Our friends at "The Fix" have more on Sen. John McCain's Senate Floor speech deriding the Tea Party and its Elected official followers:
Arizona Sen. John McCain's floor speech on Wednesday denouncing the negotiating tactics of some tea party-aligned Members of Congress raises the question as to whether the famed maverick is back to his old tricks.
McCain derided the idea - pushed by some tea party-affiliated members like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)- that raising the debt ceiling should be tied to adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, a proposal that lacks majority support in the Senate. (McCain supports the idea.)
He called such an argument "foolish" and bizarro", adding that to portray the balanced budget amendment as a possibility amounted to "deceiving many of our constituents." He also quoted extensively from a Wall Street Journal op-ed that compared tea partiers to "hobbits".
The tea party responded in kind; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul deadpanned that he'd "rather be a hobbit than a troll" while 2010 Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle said that "it is the hobbits who are the heroes and save the land." Um, ok.
You've got to love that last quote from Sharron Angle, one-time Tea Party darling but also example #1A for how the Tea Party is killing Republicans (it was her ridiculous U.S. Senate campaign in Nevada in 2010 that made it possible for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to escape what looked to be a losing re-election bid).
As The Los Angeles Times reports, add another complaint to the frenzy over illegal immigrants and the "damage" they cause:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Monday defended his statement over the weekend that illegal immigrants were responsible for some Arizona wildfires, citing congressional testimony and published reports to back his claim.
Speaking from his home state Saturday, McCain said there was "substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally." He didn't specify what evidence, however [Pols emphasis]...
...Speaking on the "Imus in the Morning" show Monday, McCain stood by his statement.
"I was briefed by the Forest Service about the fact that illegal immigrants sometimes start these fires," he said. And there has been testimony by service officials that "large numbers of warming and cooking fires built and abandoned by cross-border violators have caused wildfires that have destroyed cultural and natural resources."
He also cited a Los Angeles Times report backing his claim, though it was unclear which story he was referring to.
Imus challenged McCain, though, saying the reports don't prove illegal immigrants were responsible for the so-called Wallow blaze raging through eastern parts of the state.
McCain said he never was referring to the specific fire in his remarks. [Pols emphasis]
First off, kudos to Imus for not just nodding at McCain's claims and actually challenging what he had to say.
Perhaps McCain is referring to the same band of invisible illegal immigrants whom Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler "almost certainly" have voted in past elections, despite a complete lack of evidence that this has ever happened in Colorado. And not that they haven't looked -- Mesa County Clerk Sheila Reiner -- a Republican in a heavy Republican county -- recently went public about her concerns that the SOS office doesn't seem to have any records of any illegal immigrants having voted in Colorado, although that's not what Gessler has told Congress and anyone else who will listen.
Look, illegal immigration is an important issue that deserves a serious discussion. But we can't have those discussions when elected officials are always tossing around unconfirmed accusations about illegal immigrants casting ballots, causing fires, and beheading people in the desert. None of this does anything to address the actual problem of illegal immigration, and it devolves the entire discussion into a silly game of finger-pointing. What difference does this make, anyway? Are illegal immigrants known to be less careful with matches than legal residents? Can we now classify illegal immigrants as a "fire hazard?"
In our view this isn't about defending or opposing illegal immigrants. This is about something much more fundamentally important -- elected officials should not be allowed to just toss out harmful accusations against anybody without proof.
If McCain had accused an individual person of setting these fires, people would be elbowing each other trying to be the first to condemn his remarks. If McCain had said, I'm told that Ed Smith of Tucson set these fires. I don't have any proof, but I'm pretty sure. -- he would be absolutely roasted (pun intended) by the media and opinion makers on both sides of the aisle. But if he makes a baseless generic accusation against a faceless group of people -- like illegal immigrants -- then it's not as big of a deal somehow. Yet it is still so very wrong, and so very irresponsible.
Perhaps this is all just a misdirection ruse so that people won't realize that U.S. Senators actually set the fires in Arizona. We don't have any proof of that, but we read it somewhere in a newspaper once, and this guy who we think works for the government confirmed the story.
Whatever desire that Democrats may have to bring Senate candidate Jane Norton down to earth should not permit subsidizing the rants of Colorado's greatest embarrassment since John Chivington. Noting very, very briefly what the Denver Post reports:
Former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton will announce her candidacy for the U.S. Senate today, much to the chagrin of retired U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo.
Tancredo said he would not have had a problem if Norton earlier this year had called fellow Republicans statewide to say she wanted to run for the office and outlined her reasons.
Instead, he charged that Norton in recent weeks got talked into running by Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Norton family friend and political ally.
"Does John McCain have a right to do that? Sure. Do I have a right to (complain) about it? You bet," Tancredo said in an interview Monday night. "Jane Norton is a nice lady who I like. End of story. But I fear she is not ready for prime time."
Yeah, we'll remember that next time you run for President on the "Send 'Em Back" ticket. And why do we have the feeling that Tancredo wouldn't be nearly so angry if McCain had suggested that he should run for Senate?
At least Post reporter Lynn Bartels had the sense to edit Tancredo for the print version, in the first version of this story he asks, "Do I have a right to bitch about it?"
If the messenger makes your skin crawl, it's really hard to listen to what they say. Almost makes us wonder if he's learned his lesson from the Sonia Sotomayor burn and is now using his ignominy to inversely boost the team...
It should now be clear to everyone across the political spectrum that Sarah Palin was a disastrous pick for the VP slot. Most of us saw that before the election, which is why Palin went quickly from having superstar status to being a serious drag on the McCain ticket. But the evidence coming out in the days after the election of her profligacy, lack of basic knowledge about things like NAFTA and Africa that a C-student in American Government would know, and reports of her serious attitude problems, it should be utterly clear to even hyper-Republican partisans that Palin was the worst possible choice.
As The Denver Post reports, John McCain's campaign is cutting back in Colorado...just like every once-competitive tight Republican race:
Despite assertions that it was not cutting back on resources in the state, John McCain's presidential campaign has drastically slashed television advertising at Colorado's big three stations.
At the same time, national Republicans have canceled $600,000 worth of ads supporting incumbent GOP Rep. Marilyn Musgrave's re-election bid. And the campaign arm of Senate Democrats pulled out of the Mark Udall-Bob Schaffer race, where recent polls show Udall, a Democrat, with a wide lead. Colorado's days as a battleground state for the Nov. 4 election may be waning.[Pols emphasis]
McCain, who trails Barack Obama by an average of 5 percentage points in Colorado polls, this week bought a total of $305,550 worth of ads at KUSA-Channel 9, KCNC-Channel 4 and KMGH-Channel 7, according to records. That is a 46 percent decrease from the week before and a 56 percent slide from two weeks ago...
..."What this means is that the McCain campaign has sparse resources and is beginning to write places off," said Jennifer Duffy, managing editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "Colorado polling is consistently looking bad for McCain. So it doesn't surprise me that they are putting their resources elsewhere."
You have to feel sorry for the McCain spokespeople at this point, because they're left sounding a little like the old Iraqi Public Information Minister:
Members of both the local and national McCain campaign have repeatedly denied they would - or did - shift or cut back on resources, including ads, in Colorado. When asked about the drop at the three stations Wednesday, Tom Kise, spokesman for the campaign, refused to answer the question and instead discussed the ads themselves.[Pols emphasis]
"We are not pulling ads and will be on the air in Colorado through Election Day. While we won't be discussing specifics of any buy, we reserve the right, like all campaigns do, including the Obama camp, to make strategic moves on a daily basis with our paid media efforts," Kise said.
Not only are we not cutting back our ads, we're actually winning in Colorado. In fact, we've already won. You just haven't been told yet.
After a turbulent week that included new disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin and signs that Senator John McCain was struggling to strike the right tone for his campaign, Republican leaders said Saturday they were worried that Mr. McCain was heading for defeat unless he brought stability to his presidential candidacy and settled on a clear message to counter Senator Barack Obama.
Again and again, party leaders said in interviews that while they still believed that Mr. McCain could win over voters in the next 30 days, they were concerned that he and his advisers seemed to be adrift in dealing with an extraordinarily challenging political battleground and a crisis on Wall Street.
The expressions of concern came after a particularly difficult week for Mr. McCain. On Friday night, new questions arose about his choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate after an investigation by the Alaska Legislature concluded that Ms. Palin had abused her power in trying to orchestrate the firing of her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.
"I think you're seeing a turning point," said Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, where Mr. McCain has decided to stop campaigning. "You're starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign's message, isn't connecting."...
...The difficulties of the McCain campaign have led some Republican leaders to express concern that he could end up dragging other Republicans down to defeat. "If Obama is able to run up big numbers around the country, the potential for hurting down-ballot Republicans is very big," Mr. Anuzis, the Michigan party chairman, said.
One sign of that has emerged in Nebraska, where Representative Lee Terry ran a newspaper advertisement featuring words of support for him from a woman identified as an "Obama-Terry voter."
Colorado's own Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams takes his shots at the McCain camp as well. You know, because he's run such a brilliant campaign for Bob Schaffer and all:
But no subject has more divided Republicans than the one that has been a matter of disagreement in the McCain camp: how directly to invoke Mr. Obama's connection to his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground who has had a passing association with Mr. Obama over the years.
In Colorado, a traditionally Republican state that Mr. McCain is struggling to keep in his column, the party chairman, Dick Wadhams, urged Mr. McCain to hit the issue hard, arguing that it was fair game and could be highly effective in raising questions about Mr. Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. He said he was surprised Mr. McCain had failed to do so in last week's debate.
"I think those are legitimate insights into who Senator Obama is," Mr. Wadhams said. "I do not think it is irrelevant to this election."
But Fergus Cullen, the Republican chairman in New Hampshire, said Saturday that he thought it would be a mistake for Mr. McCain to go down that road, warning that it would turn off moderate voters in his state who have a history of supporting Mr. McCain.
Barack Obama is outspending John McCain at nearly a three-to-one clip on television time in the final weeks of the presidential election, according to ad buy information obtained by The Fix, a financial edge that is almost certainly contributing to the momentum for the Illinois senator in key battleground states.
From Sept. 30 to Oct. 6, Obama spent more than $20 million on television ads in 17 states including more than $3 million in Pennsylvania and more than $2 million each in Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. McCain in that same time frame spent just $7.2 million in 15 states. Even when the Republican National Committee's independent expenditure spending in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin is factored in (a total of $5.3 million), Obama still outspent the combined GOP forces by roughly $8 million in the last week alone.
Biden said McCain voted "the exact same way" as Obama to raise taxes on people making $42,000/year.
That's a lie. McCain didn't vote on either bill:
Barack Obama Voted Twice In Favor Of The Democrats' FY 2009 Budget Resolution That Would Raise Taxes On Those Making Just $42,000 A Year. (S. Con. Res. 70, CQ Vote #85: Adopted 51-44: R 2-43; D 47-1; I 2-0, 3/14/08, Obama Voted Yea; S. Con. Res. 70, CQ Vote #142: Adopted 48- 45: R 2- 44; D 44- 1; I 2-0, 6/4/08, Obama Voted Yea)
For future generations following this election, I thought I would post some pictures to illustrate one of the main contentious issues of this campaign: John McCain - maverick or not?
