Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Remember, my darlings, it's Obama who's the presumptuous one. Not McCain. McCain's not presumtuous in the least (h/t Digby):

This image is going to give me nightmares tonight, guaranteed.

McCain may be making assumptions based on the fact that the Republicons have gotten very good at stealing elections. Digby has an excellent rundown of some of the major shennanigans, along with a warning so obvious we've missed it:

This voting stuff isn't going away, and if anything it's going to get more intense as Republicans get more desperate. I can't believe that this article didn't get more attention when it came out a few weeks ago. There's no question that this will became an enormous issue literally out of nowhere this fall.

Election officials worry that the state's home foreclosure problem will pose a problem this November for voters still registered at their former address, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Voters in pivotal Ohio with outdated addresses face possible pre-election challenges and trips to multiple polling places. They also are more likely to cast provisional ballots that might not be counted.

"It's a real issue," said Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in elections. He wonders whether foreclosures might explain the increasing percentages of provisional votes cast between 2004 and Ohio's latest election, the presidential primary in March.

Ohio provided President Bush with an 118,000-vote victory in 2004, giving him the electoral votes he needed to win the election.

All of a sudden you're going to hear that these families forced out of their homes and relocated across the country are actually fraudsters trying to steal the election for Obama. The very fact of vacancy at the addresses where these people are registered makes hundreds of thousands of people prime suspects for voter caging. And you can be sure that re-registering isn't paramount on their minds, either. In battleground states like Nevada, one out of every 120 or so homes is in foreclosure right now. This seems like a huge under-the-radar issue that is receiving literally no attention.

Time to shine the bright light of scrutiny on the Republicons. We don't want another election stolen out from under us. I don't know about you, but the idea of McCain's little "President McCain" graphic is something I want to see remain presumptuous, not prophetic. So if you know someone unfortunate enough to have suffered foreclosure or any other uprooting experience, be a dear and make sure they get properly registered. Their votes need to count. After all, it's not likely that McLame and his Incredible Tax Fairy with Magic Budget Dust are going to be able to help people who've lost their homes, jobs and possibly hope due to Bush's insane policies.

In other outrageous news, let's turn to what one of McCain's fundraisers is up to these days. I'm not copying in the entire post - you need to head over to ThinkProgress.org to read it for yourself - but here's the gist: Chevron is battling an $8-16 billion judgement against them for environmental damage in Ecuador's rainforest. One of McCain's top fundraisers is pushing hard to ensure they don't have to pay for their pollution. Outrageous enough, and your blood pressure is sure to rise reading the details.

Here's the icing:

So far, Chevron’s power push has resulted in “a senior Chevron exec” meeting with Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte “on the matter.” “One Chevron lobbyist” told Newsweek that the company’s argument to the Bush administration is: “We can’t let little countries
screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world.”

Out-fucking-rageous.

But this is exactly how these people think: the corporate juggernauts and the Republicons in their pockets. Dems end up in corporate pockets, too, but not to this extent. Not to where they can get away with having their major fundraiser lobby on behalf of a corporate polluter. Not to where they think sovereign countries have no right to "screw around" with the corporations.

This is 19th century thinking, people. This is colonialism, imperialism, and a sense of entitlement so huge it should leave you sputtering. They think their money entitles them to own the world.

And McCain believes them. Otherwise, why have so many lobbyists on his staff? Why such idiotic tax policies guaranteed to screw the poor and throw cash at the rich? Why repeat every fucking Bush talking point nearly word-for-word?

Don't be deceived by St. John playing Mr. Common Man on the campaign trail. He's a corporate bitch, and he's a lying, pandering, slandering political hack, and he's going to give us four more years of absolute political decomposition. The White House isn't even rotting at this point: it's gone beyond that, so defiled and polluted that I'm surprised it doesn't explode like a week-old corpse in a humid room:

Last night on PBS, Bill Moyers interviewed investigative journalist Jane Mayer and mentioned that in Mayer’s new book, she notes that FBI agents refused to participate in the CIA’s interrogation of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay because they determined it to be “borderline torture.” Moyers then asked, “Who were some of the other conservative heroes, as you call them, in your book?”

Mayer remembered one top Justice Department lawyer and “very conservative member of this administration” who said that after participating in White House meetings authorizing torture, he believed that “lunatics had taken over the country.”

Mayer said two other top DOJ lawyers had to develop a system of speaking codes because they feared they were being wiretapped while others described an “atmosphere of intimidation,” mainly from Vice President Dick Cheney:

MAYER: There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. … They felt so endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped…by their own government. They felt like they might be kind of weirdly in physical danger. They were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney.

That's how bad it is. High-level government employees are afraid of being physically harmed by the administration. They're terrified of their own government. This sounds like the USSR, not America. And to retain this power of terror and fear, to stay in control and ride American democracy and prosperity down its death throes, people like Bush, Cheney and the evil fuckers running McCain will lie, cheat, and steal their way to victory.

Don't let them do it.