The Hollywood Liberal

Johnny B. Dull

My first thought on walking into the Xcel Center tonight and seeing the blue screen behind John McCain was — have they learned nothing? Lime green jello and cottage cheese?  Is there no one in the Republican party who can do staging?  Hello, McFly?

My first thought on walking into the Xcel Center tonight and seeing the blue screen behind John McCain was — have they learned nothing? Lime green jello and cottage cheese?  Is there no one in the Republican party who can do staging?  Hello, McFly?

And then there was the  sound of McCain’s voice.  He’s obviously been taking public speaking lessons from Hal, the computer from 2001.  It wasn’t long before I needed a nap.  But fortunately, there was plenty of time for one.  Fifty-three minutes, in fact.

It was an endless laundry list of failed conservative ideas.  The place was packed with a sea of Karl Rove look-alikes (who knew it was a style?) who only got excited about the idea of lower taxes and drilling for oil.  But even then, just barely.

McCain promises not to raise taxes, but he never says that he’s planning to tax your health care benefits as income.  Haven’t heard much about that, have we?  It’s true — if you receive health care benefits from your employer, John McCain wants to consider that income, and subject it to income tax.  It’s estimated that this would cost the average worker a couple thousand dollars a year.  He doesn’t mention that much.

What he does mention is his POW experience.  Over, and over, and over again.  I was a lot more sympathetic to his personal stories of being plucky in the face of torture before he started using his POW history to assert that the very same techniques used on him can’t be considered torture when used on “detainees.”  McCain’s rather fluid definition of torture, and his willingness to use his history for political advantage as some enormous, all-purpose trump card leaves me a bit unmoved the more I hear his story.  And boy, do we hear it a lot.

I got there late and didn’t hear any of the other speakers because I was doing Bloggingheads with Ann Althouse (yes, we fought like alley cats, it’ll be up tomorrow).  As we were leaving McCain and his possee were standing around rather awkwardly on stage to a lackluster “greatest hits of the 70s” compliation, and I wondered how long it would take Heart to file an injunction over “Barracuda.”

Evidently not long.

What Republicans Can Learn from “Gossip Girl”
The sordid, trashy teen drama “Gossip Girl” offers a much smarter and more useful take on teen sexuality than the Republican platform.

RNC’s Clock On Obama’s Iraq Trip Is Wrong By Over 900 Days
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Walking a Fine Line
The Pentagon confirms to TPM Election Central that military officials told the Obama campaign he could not visit Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany yesterday with campaign aides in tow because that would violate DOD regs. “We informed the Obama…

Kicking Off a Campaign of Lies

McCain lamely tried to grasp the mantle of change last night, with a rehash of the same failed conservative policies and same dishonest politics that most folks want changed.

He accused Obama of wanting to raise taxes on everyone, when Obama’s tax plan lowers taxes more for more people.

He attacked Obama for supporting corporate welfare for oil companies, when it’s McCain who refuses to back the “Gang of 10” compromise that would repeal those handouts.

He said he was for clean energy, when he refused to cast the deciding vote that would have broken a conservative filibuster blocking investment in clean energy.

He claimed Obama would not oppose teacher unions (horrors!), when he has directly disagreed with them on the subject of merit pay.

He said ” I’ll work to establish good relations with Russia so that we need not fear a return to the Cold War,” when he has been itching to bring back the Cold War by threatening to kick Russia out of the G-8.

He said Obama will “force families into a government-run health care system” when his plan rejects mandates for adults (remember the primary?), allows anyone to keep the coverage they have, and provides a choice between public and private plans.

McCain tells these lies because he has no chance to winning the swing vote on the merits, after voting with the president they all hate 90% of the time.

With that in mind, it will be interesting to see if McCain’s TV audience was a big as Gov. Sarah Palin’s 40M audience.

Because Palin was a political pick designed to rev up the base, But her speech clearly attracted more than base voters. And those swing voters may well have been turned off by the relentless sarcasm and lack of substance.

In other words, perhaps Palin speech’s was seen by too many people, and McCain’s speech — with its lies tailored to impress swing voters — by too few.

Cable news covered more of RNC?s peak hour programming than DNC?s.
Media Matters reports: During their September 2 and September 3 coverage of the Republican National Convention, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News each dedicated more on-air time — significantly more in most cases — to speeches and other official Republican convention programming during the most-watched portions of their coverage than each channel dedicated to official convention […]

Media Matters reports:

During their September 2 and September 3 coverage of the Republican National Convention, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News each dedicated more on-air time — significantly more in most cases — to speeches and other official Republican convention programming during the most-watched portions of their coverage than each channel dedicated to official convention programming during the same times on comparable nights of the Democratic National Convention one week earlier.

Digg It!

The Other Party’s Playbook
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates. The Democratic Party, ever conscious of the diversity of modern America, is doing everything it can to blur the lines of race, class and gender. As if anyone thought otherwise, this is going to be an interesting few weeks until Nov. 4.