President McCain Does It For The Nation's Wealthiest (Just Like Beloved Leader)

Both John McCain and Barack Obama promise to cut taxes for the majority of Americans. But an Obama administration would redistribute income toward lower- and middle-class households, while a McCain White House would steer the bulk of the benefits to the wealthiest families, according to a nonpartisan analysis of the still-evolving tax plans of the presidential candidates.

Both plans risk causing more economic damage than improvement, according to the detailed study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center. While some of Sen. McCain's tax cuts could lift economic activity, the "adverse effects of the resulting increased deficits may make the net effect of the plan economically harmful," the report says. Sen. Obama's plan similarly "would substantially increase the deficit" and could create "additional complexity" to the tax code by offering a range of targeted breaks.

Link.

Here's the side-by-side.

NSFW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

World's first animated porn???

President McCain, Then And Now

So which is it with all the flip-floppery?

President McCain: His Record

I Love New York!

My city, why I love it....

More than one in four New Yorkers were infected with genital herpes, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause sores and increase the spread of HIV, as of 2004, according to the city's first measurement of the virus.

About 26 percent of New Yorkers carried the virus compared with the national average of 19 percent, the New York City Health Department said today in a statement. The rate was higher among women than men -- 36 percent versus 19 percent, and higher among blacks than whites -- 49 percent versus 14 percent, the city said.

Link (-- which comes from our mayor!!!).

More Pandering From President McCain

Whoring for telecoms; that's leadership:

If you've been wondering where all the telecom lobbyists went to lick their wounds after the House rejected retroactive immunity for wiretapping, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it's found a bunch of them smack dab in the middle of John McCain's presidential campaign organization.
The group suggested Friday that the swell of current and former telecom lobbyists in the McCain camp might have something to do with the candidate's recent reversal on the legality of warrantless wiretapping. His most recent position "reads a lot like the talking points that a telecom lobbyist might employ," writes EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl.
McCain has long supported amnesty for telecoms who cooperated with Bush's warrantless domestic spying, but until recently questioned the legality of the program. After zig-zagging on the issue over the last few weeks, he eventually settled on a position nearly identical to President Bush's -- that presidential war-making powers trump the law when it comes to warrantless wiretapping.
That position further bolsters the phone companies' arguments for amnesty, since they could argue that they only helped out in a completely lawful surveillance.
The EFF is suing AT&T for its alleged cooperation in warrantless spying, in one of about 40 privacy lawsuits stemming from the surveillance program. EFF looked at the lobbyists who worked on a bill that would have given those companies immunity. Among the lobbyist connections the EFF found:

Charlie Black, a top McCain political adviser, worked for lobbying firm BKSH until March of this year. AT&T paid the firm $120,000 for the first three months of 2008, in part to lobby for the FISA amendments. Black was listed as one of AT&T's lobbyists.
The influential Wayne Berman, one of McCain's national finance co-chairs, works for Ogilvy, a prestigious lobbying firm which represents AT&T on FISA. Berman was listed in the first quarter of 2008 as having lobbied for the company.
John Green, also from Oglivy, lobbied on wiretap bills and amnesty for AT&T. He now reportedly works as a full-time liaison to Congress for the McCain campaign.
Dan Coats, a member of the McCain's Justice Advisory Committee, formerly lobbies for Sprint on FISA reform.

When asked about the ties, McCain's campaign declined to comment, though did say the senator would be providing comment on the matter to cable news channels Friday afternoon. But no remarks seemed to have been carried by the networks.
In remarks to reporters Friday, McCain called the legality of the program "ambiguous," but did not want to dwell on it, according to MSNBC.
Patrick Hynes, the campaign's online outreach coordinator, repeatedly declined to explain why McCain's position on warrantless wiretapping has changed, finally stating that McCain's "position on this issue has been consistent," despite stories from the conservative National Review Online, The New York Times and the liberal online magazine Salon to the contrary.
Reporter Charlie Savage -- who as a Boston Globe reporter pressed presidential contenders about their view of executive power in the fall -- added to the controversy Friday with a front page New York Times story.
Savage noted the discrepancy in what McCain said to him in December, and what his campaign told the National Review Online last Monday.
McCain oversees the telecom industry in Congress as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The McCain campaign's apparent embrace of the Bush administration's legal rationale for evading court scrutiny of U.S.-based wiretaps has given fodder to Democrats' attempts to tie McCain to the unpopular president.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) poked at the issue on cable news Friday, while Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) issued his own written statement.
"In 1978, I helped draft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which made clear the exclusive legal steps the President must take in order to conduct national security surveillance," Biden's statement reads. "Senator McCain has now not only joined the company of President Bush -- but also President Nixon -– in taking the position that as President he would consider himself above the law."
The EFF's post is not the first time that the McCain campaigns ties to telecom lobbyists have been noted.
In March, USA Today reported that "people who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisers more than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show."

Link.

Victory In Hanoi?

What 55,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries and ruined lives have wrought? This is what we were fighting to prevent?


Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo.

First Notes Of The Death Knell Of Micro$oft?

Kidding; the first was Ballmer's "Developers" "dance" (or "fit"); next are these....

Evolution: Witnessed!

True believers of course, smart as they might be, are capable of denying scientific fact, but the truth is here.

35 Of Beloved Leader's Sins

Well, his and the rest of Our Leaders'.... See them here. Way to go, Bushie!

President McCain's Economic Platform? Built Of Lies

See for yourself. And more about that here.

Hav-A-Laff!

Good joke: Spell Check Poem

Music Viddie Of The Day

Insight Into Christofascism

Of course, ultimately it's a religion based on forced conversion. And if that requires lies, well, the ends always justify the means. (That, opposed to morality, where a principle is a principle.)

So see them lie....

Doing This May Be Good For Me After All....

Not that I've seen proof.... Link.

Viddie Of The Day

The legendary Henry Miller....

Wiiiiiiiiiiii!!! What Our Leaders Have Wrought: Finally Succeeding In Making America Second Rate

Me, I always thought the GOP's ideal of America was to be a banana republic, a nation with a non-democratic government, shall we say, ran for the exclusive benefit of an oligarchy.

Along those lines, there's this recent success of Our Leaders':

[Nintendo] also is shrewdly maximizing its profit by sending four times as many [Wii] units to Europe, reaping the benefits of the strong euro, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Pachter estimated that Nintendo shipped just 500,000 copies of the game in North America but as many as 2 million units to Europe.

"The shortage demonstrates one consequence of the weak dollar. We're seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit elsewhere," Pachter said.

Link.

Leadership, Beloved Leader-Style

Is it possible to sink even lower?

Remember this?

Bush, December 28, 2007:

I am withholding my approval of H.R. 1585, the "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008," because it would imperil billions of dollars of Iraqi assets at a crucial juncture in that nation's reconstruction efforts and because it would undermine the foreign policy and commercial interests of the United States.

This was the bill that Bush claimed he was pocket vetoing, but really couldn't, because Congress was still in session.

But the important thing to remember is that he was vetoing a bill that:

1. contained a pay raise for the troops, and;

2. enabled American veterans of the first Gulf War who actually won court judgments against the Iraqi government for having been captured and tortured by the Saddam Hussein regime to recover against frozen Iraqi assets in this country.

Bush was willing to endure the horrible optics of both of those things (as though the Vestigial Media could ever be counted on to actually notice and present those optics) in order to protect those Iraqi assets he considered so critical to that country's "reconstruction." Well, that and the fact that it would have put his "administration" in the position of having to admit that people were entitled to compensation for being tortured.

Fast forward to today:

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity.

Yep. The same money that was so critical to long term Iraqi and regional stability one Friedman Unit ago that it couldn't even be used to compensate American soldiers who had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. Same money, now being held hostage by Bush to force the Iraqis to accept a perpetual American military presence in their country, all arranged without Senate approval by calling this treaty by another name: a "Status of Forces Agreement."

And what an "agreement," at that!

Link.

Hav-A-Laff!

Good joke: The Perfect Career for a Writer

Moral Issue Of The Day

A mean, nasty, stupid person, through good fortune and absolutely no more, comes into a fairly large sum of money. Is this person who was previously pretty much worthless as a human being (yeah, yeah, pun intended), suddenly other than the same worthless wretch they were before their stroke of good fortune.

I say no.

But then again, I believe this (from one of my very favorite comic book stories ever!):


Link.