I mean, look at her. That is the smile of the demonically possessed. More substantively, she is typical of Alaskan Republicans in that she’s a staunch ally of big oil. She supports drilling in ANWR, and generally comes down in favor of letting energy companies run pipelines wherever they want. They in turn have contributed generously to her campaigns.

8.17.08 McCain suggests raiding Colorado's water

Memo to: John McCain. From: Five million thirst-crazed Coloradans.

Subject: Forget about winning our nine electoral votes next November. We don't vote for water rustlers in this state; we tar and feather them!

Yes, fellow citizens of the state whose official motto is "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting," John McCain has thunk the unthinkable — and proposed renegotiating the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

To quote from Charles Ashby's story in the Friday Pueblo Chieftain:

"The water compact that Colorado and other upper basin states have with California and Arizona should be renegotiated," U.S. Sen. John McCain said Thursday.
Bob Ewegen: The Denver Post

In which Frank Rich skewers John McCain - Read the whole thing!

... a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.
...
Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.” NYT OpEd

But McCain's "base" -- such a good adjective for the knuckledraggers on the right! -- love him for who he really is. And, as Frank Rich points out, that's the McCain who practically never stopped supporting the Iraq war, the McCain who licks his lips at the confrontation with Russia, who never got upset about what happened in New Orleans, who embraces religious intolerance, whose campaign is "essentially" run by lobbyists, including Blackwater's boys on the Hill.

And that doesn't even include McCain's volatile temperament.
Prairie Weather

8.16.08 McCain offers no road map to the Shining City

See also Digby: "I remember writing a long time ago that John McCain is the man George W. Bush was pretending to be, right down to the flight suit. The Real Thing is actually far more dangerous than the cheap imitation. If he wins this thing, we could find ourselves in a very, very serious crisis, of both economic stability and national security ---- and very likely of our government itself. This man is unstable."

8.16.08 Kevin Drum:

Look: Saakashvili came to power on a Georgian nationalist platform of recovering Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He's been jonesing for an excuse to send troops in for years, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. Likewise, Putin has been eagerly waiting for an excuse to pound the crap out of him in return — again, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. (You don't think Russia was able to mount a highly precise counterattack within 24 hours just by coincidence, do you?)

Now sure, in general, Kosovo + missile shield + NATO enlargement + resurgent Russian nationalism formed the background for this war, and maybe the U.S. has played a bad hand on this score. But Bush administration officials have said for months (i.e., before the war started, meaning this isn't just post hoc ass covering) that they've urged Saakashvili to stay cool. And I believe them. What else would they do, after all? There was never any chance that we were going to provide Georgia with military help in case of a Russian invasion, and it's improbable in the extreme that anyone on our side said anything to suggest otherwise. When Saakashvili says, just hours before sending troops into South Ossetia, that he understands this means war with Russia but he "cannot imagine the West not coming to Georgia's aid," he's being delusional.
Washington Monthly

... The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”
Randy Barnett, quoting Tim Lynch: The Volokh Conspiracy

1. Jury Nullification. — Jury nullification occurs when a jury votes to acquit a defendant despite the fact that the defendant is guilty under the letter of the law. A jury may opt to nullify because it believes the law is generally unfair or unjust, because it believes applying the law in the particular case would be unfair or unjust, or because it believes the punishment is too harsh. The jury's power to nullify stems from the fact that it does not need to give a reason for its decision and its vote of acquittal is unreviewable.
Rachel E. Barkow:Harvard Law Review, Page 1340

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.
...
The rule also would allow criminal intelligence assessments to be shared outside designated channels whenever doing so may avoid danger to life or property -- not only when such danger is "imminent," as is now required, German said.

8.14.08 Anthrax And The Bush 'War On Terror'

You see, the process used to create this anthrax was in flagrant violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (more here). The United States is not just a cosigner, it is one of the chief authors of this particular international law, which has been in effect since 1972. Chief among its tenets is the prohibition against developing new biological-weapons processes.

The FBI's self-evident conclusion that the anthrax was produced at Fort Detrick is manifest evidence that we are violating that law -- and have probably been doing so for some time, even preceding the Bush regime.
Orcinus

8.5.08 The Commander in Chief Test

This point gets made a lot, but rarely by referencing the candidates' actual words. Here's what John McCain and Barack Obama had to say when the country was debating the biggest foreign policy decision we've made in the last several decades.
...
McCain: Isn't it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?
...
Obama: I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
Anonymous Liberal

Senate Republicans can be obnoxious too, but there are certain structural factors that limit the level of pure lunacy on display. For instance, to become a senator, you have to win a state-wide election, which generally requires beating a relatively well-funded and respectable opponent. Not so in the House. Most of the remaining Republican members of the House represent heavily conservative districts and often run uncontested. For many of them, their only real concern is the threat of someone even more reactionary launching a primary challenge. Furthermore, the House is much more structured and hierarchical than the Senate. And the House GOP delegation was run for the better part of the last decade by Tom Delay, who is probably the most corrupt, dishonest, and generally reprehensible figure to rise to prominence in American politics since the Gilded Age. And he left his stamp all over the House GOP delegation, which is currently run by his proteges.

So it's not at all surprising that the House GOP delegation is now composed largely of shameless hacks and reactionary nutjobs. In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi: "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." Okay, maybe that's overstating things a little bit (but not much).
Anonymous Liberal