Sal is a rep just stirring the pot. He is obviously just trying to draw out the positive opinions for the reps. But he is doing it through the back door with a fake story and language. I didn't think they would stoop so low.
Where is the 'ignore user buttom'?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
I have made a point to speak with many people since she was selected as McCains VP running mate. I have found people to be very excited about the upcoming election since he chose her. They have said she is just what McCain needed to revitalize his campaign. It was a bold move on his part that will pay off in the end. People are excited by her grit and fearless nature as evidenced by her record in Alaska. They seem to love that she is not afraid to take on the establishment. I have to agree on all points. And damn those who belittle her experience & intelligence because she doesn't come from a state with a huge number of people, because she was the Mayor of a "small city". Schenectady is a very small city, does that make Brian Stratton less intelligent then Mayor Jennings? I don't think so.
Schenectady is a very small city, does that make Brian Stratton less intelligent then Mayor Jennings?
Please don't make me answer this one!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Click on "Member Panel" at the top of the screen, scroll down on the left to User Message Block .. Add a new user that you wish to block.
Simple - no more idjits.
Thanks!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
I was just watching Nightline and a Democratic spokesman was bashing the small town of Wasillia that Palin comes from. He chuckled that the City Hall looked like a "bake shop". Arrogant SOB. This arrogance will play a significant role in the victory of the McCain/Palin ticket on election day. To discount the power of small town America will be their demise. They also interviewed the "CEO" of the town and she indicated they would not return the calls of national reporters because they would use up the funds in the budget for that line item within a week. Fiscal responsibility.........Gotta love that
well those small towns really dont mean that much in the way that the votes ad up so be real my friend. The city has much more clout then Duanesberg and Delanson and Princetown out there as well as Schoharie or Middleburg, so why is it relevant. The demos know where to count the votes plus a lot of the country folks want the demos because the farmers get the hand outs like hogs at the troffs that they are. So the reality is that you have as much experience as Palin to be president and that us what is upsetting plus you have to remember that ALaska is the smallest state of population Plus lets be real overe here. She has the retarded baby and the putan daughter out sleeping around since she isnt talking care of the home - front like she should so how is this part of the repubs plan? I cant defend this what so ever overe there. Terrible like I said and later you will all say Salvatore is right all along indeed.
Mr. McCain's message First published: Saturday, September 6, 2008
Friday was the day for Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, to move on, from the exuberance and adulation of the party faithful and back into the political middle where a contentious and critical battle for the presidency will be settled at last.
The Republicans loved what they saw and heard in St. Paul, of course. Ms. Palin speaks their language, all right. She's a brand new voice, comfortable and eager in her roles of citing party dogma as well as tweaking and even sneering a bit at Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate. Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has reintroduced himself as the long-ago survivor of war horrors that no human being should ever have to endure.
The unanswered question is whether they offer solutions palatable to the swing voters in the most contested states in what's shaping up as one more very close election. The country has no shortage of admiration and respect for Mr. McCain, and perhaps Ms. Palin as well. But will Americans entrust the Republican ticket to lead them out of what even Mr. McCain acknowledges are hard times?
This is an unusual team of an established insider and an untested outsider running against the excesses, partisanship and dysfunction of Washington. Mr. McCain vowed in his acceptance speech Thursday night to restore prosperity. Mr. Obama no doubt will ask, as he has already, why Mr. McCain is so consistently supportive of the policies of the man he barely mentioned, President Bush. Mr. McCain will need to better explain how and where he, as the new leader of what he calls the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, will change course from eight years of misdirection and disaster.
The Republicans should be required, of course, to win this election on the merits and on the issues. What they can't be allowed to do is turn the race into a test of popularity and patriotism. The matter of who loves his country more, Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama, has no winner and has no answer.
Yet here's Mr. McCain at once hailing the historic accomplishments of Mr. Obama, but then veering off with shots like this:
"I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again. I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not."
Mr. McCain can rise above the culture of partisan warfare or he can intensify it. He can't do both. He should look more to what he calls the great things that are always within our reach.
"Fight with me," he says — for our better principles and character, for the future of our children, for justice and opportunity for all of us, for our shared heritage and our national defense.
Those are the stakes for a presidential campaign that would elevate us, not diminish us. It's up to Mr. McCain to meet his own ideals. Convention season is behind both candidates and both parties. Something much larger and more lasting awaits the winner of a campaign waged on substance, not just rhetoric.
John McCain has an impressive personal story. Imprisoned by the North Vietnamese for five and a half years, mostly in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton," he showed great courage, resilience and reservoirs of strength.
In choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, McCain picked another politician with an interesting personal narrative. A mother of five, she overcame long odds to oust the entrenched Republican governor in 2006. When she and her husband learned their fifth child would be born with Down syndrome, they didn't terminate the pregnancy. That's a decision I and many other Americans find admirable.
McCain hopes those compelling biographies will be enough to take him and his running mate over the line in November. Since personality matters as much as policies, the Arizona senator has decided to give short shrift to issues and go all out on charming personal stories.
"This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates," his campaign manager, Rick Davis, told The Washington Post last week.
It's no surprise McCain's acceptance speech Thursday was heavy on biography and short on policy prescriptions. The short film that introduced him offered a Hollywood-esque arc. It's quite a tale, with the dimension of truth.
McCain seemed most comfortable when he was speaking of the ideals he embraced in those years — honor, service, courage. But he was oddly lifeless and unconvincing when he rattled off a laundry list of domestic issues, touching on "school choice," health insurance and taxes. That's clearly not where his heart is. Even less persuasive was his attempt to snatch the mantle of change from his rival, Barack Obama. McCain is 72 years old; besides, he is a member of the Republican Party, which has held power for the last eight years. It's hard to run as an insurgent if you've been part of the establishment.
The aging war hero apparently believes that he is still the "maverick," a "Mr. Smith" played by John Wayne instead of Jimmy Stewart. But that McCain gave up the good fight after his crushing defeat at the hands of Bush forces in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries. Since then, the "maverick" has set about ingratiating himself to the same establishment he now vows to fight. He has adopted nearly every one of Bush's failed policies.
Don't be fooled by Palin. She's just a fresh face to rev up the culture wars. She opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest; she urged an Alaska librarian to ban books; she believes "creationism" should be taught in public schools; she asked ministry students at her former church to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it "God's will." In choosing her, McCain caved in to the rigid Christianists who now form the core of the GOP.
The John McCain on display as he closed his speech, speaking of duty and sacrifice, is a compelling figure. That McCain is a man who wants to resist partisanship, a man who would shrink from the vicious attacks his campaign has, in fact, run against Obama. If voters believe in that McCain and think that's all the country needs, he wins.
But if the campaign is fought on the issues, McCain loses. That's why he stays away from them.
Cynthia Tucker writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her e-mail address is cynthia@ajc.com.
By JAY BOOKMAN First published: Saturday, September 6, 2008
John McCain's campaign and much of the Republican Party are outraged at media coverage of Sarah Palin. McCain strategist Steve Schmidt set the tone perfectly Wednesday, whining about a "faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee." Well, cry me a river. Let's take that claim apart, and let's start with this:
A handful of commentators and a larger number of bloggers have indeed wondered in public about Palin's decision to accept the nomination so soon after giving birth to a son with Down syndrome, a condition that requires a lot of attention, and when she has a 17-year-old unmarried pregnant daughter. How, they have asked, could Palin do right both by her family and her country?
To the McCain camp, such questions constitute a vicious media campaign to ruin a promising conservative candidate, using sexism to do it. Is that true?
We have a similar set of circumstances to compare against the Palin case.
In March of 2007, John Edwards decided to continue his presidential campaigning even after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The reaction will sound familiar.
Rush Limbaugh said the Edwardses were turning their eyes to the campaign when they instead should turn their eyes to God. Katie Couric accused Edwards of mining his wife's condition for votes.
"Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you're dealing with a major health crisis in your family," Couric told Edwards.
And in Time magazine, columnist Jay Carney wrote that "surely many average Americans have to be wondering at what point the candidate will decide that his duties as husband and father to three children, including a 6- and 8-year-old, trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House."
Edwards is a man; he is also a liberal. Yet, he faced the same questioning and second-guessing that Palin is now undergoing. Why? Because human beings are drawn to human stories, and the media have an economic incentive to tell those stories.
The McCain campaign's complaint about a media feeding frenzy focused on Palin is even more precious. John McCain chose to introduce an unknown player to the national scene at a critical point in the campaign, and he did so by portraying her as a gun-toting mother of five, riding out of the wilds of Alaska to clean up Washington.
And they claim to be shocked at the "feeding frenzy" they set off? In the first hours after the announcement, TV reporters had so little information about Palin that they were reduced to reading off Wikipedia for information. Of course, the media descended on Alaska to try to fill in the gaps as quickly as possible.
The story the McCain camp peddled was so appealing that Palin even drew coverage from Us magazine, People and National Enquirer, outlets that would never have wasted ink on a Kay Bailey Hutchison or Tim Pawlenty. Their interest was human, not political.
The real reason Schmidt is angry is because the reporting has shown that so much of the original McCain narrative was untrue.
Palin was cast as a reformer who fought the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." But in fact, she ran for governor in 2006 as a champion of the pork barrel bridge and "opposed" it only after it was clear the project was dead. We were told that Palin abhors earmarks, the special congressional appropriations that Alaska politicians have used to bleed billions from the American taxpayer. But it turns out Palin fought to get earmarks both as mayor and as governor.
It's not the media's fault that the cinematic story envisioned by McCain and his staff has fallen apart on closer inspection. They just didn't do their homework, and they got caught.
Jay Bookman writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His e-mail address is jbookman@ajc.com.
You stepped way over the line in your Sept. 3 editorial about the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. The Gazette apparently believes that a woman’s place is in the home — but not the statehouse, and definitely nowhere near the White House — if she happens to have kids who need her attention. Well, guess what? All kids need attention, and plenty of mothers manage to have families and a successful career at the same time. How dare you presume to know better than Sarah and Todd Palin about the timing of her return to work after the birth of their son? As long as the baby is loved and cared for, the length of her maternity leave is nobody else’s business but the Palins’. It’s equally outrageous for you to suggest that Sarah Palin’s demanding career caused her to be a “hands-off” mom, to the detriment of her oldest daughter. No parent can hover over a teenager 24 hours a day. Even Wally and the Beav managed to get into scrapes while June Cleaver was busy dusting in her chiffon dress, high heels and string of pearls! There’s a legitimate question whether Gov. Palin’s career experience qualifi es her for the office of vice president, and I have no problem if anyone wants to argue that point. However, her status as a working mother facing difficult family issues should have no part in that debate. KRISTINE SMITH Duanesburg
Kristine you're correct, what about the families in this country who have kids hooked on drugs or alcohol did they all do something wrong? People who have never raised kids especially a teenager wouldn't understand that you can't keep an eye on your kids 24/7, all you can do is teach them the proper values/ morals, and hope that they follow them.
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