This blog provides the ugly but well-researched and documented truth about John McCain's voting record, his fatal inconsistencies, his marital unfaithfulness and divorce record, his absurd and dangerous statements about Iraq and Iran, and all of the reasons why Senator John McCain from arid Arizona ought never, ever become president of the United States of America.
Another hot tip for you; remember the story you covered back in February when he flip-flopped on new taxes? He's done it again.
Mr. McCain likes to tell voters that he's the presidential candidate who wants to cut taxes.
"Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't," he often declares. Or: "If you want to raise taxes, then don't vote for me."
Except there is one tax Mr. McCain might be prepared to raise. When asked in an interview Sunday whether he was prepared to raise payroll taxes to correct social security's funding shortfall, he replied:
"There is nothing that's off the table. I have my positions, and I'll articulate them. But nothing's off the table. I don't want tax increases. But that doesn't mean that anything is off the table."
The Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, found the response "shocking.
"Your comments yesterday send American taxpayers and businesses a mixed message about where you stand on this issue," the group's president, Pat Toomey, wrote Monday in an open letter to the senator.
So what is his actual position on Tax increases, if he has one?
John McCain, Yahoo News reports, has had skin McCancer three times, (hey, talking about JiSM makes me tasteless) and gets check-ups in Nevada every three months to make sure the cancer hasn't come back. In fact, he was in Nevada today to have a
small patch of skin removed from his face and biopsied as part of a regular checkup with his dermatologist. ( . . . ) The fair-skinned Arizona senator, who suffered severe sun damage from his 5 1/2 years in Vietnamese prison camps, gets an in-depth skin cancer check every few months because of a medical history of dangerous melanomas." Yahoo News
"Along with his signature bright white hair, the most striking aspects of Senator John McCain’s physical appearance are his puffy left cheek and the scar that runs down the back of his neck. New York Times
We all are aware of the normal actuarial risks of being seventy-two years old now, and seventy-six years old when and if his first term expired before he did. However, if elected JiSM would treat the public to a "does he have cancer or doesn't he" check-up every three months. In fact, he'll be getting another check-up like this around November 28.
Everyone's days are numbered, but John McCain's days are more numbered than most everyone else's. Shouldn't we know what his November 28th 2008 check-up will say before we risk electing him president on November 4?
Elizabeth Edwards' possibly terminal cancer became a big issue in the Democratic primaries. Can John McCain's candidacy survive that kind of scrutiny of his health conditions, particularly the risk that cancerous lesions will appear on his face?
What kinds of fluctuations in the markets could we expect on a quarterly basis before and after John McCain's check-ups? If John McCain were elected president, how much of his face would have to be cut off before . . . 2012?
Let's, be realistic, though. Ronald Reagan was 175 years old when he was elected president; was shot; underwent operations for bowel polyps; and probably spent most of his presidency with early Alzheimers Disease. When many of us thought he was nodding meaningfully, some of us knew he was nodding portentously. But he still survived to make liberals miserable for eight years.
Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, it seems to me, is making all of the right foreign policy moves his trip overseas. I take particular note of the following passage, found at Yahoo News:
PARIS - Democrat Barack Obama said Friday that Iran should promptly accept an international call to freeze its uranium enrichment program, which some nations see as a potential step toward obtaining nuclear weapons, and not wait for the next U.S. president.
The presidential candidate met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, where they discussed Iran, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change and other issues.
Speaking later at a news conference, Obama said Iran should accept the proposals made by Sarkozy and other Western leaders. He urged Iran's leaders not to wait for the next U.S. president to push them "because the pressure, I think, is only going to build."Yahoo News
Recently, John McCain and other anti-Obama forces (e.g. here) were able to convince the mainstream media to report that European leaders were afraid that Obama would not pursue an Iran diplomacy consistently strict with what Europe has been doing.
By meeting with Sarkozy and promising that "the pressure, I think ,is only going to increase", Obama is promising to apply even more pressure than the Bush Administration has, but within the framework set out by the Europeans, which does not include going to war with Iran.
The two men recalled their 2006 meeting in Washington, when Sarkozy was the French interior minister. Obama said the only other U.S. senator who Sarkozy visited then was McCain, now the presumed Republican nominee for president.
Obama urged U.S. political reporters to seek Sarkozy's insight because "he seems to have a good nose for how things play out." Yahoo News
Obama is promising and demonstrating through his diplomacy that he is going to pursue a strategy consistent with that of our allies. Meanwhile, McCain is insisting that a war that all of Europe opposed (Iraq) is still necessary, and McCain promises to attack Iran militarily, which is utterly inconsistent and counter to the European approach.
Would John McCain's election result in perpetual war in Iraq and elsewhere? Well, just look at what John McCain's chief adviser has to say about that. John McCain's chief policy adviser is Douglas Holz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, heads the Greenberg Centre for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and here's what he says about the loss of Americans lives and the economic cost of the war:
[T]he current and future budget cost and loss of life and health probably give the right magnitude. If so, the annual war bill represents only about one cent of the $12,000bn of national income each year, and the total military cost at most, a nickel. And that is the right lesson: the foundation of US international influence is its large, powerful economy which can absorb the narrow, resource costs of war and free the US to pursue strategic [WAR, WAR, WAR] and security goals. FinancialTimes.Com (emphasis added)
John McCain is always wrong about Iraq, and his errors are very dangerous. As when,
. . . he said the war would be "brief" and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who'd already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A. (The relationship between Mr. Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, "The Man Who Pushed America to War," by Aram Roston.) NYTimes
Read the whole article. With McCain's chief adviser's reasoning, we can expect even more wars like the one in Iraq under a McCain Administration, since the Iraq War continues to be such a great bargain for America, both in terms of loss of life and expense to the US Treasury.
Meanwhile, Obama also knocked down on of McCain's (and all Republicans') chief criticisms of Democrats, as being pacifists unwilling to fight wars that are necessary for American security. Basically, the only thing a Democratic candidate has to do to win on this count is point out a country where he IS determined to fight a war, and show determination about it. Obama met the test.
Yesterday,
Obama told reporters that "Afghanistan is a war we have to win." The Taliban and terrorist groups it supports, he said, pose an unacceptable threat to the U.S., France and other nations.
"We've got to finish the job," said Obama, who often has said the Iraq war was an unwise move that distracted the United States from efforts to find Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders and to root out the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Yahoo News
In fact, there are very good alternatives to most wars the US might be called upon to fight, but most of the public wants to know that a president will be willing to fight a war if the need arises, and some actually want a war just for the fun or the lucre of it. The best way for a candidate to show that he has a war in him is to point out a place where he believes a war should be fought, and that's precisely what Obama did.
Senator John McCain speaking about his political opponent Senator Barack Obama:
*** Let me begin with a few words about my opponent. Don’t tell him I said this, but he is an impressive fellow in many ways. He has inspired a great many Americans, some of whom had wrongly believed that a political campaign could hold no purpose or meaning for them. His success should make Americans, all Americans, proud... Senator Obama talks about making history, and he’s made quite a bit of it already. And the way was prepared by this venerable organization and others like it. A few years before the NAACP was founded, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage and an insult in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the nomination of an African-American to be the presidential nominee of his party. Whatever the outcome in November, Senator Obama has achieved a great thing — for himself and for his country — and I thank him for it.
Lobbyists should be shown the door. As far as McCain’s campaign goes, lobbyists are flying roughshod in the Republican side of the presidential election. They’ll screw up this election process with all of the commercial interests that are tugging at their coattails. What we’ll be seeing is a bunch of corporations in line to buy candidates’ favors. Lobbying is a fixture in Washington, but it’s never been part of a presidential election in this way.
There are lobbyists for any industry you can think of : automotive, pharmaceutical, energy, farming equipment, coal industry, you name it! These companies will pay anything to get bills through Congress that help them peddle their product. For example, a company that sells canned sardines hires a lobbyist to visit a bunch of congressional offices to do some tongue wagging and propose softer import restrictions. That way the sardines cost less to bring over from Sweden. Then there's companies that hire lobbyists to push to reduce restrictions on air emissions, so they can have their refineries on full throttle and completely pollute our skies.
There's probably a lobbyist out there for the tire industry bouncing around in Washington. A tire company would push for things like federal funds to build more roads : more roads, more cars and bingo, more tires. All of these people in McCain’s committees are following instructions from commercial interests, not from citizens! McCain’s town meetings must be a farce if his campaign is led by some of the top lobbyists in the country.
There are too many lobbyists interfering with our country’s legislation. A law that is supposed to increase the minimum wage can get railroaded by a dozen companies that hire lobbyists to prevent that.
A lobbyist from an automotive company could show up at every Congressman's office with a Powerpoint presentation showing why a higher minimum wage wouldn't work. At the same time, a group of construction companies could hire a lobbyist to go around Washington clamoring that the price of materials would slow down building if they had to raise everyone's pay. Along comes a lobbyist that the movie industry has hired because it doesn't want to pay a cent more for extras that stand on the sidewalk and chew gum. Or maybe just chew gum. There could be a handful of billion dollar companies hiring lobbyists to do and say whatever it takes to keep the minimum wage increase from passing through Congress.
Here’s an article that describes that situation from a while back : Minimum-wage Hike Faces Hurdles. This approach can be applied to bills that improve energy use, improve education, decrease costs of medicine, put more funding into bridge repair, improve manufacturing policies and whole bunch of things that this country needs to move ahead.
Let's take William V. Hilleary, for example. He's a lobbyist for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Copy and paste "William Hilleary Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal" into Google for more info. So William here is hired by companies that need certain government policies to pass that benefit their shareholders. Check out his page here William V. Hilleary. As a lobbyist, William is working in government everyday to push commercial interests. He's also jumped into McCain’s raft, acting as the Tennessee co-chair. He's probably doing alot of fundraising for McCain, with alot of money coming from previous clients. You gotta wonder, how do the donations from these companies reflect Americans?
Mega-million corporations putting up the bucks to ride on McCain's Merry-Go-Round.
In the above video, John McCain simply refuses to give a straight answer whether it's fair for insurance companies to cover Viagra but not birth control methods. It's seems like pure discrimination to me, but John McCain - twice married and with children - says he's never thought about it and can't respond at all, over and over again.
If this is "straight-talk" from John McCain, let's hope we never see him bullshitting, because that would really be embarrassing.
I guess John McCain doesn't like to talk about sex? He refuses to tell us why he called his wife a "cunt" in front of half a dozen reporters.
That stupid laugh: "uh-huh, uh-huh". Is it me or is this guy just sickening? It's fun, but sad watching McCain in these Town Hall settings. On issues with the economy, foreign policy, Iraq and any other subjects, McCain is always quickly outwitted and overwhelmed. I listen to this old fool and his plans to make things better and just shake my head. What an embarrassment. That smug, arrogant look he always has makes me want to vomit. Pig5689
OK, Agent X, but where's the "whopper". Sure he mentioned "the Outdoor Footwear company Crocks", which has been insider trading and cheating shareholders:
Shareholders sue Crocs over stock price drop Fort Collins (Colo.) Coloradoan | 231 days 6 hours 8 minutes ago DENVER - Executives of shoemaker Crocs Inc. have been accused of misleading shareholders about operations while they sold at least $58 million in stock before the price plummeted on the third-quarter earnings report.
This is what I said at DailyKos, just before I was banned there:
I define “white male supremacy”: as “the belief that white males, no matter how much and how often they fail, are still, by virtue of their male gender and white skin, inherently more qualified than blacks and women who succeed.” – Francis L. Holland, December 13, 2006 at DailyKos.
And everything about this election in 2008, shows that I was correct: Barack Obama runs not just against a man, John McCain, but also and much more importantly, against the white male supremacy paradigm. Barack Obama has to show NOT ONLY that he will be a better president than John McCain, but also and more importantly, that John McCain is not inherently superior to Obama by virtue of John McCain’s white skin.
It ought not be hard to demonstrate that the party that prefers to end an expensive and futile war that is wildly unpopular is preferable to the party that proposes to continue that war indefinitely. It ought not be hard to convince the public that the party whose current president has a 29% approval rating ought not be selected to perpetuate the policies of that same lousy-ass president.
And polls show that when adding undecided voters to the McCain column, (as might arguably happen in November) the race is actually a dead heat.
I think many of the people watching this video are eating it up. They're part of the 29% that still love and support George W. Bush in spite of all of his failures, because he is a white man on a white supremacist mission that favors the rich and disadvantages the poor and the middle class, and anyone who has to work for a living.
However, there are even more people dedicated to some aspect of the Republican program, like anti-abortion, the perception of commitment to lower taxes, military adventurism of the sort we see in those popular Rambo and Arnold Schwartznegger movies, etc. To the extent that McCain speaks to these issues in his speeches, no matter how much he mangles them, ThinkProgress does a SERVICE to McCain by giving these videos extra play, more eye-views than they would have received otherwise.
The only videos of John McCain that should be circulated are those that show him to be unstable, a liar, or to hold positions that ALL Americans disagree with. For example, consider his votes against health care benefits for returning veterans. In spite of those votes, half of American still supports him, so highlighting those votes may actually result in greater turnout by the half of America that supports that for some reason.
This strategy of believing that everything that seems idiotic to progressives should be put into the Internet bullhorn could well backfire, giving McCain's proposals more play on the Internet than those of his opponent. Instead, Think Progress should exercise some discipline and disseminate ONLY those videos that EVERYONE, regardless of political stripe, will find to exclude McCain from the running.
John McCain will embarrass himself and show America that he cannot be president because he is unstable. But this video isn't that.
Despite neoconservatism's close association in the public imagination with the Bush administration, and despite McCain's image as a moderate, a look at the record makes clear that McCain, not Bush, is the real neocon in the Republican Party.
McCain was the neocons' candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we've seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing. McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism. American Prospect current issue by way of P6
A few weeks ago, I pointed out that John McCain’s most vulnerable area was his fiery temper, which could very well be his undoing. The one thing a man cannot hide is what’s on the inside of his heart.
General Wesley Clark struck a nerve with McCain when he said that “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” was not a qualification to be president.” To clarify, Gen. Clark elaborated that McCain’s military service, “by itself”, qualify him for the Whitehouse. (Read: “A Man among Men: General Wesley Clark”)
The off-the-cuff matter-of-fact statement reciprocated an outcry from McCain. “I think the time has come to not just repudiate Gen. Clark, but to cut him loose,” McCain advised Senator Barack Obama.
Repudiate General Clark? Cut him loose?
Is McCain that touchy? If he would repudiate a man of General Clark’s stature, what would he do in diplomacy?
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) tells of a physical confrontation John McCain had with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega while on a diplomatic mission in 1987. "I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don’t know what he was telling him, but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns, and we were there on a diploma- tic mission," Cochran recalled.
Cochran startled many people this year with comments about McCain’s temper… He told The Boston Globe that "the thought of (McCain) being president sends a cold chill down my spine." McCain,” Cochran said, "is erratic. He loses his temper, and he worries me."
A former fighter pilot who goes around singing, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran”, worries me too. Forty years ago, it was “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Hanoi”, which is how he wound up a POW in the Hanoi Hilton. Since that time, the song hasn’t changed very much as McCain inches his way one step closer to the nuclear trigger.
The quote McCain "wasn't allowed"to retract on Iraq.
Take The Bush-McCain Challenge — an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain.
P.S. After you finish 10 questions, there's a "Carrot Round" that you definitely don't want to miss.
Enjoy! (Hat Tip to Electronic Village!)
The Field Negro says, "Francis L. Holland is at it again! Francis can be like a pit bull with this shit. I hope John McCain is ready."
African American Political Pundit says, "Great Blog Francis! I can't wait to read the many issues that make John McCain the wrong person for the Presidency of the United States."
Electronic Village calls The Truth About John McCain blog part of "the 'swiftboat' counter-insurgency for the 2008 election cycle."
GossipList says, "Wow! Read all the dirt about John McCain in one place!"
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