Claire McCaskill is Like School in the Summertime

No class:

McCaskill was stepping out of her chair at the end of an MSNBC interview, and Romney was up next. She and a staffer unplugged her various wires, and she handed Romney the earpiece the guests use to hear the host.

“I spit on this before I put it in,” she said to Romney, with a sweet smile.

It’s a good thing Sarah Palin wasn’t following Claire McCaskill in the interview seat. God knows what would have been done to the earpiece.

October 8, 2008 · Filed Under Election 2008, Liberal Absurdity

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Epic Fail: Obama Tries to Play the Cancer Card

Most pundits and reporters are calling the second presidential debate in Nashville a solid win for Barack Obama, and I have to wonder if they watched the same debate I did. I’ve read tons of debate analysis, some excellent and some undeserving of linkage, and I have yet to see anyone discuss what Obama revealed about about how he treated his dying mother. In answer to Tom Brokaw’s question about whether health care in America is a privilege, right, or responsibility, Obama said:

Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills — for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.

You want to know what’s really “fundamentally wrong?” Barack Obama let his dying mother spend some of her last moments arguing with insurance companies. Energy that could have been put toward fighting her monstrous disease was channeled toward navigating bureaucracy, and her son, a 34 year old “man,” couldn’t find the time or the heart to shoulder that weight for her.

This is personal for me. I was years younger than Obama when my mother lost her life to cancer, and it never occurred to me to burden her with medical bills and insurance negotiations as she lay in a hospital room receiving blood transfusions and chemotherapy treatments. I didn’t realize my mom was dying at the time, but all the same, I handled the phone calls and mail from the insurer, and I made damn sure she didn’t have to think about those things.

Why didn’t Barack Obama fight with the insurance companies on behalf of his dying mother? Was he too wrapped up in his career as a lawyer, lecturer, and author? Was it her right and not his responsibility?

Barack Obama’s callous disregard for his mother is deeply disturbing. Just as sickening is his attempt to use her suffering for political gain after he apparently did nothing to help her.

And in case you still find Obama to be a man of character, let me remind you that he saw no problem with admitting, on live television, that his mother spent her final months arguing with insurance companies. He admitted this because he doesn’t believe it reflects badly on him in any way. Blame the government, he says. Blame the system. Blame the greedy insurers. Screw that, Barack: I blame you.

Dealing with insurance companies sucks. It takes more time, effort, and mental stamina than any cancer patient should have to give. But it’s manageable by a healthy, young person working on the patient’s behalf. Tens of thousands of Americans have juggled other responsibilities to be there for their ailing loved ones, and I hope each one of those people watched the debate.

I hope they caught Obama’s revelation and found it as sickening as I did.

October 8, 2008 · Filed Under Barack Obama, Election 2008, Health care

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Bill Ayers Makes Awesome Dinner Company!

Want to know the latest reason Barack Obama’s ties to violent unrepentant terrorist William Ayers shouldn’t be held against him? Ayers and his terrorist wife make lovely dinner companions.

That’s the conclusion of retired University of Chicago professor Richard Stern after attending a handful of dinner parties with Ayers and his “attractive” wife Bernardine Dohrn.

I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms. As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They’d raised the child of a weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernadine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

Yeah, and I bet Bill Ayers would make a delightful inauguration guest too.

October 7, 2008 · Filed Under Barack Obama, Election 2008

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Cindy McCain Has a Twitter Squatter

Some fool is posing as Cindy McCain on Twitter. Fake Cindy finds Sarah Palin annoying and laments that McCain’s campaign isn’t as Internet savvy as Obama’s. Other silliness, preserved for posterity:

Blog Herald calls this a hijacking, but as far as I can tell, the Twitter account name was registered by an impostor, not actually stolen from Cindy McCain. At any rate, we’ll see how long this Twitter squatter lasts.

October 6, 2008 · Filed Under Election 2008

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Understanding McCain’s Health Plan

John McCain’s plan to reform the American health care system has been getting ripped a new one by Barack Obama and his surrogates. Joe Biden described a laughable distortion of the plan during his debate with Sarah Palin last Thursday, and the Obama campaign followed up with an equally dishonest ad to ensure the fabricated details would linger in the minds of voters.

Part of the problem is that even McCain supporters don’t seem to understand his health care plan well enough to defend it adequately. Even the official campaign Web site doesn’t do a great job of laying out the nitty gritty.

That’s why this concrete example of how the plan would work is required reading.

Suppose a worker gets $50,000 in cash wages and $12,000 in health insurance.

Right now, he pays federal income taxes on the wages but not the health insurance. Letâ€™s assume, for reasons of simplicity, that the tax rate he is paying is a flat 25% on his wages. He therefore pays $12,500 in federal income taxes. His after-tax, after-health-care income is $37,500.

Now, under the McCain plan, his employer keeps paying the premium, which is now counted as income to the worker. He therefore pays federal income taxes on $62,000, or $15,500.

But he also gets a tax credit of $5,000 for health insurance, which means that, all in all, he owes $10,500 in federal taxes, or $2,000 less than he does today. His after-tax, after-health-care income is $39,500.

Continue reading at The New Atlantis to understand how McCain’s plan would work if this same employee opted to buy his insurance directly from an insurer in the open market. The McCain campaign would be well advised to add similar examples to the official Web site.

October 6, 2008 · Filed Under Election 2008, Health care, John McCain

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Liberals are Crabs in a Bucket

Alfonzo Rachel, better known as MachoSauceProductions, continues to impress me with video blogs. His monologues and skits about conservative ideals aren’t full of bombastic rhetoric, just a ton of common sense presented by a guy with a natural gift for entertaining. I don’t agree with all of his political positions, but I’ve gotta give respect to a guy raised in a family of democrats in ultra-blue California who’s willing to lay out his conservative views for the world.

He tackles liberalism with particular mastery. In this video on why he’s voting for McCain/Palin, Alfonzo compares liberals to crabs in a bucket: even those that try to climb out of the bucket get yanked back in by the other crabs.