Iraq

The Iraqi government has stated that it wants US troops out of Iraq after 2011.

That's all.

Can we get some of that money back now?

They don't want us there. The American people don't want to be there. The only person that wants to keep us in Iraq is John McCain.

Less than a week

There has so much to comment on recently it is hard to say where to begin. The Presidential race seems to have swung so far to Obama that Buchanan is already hyperbolizing President Obama's 1st 100 Days. The "global financial crisis" is still in full swing and the first *GULP* billions should be on its way out of the Treasury and to the banks. And for the first time since 1958 the Federal Funds Rate is 1%.

What is most interesting at this point is watching the GOP cannibalize itself as people begin abandon the sinking John McCain campaign. Even Sarah Palin, who seems to be drawing bigger crowds than the top of the ticket, has been positioning herself outside of the McCain camp, taken stands on issues that have not been on message. It seems that Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions are not going to wait until after the election, she is positioning herself to run for the GOP nomination in 2012 (yet another sign of the coming apocalypse?). The McCain camp has traded the "maverick" tag for "diva" and called her out in public on it.

The choice of Sarah Palin has undone the McCain campaign. Perhaps the oddball choice of Alaska governor wasn't as smart as initially thought. Tom Ridge would have made McCain far more competitive in Pennsylvania and actually give them a chance at winning.

Back home in the "other" Washington the Governor's race is especially close. Rossi has hit Gregoire on traffic, sex offenders, and now has an ad of her endorsing a state income tax. Stick a fork in her, she is done. Gregoire managed to get touched by all three of the third rails in WA politics. She has no response to any of it other than the comparison to the Bush administration.

We'll have to see. It's not helping Gregoire out much that I can tell. We'll have to see about Burner and the legislative races. Personally I do not believe that Obama's enthusiasm gets to the bottom of the ticket. Rejection of that kind of partisanship is part of the reason he has done so well and a big part of the appeal to the younger independent voters that he has drawn.

That One

“Mr. DuHaime rejected comments made last week by a Pennsylvania Democrat, Representative John P. Murtha, who told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, speaking of his home base, that ‘there is no question that Western Pennsylvania is a racist area.’

Mr. McCain referenced Mr. Murtha’s comments in his third stop of the day, at Robert Morris University here, when he said, ‘I think you may have noticed that Senator Obama’s supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately.’ As the crowd booed, Mr. McCain became tangled up in the rest of his remarks. ‘And you know, I couldn’t agree with them more,’ he said, to silence…”

-Elisabeth Bumiller & Jeff Zeleny; New York Times

Fourteen days ago Senator John McCain referred to Senator Barack Obama as “that one” in a debate in front of, at least, 90 million onlookers. The day prior to that, Senator McCain posed a simple question to a foaming crowd if we really know who the “real” Obama is. A worm in the crowd had an answer to that: a terrorist. The bellicose comment seemed to catch McCain briefly off-guard—that for a nanosecond he couldn’t believe what he has become: an angry threatened pol who will do anything to win. Joe Every-man is not on the good side of public perception. Death threats--Wallace, this rhetoric on both sides should end.

It is clear the McCain cadre gave the green light to race-bate this contest and caricature Mr. Obama as the mysterious otherman. This is the last resort, you see. Pat Buchanan volunteered his thoughts on the matter in saying, “he has to go there, or he will lose this election.” The spirit of Lee Atwater is alive and well in modern Republican politics.

The General Election has spiraled into the darkest of depths at similar speed to that of the stock market crash. Attitudes are vicious. There is now an element of hate and fear coming from Senator McCain's campaign that is careening out of control. The conservative intelligencia (Peggy Noonan; Bill Kristol; Christopher Buckley; George Will, and now, Colin Powell) have all rejected where McCain is going, in particular his nod to someone who equates seeing Russia from American soil to sound foreign policy experience. Senator McCain’s crowds have changed. They are not reflective or even remotely reminiscent of the bipartisan quasi-conservative lot that attended his primary experience.

What a difference a year makes.

Meanwhile, his opponent convenes an economic panel and a foreign policy panel to talk through the difficult issues we face.