The Hollywood Liberal

McCain Plans VP Birthday Bash
Our earlier speculation on an errant blog posting appears to be on the right track.

According to Politico, Sen. John McCain “plans to celebrate his 72nd birthday on Aug. 29 by naming his running mate at a huge rally in the battleground state of Ohio.”

The campaign “has begun building a crowd of 10,000 for Dayton, Ohio, according to an organizer. McCain is scheduled to appear with his running mate at a large-scale event in Pennsylvania shortly thereafter.”

McCain Zeroes In On Ohio Running Mate?
Marc Ambinder noticed that an Ohio Republican official wrote on his blog yesterday that Sen. John McCain would be in Dayton, Ohio the day after the Democratic convention — and was looking for a “big” venue.

Wrote Alex Triantafilou: “Sen. McCain is expected to host a rally on August 29 in Dayton and is looking for a BIG venue and for a BIG crowd. He’ll get it. This is not yet public. I guess I just made it so.”

Today, that sentence has disappeared from the site.

Clan McCain: The Family That Shuns Together…
Getting to know John McCain and his family is like getting acquainted with the characters from a Jackie Collins novel.

AP/Mary Altaffer

From Nice Polite Republicans:

Last Tuesday, NPR broadcast a story about Cindy McCain’s business and charity work. In it, Ted Robbins described McCain as the only child of Jim Hensley, a wealthy Arizona businessman. The next morning, NPR received an e-mail from Nicholas Portalski of Phoenix, who heard the story with his mother.

“We were listening to the piece about Cindy McCain on NPR, All Things Considered, and it just struck us very hard,” Portalski said.

His mother, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, is also Hensley’s daughter.

So the media’s favorite blonde isn’t an only child after all?  Beer Heiress Barbie has a–GASP!–middle class half-sister? A half-sister who was effectively cut out of Daddy Beerbucks’ will, to the sole benefit of Cindy? A half-sister, the existence of whom Cindy McCain has never publicly acknowledged?  Wait, wasn’t this a story line from “All My Children”? 

And it’s not as if Cindy McCain has actively disabused the media from labeling her as Jim Hensley’s sole progeny:

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase “only child,” as she did on CNN last month. “I grew up with my dad,” she said then. “I’m an only child.”

Hold onto your Stetsons, because the story turns eerily familiar:

Jim Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17, flying over Europe during World War II.

He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman — Marguerite Smith. Jim divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945.

How special is it that Cindy’s daddy treated his first wife with the same courtesies that John McCain treated his.  Apples, acorns, trees.  With a father like that, it’s no wonder that Cindy McCain hooked up with Ol’ Mavericky.  Maybe Freud did have a point.

By the way, this story comes on the heels of the release of court documents on Saturday in which it was revealed that Roberta McCain, John McCain’s media-beatified mother, sued McCain’s first wife — you know, the crippled one who raised his kids–for the return of some relatively innocuous trinkets that she had given to Carol McCain during her marriage to Roberta’s sanctified son. 

And let’s not forget Meghan McCain’s upcoming children’s book, just in time for the Republican National Convention, in which she neglects to mention her half-siblings from Daddy’s first marriage.  I’m sensing a pattern here.

All that money and they can’t even buy compassion.

Nobody Could Have Predicted
That the housing bubble-related housing crisis might be a wee bit more problematic than most “experts” usually cited on the subject.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks fell on Monday as investors fretted about the prospect of more losses from the mortgage crisis, sending shares of the two big U.S. home finance providers and other financial companies lower.

Investors were hit with a one-two punch from news pointing to no let up in the credit crisis stemming from the U.S. housing slump.

Early Evening Thread
enjoy

Amy Goodman: Naomi Klein: China’s Hi-Tech Surveillance State Is Ready for Export
With 300,000 security cameras in Beijing alone, China is at the forefront of the surveillance boom — and U.S. corporations are reaping the profits.

How Do We Seize the Obama Moment?
Obama will be the president we want him to be if we mobilize support on the progressive issues and ward off the influence of entrenched interests.

Missing Manufacturing Boom
One of the most read posts I ever wrote was a piece in April called The Hollowed-Out Economy, in which I mocked Treasury Secretary Paulson’s contention that Bush’s economic stimulus package was going to create 600,000 new jobs in America….

McCain Pulls Even in Ohio
New Public Policy Polling survey: tied at 45….

Countdown – Special Comment

Keith Olbermann has slowly taken John McCain’s speech at the VFW (veterans of foreign wars) and deconstructed it. He has pulled McCain’s Iraq victory speech in 2003. This is the speech in which John McCain declared victory in Iraq and Afghanistan – 5 years ago. We were done according to John McCain.

McCain has called out Barack Obama on shifting positions on Iraq but no one has been on both sides of the fence at the same time as well as Senator McCain. McCain praised Donald Rumsfeld at the same time he was criticizing him. John McCain has stated that the surge has worked but he isn’t ready to bring the troops home. When is that time exactly? Well, McCain will never state that time because it would sound like a time table.

This is a very good special comment by Keith Olbermann.

It should be mentioned that I cringe when I hear that someone is speaking to the VFW. I have a flashback. It was at the VFW that Dick Cheney laid down the saber back in 2002. Remember –

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors — confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.” Vice President Dick Cheney at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, August 26, 2002.

China confiscates Bibles at airport
BEIJING, China (CNN) — Four members of a Christian group from the United States are refusing to leave an airport in China after authorities confiscated their 300 Bibles, the group’s director said Monday. The four members of Vision Beyond Borders — based in Sheridan, Wyoming — arrived in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming on Sunday. Customs officials discovered the Bibles during an X-ray scan of their luggage, said Pat Klein, director of the group, which supplies Bibles and other Christian material to people in China and other countries.

Kristol Makes His Fourth Factual Error In His New York Times Column
Today in the New York print edition of the New York Times, columnist Bill Kristol attacks allegations that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) may not have been in the “cone of silence” during Saturday’s Saddleback Civil Forum: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do […]

Today in the New York print edition of the New York Times, columnist Bill Kristol attacks allegations that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) may not have been in the “cone of silence” during Saturday’s Saddleback Civil Forum:

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”

That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

Kristol is wrong. In fact, the New York Times itself reports today that McCain “was not in a ‘cone of silence’ on Saturday night.” He was instead “in his motorcade on the way to the church” when Rev. Rick Warren was interviewing Obama.

Instead of issuing a correction to Kristol’s column, Tom Tomorrow notes that the Times has simply quietly revised it for the online and national print editions. The column now reads:

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”

There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

Perhaps the New York Times is too embarrassed to write a correction for another one of Kristol’s columns. This is the fourth factual error he has made since commencing his column in January. Here are the other three corrections. Unfortunately for Kristol, his Kristol Ball isn’t doing so well either.

Obama Tells Allies He Is Ready to Hit Back
ALBUQUERQUE, Aug. 18 — Sen. Barack Obama returned to the presidential campaign trail on Monday after a week-long Hawaiian vacation and tried to assure anxious Democrats that he is ready to fight back against Republican character attacks that grew sharper in his absence.