the last thing on their minds.  The billions made in the process of draining the last of the capital accumulated by the middle class since the Fifties found its way to invincible campaign war-chests, and to the accounts of lobbyists who were often well-connected to congressmen.   In order  that nothing interfere with the agenda, which was interspersed with a noisy tug-of-war over health care reform which would never happen, newly elected Speaker of the House Steny Hoyer declared the indictment of Bush-Cheney for war crimes  "off the table."

Then came the horrifying attacks which frightened Americans, at the next election,  into the arms of a presidential campaign promising to level entire regions with nuclear weapons, to eliminate threats to America once and for all.  Obama in  vain reminded people that this was genocide, but the nature of the attacks had so traumatized the population that now anything was possible.

The new president lost no time flexing her muscles.  During the Bush-Cheney years the precedent had been set, and left unchallenged, that in times of crisis the president was a law unto himself.  The case Padilla vs. Rumsfeld had never reached the Supreme Court, since the Bush administration had released Padilla to the civilian courts before it could be decided.  The principal issue before the Court was whether the Congressional Authorization for use of Military Force post September 11 gave to the President the powers to militarily detain a United States citizen by classifying the detainee as an "enemy combatant."

Briefs filed by the new administration cited the past legalese of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, and expanded upon it.  Then it was announced that a terror cell had been uncovered in Nebraska consisting of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans and their wives, which had disguised its nefarious activities under cover of peaceful dissent and protest.  With the make-up of the Supreme Court changed from the Bush years, the administration was ready to assert the authority to hold any American in secret, without trial or charges, thus completing the groundwork begun by the arrest of Jose Padilla.

For in the meantime Justices Scalia and Roberts had passed away, who were considered unreliable for such a task by the Bush administration.  For this reason only was the Padilla case made moot by Bush by releasing Padilla to a civilian trial.  It was remembered that even Scalia had sided with one of the court's most liberal members, Justice John Paul Stevens, in the case of Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, in which the court decided that the Bush administration's "enemy combatant," Hamdi, must be either charged with a crime, or released.  As socially arch-conservative as they were, Scalia and Roberts, before they were lawyers, were historians.  They could not be counted on to find that the country's Founders had envisioned a day when wartime powers should eliminate the Bill of Rights forever.

The Nebraska cell jarred the public mind, as it consisted entirely of blue-eyed, blond Midwesterners pressing for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.  With the new court in place, the stage was set for the mass round-ups which would follow, as enraged Americans saw the results of the recent raids on social security to feed the war and war contractor machine.  Reports of elderly found literally starving in strapped rural communities became common, and more than once children were sighted rummaging through the garbage of gated communities.  

For the nation's super-rich, and there was little in between this and the newly poor, had begun to disappear to private islands off-shore or behind walled "Green Zones" in America modeled in after early experiments in Baghdad.  But those were child's play compared to the present art of enabling the lushest of living standards in the midst of the most hostile environments, secured by the private armies of Blackwater.

Finally, but for the weak rubber-stamp congress subject to intimidation and blackmail made easy by 24-hour NSA surveillance, no distinction could be made between the Executive Branch and the government.  Attempts at mass mobilization and change through the ballot box were made, but the government's new spying and detention powers, combined with the ease with which any vote could be manipulated electronically, left no choice but armed revolution, which furthered the crackdowns.  Groups calling themselves the "Thomas Jefferson Brigade" and the "Patrick Henry Battalion," often consisting of veterans, sprung up for a bloody and drawn-out war.  

Legal analysts lamented that, at every stage of the way, precedents had been allowed to stand unchallenged which led to the next expansion of executive powers.  The precedents which the Bush-Cheney administration of the past had set, which at the time had been called by a small minority of activists "impeachable offenses" which constituted "breaking the law," were breaking the law no more.  

One well-known freedom fighter, an idealistic early member of the Obama team who, although from a wealthy family, took up arms at the sight of Americans starving, was quoted famously as saying, from the Air Force brig in North Dakota which had been set up for "politicals,": "You know what?  They were right.  We should have cut off their tail feathers but good, right up to their balls, in the middle of an election.  We should have impeached their treasonous asses while we could  have, and put them on ice for war crimes later."