Campaign 2008

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Her campaign is crumbling badly. Telling Wolf Blitzer to be nice could be her Waterloo.

 

Is there any actual evidence of this, snuff?

 

I'm not big on Clinton, but I don't automatically accept the Drudge Report as gospel.

 

BLITZER: Not true. No one has pressured me. No one has threatened me. No one is trying to intimidate me.

 

CAFFERTY: They'd better not. I'll come down there.

 

BLITZER: No one has even called me to try to pressure me or anything like that.

 

http://mediamatters.org/items/200711140002

[NYU 0]

I love The Drudge Report. It's so misleading, it's entertaining.

 

Headline: "Bill Clinton Tells Audience to 'Shut Up'"

 

You click on the link to watch the video and you learn that 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists were heckling Clinton during a speech about 9/11 being an inside job and Clinton responds "How dare you. A fraud? No, it wasn't a fraud, but I'd be glad to talk to you if you'd shut up and let me talk."

 

Doesn't come across quite the way Drudge put it. How anybody could take anything that site says at face value is beyond me.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Huckabee knocked this one out of the park.

 

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

Huckabee knocked this one out of the park.

 

Yup, that rules.

[snuffbox 0]

1) Drudge has proven problematic to Clintons in the past.

 

2) It is the kind of thing easily spunned to make somebody look very feeble.

 

3) It could have badly damaged Hilary's gimmick as the 'I can win the general' candidate.

 

4) None of it matters because she survived virtually unscathed from the whole mess. That "pile-on" two debates back seems to have done very little in the short-run and will do even less as time wears on. Sadly.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

Huckabee knocked this one out of the park.

 

Yup, that rules.

Is this 2006 again?

[Danville_Wrestling 0]

Here comes Obama in Iowa....

 

The top three Democratic presidential contenders remain locked in a close battle in Iowa, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) seeing her advantages diminish on key issues, including the questions of experience and which candidate is best prepared to handle the war in Iraq, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

 

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) draws support from 30 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, compared with 26 percent for Clinton and 22 percent for former senator John Edwards (N.C.). New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson received 11 percent. The results are only marginally different from a Post-ABC poll in late July, but in a state likely to set the tone for the rest of the nominating process, there are significant signs of progress for Obama -- and harbingers of concern for Clinton.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1900940_pf.html

 

 

[Gary Floyd 0]

Huckabee knocked this one out of the park.

 

He's got another supporter-in Ric Flair.

[King Kamala 0]

Between 'Natch, Nuge, and Chuck, it's pretty much a given that if Huckabee is elected, he'll have the greatest Presidential Inauguration ever.

[snuffbox 0]

Drudge seems to have stopped with that whole Hilary-has-a-creepy-look-to-her-sometimes gimmick.

[Lil' Bitch 0]

Ugh, at least this point, the best GOP candidate is Mitt Romney. I love McCain and normally I'd support him, but he's fucked himself over by remaining loyal to Bush.

 

I'm sticking with Obama, but of course Hilary is going to win the nom (unless she fucks up BIG TIME) and more than likely the White House mainly because people like her husband, ugh.

[snuffbox 0]

On what issue is Romney different than Bush Jr?

[Danville_Wrestling 0]

This is probably going to sound crazy but I'm not giving up on John McCain's chances yet. I have this gut feeling that he could pull off a John Kerry-like comeback and win this nomination because a lot of the criticisms the Kerry camp was facing four years ago at this time is what McCain is facing right now.

 

That said, I think the GOP matchup is going to be Romney vs. Guiliani and I think that benefits Romney because many of the social conservatives are going to remain wary of Rudy (even with the Pat Robertson endorsement) and go to Romney's camp. However, Romney's major problem now is to protect his Iowa flank from a surging Mike Huckabee who has benefited from the departure of Sam Brownback from the race.

[snuffbox 0]

How is Romney socially different than Rudy?

[snuffbox 0]

It appears Chris Dodd is running something of a Mayberry candidacy.

[2GOLD 0]

Between 'Natch, Nuge, and Chuck, it's pretty much a given that if Huckabee is elected, he'll have the greatest Presidential Inauguration ever.

 

Add in Trace Adkins bringing along big assed women and you might well be correct. Course I don't see how he has a shot of winning the election right now.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

This can't be good for the Rudester:

 

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

 

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

 

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

 

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/7073.html

 

When reached for comment, Giuliani was quoted as saying:

 

9/11

[Downhome 0]

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'm still not comfortable with these "YouTube debates".

[Dobbs 3K 0]

The Youtube debates don't mean crap. You win an election by getting the old people vote. Old people don't know what Youtube is.

[snuffbox 0]

Best debate of the campaign so far.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Saw something about Hillary having a plant ask questions at the GOP debate? Any substance to that?

[The Robfather 0]

It looks like there were mutliple plants at the CNN Youtube debate.

 

Really, can CNN be any more incompetent?

 

Simply check the backgrounds of the people asking the questions before approving. Bloggers are exposing them as quickly as they asked the questions last night. Two republican questioners were declared Edwards and Obama voters.

 

It took Bill Bennett during a panel discussion after the debate to clue in Anderson Cooper that the gay general was a Hilary stooge by replying the info he got via email from friends of his.

 

They fly this retired general in, let him speak for so long, grilling the candidates on an issue that is not at the forefront of republican primary voters, much less the general electorate (Don't Ask, Don't Tell). Throwing out that he was a plant, the question had no place in the debate.

 

After the debate, they showed this focus group of undecided republican voters, and one said she was leaning towards John Edwards. Yeah Riiiight.

 

 

[Boon 0]

If I wasn't already convinced that the Republicans were going to lose in 2008, I'd feel worse about considering giving my vote to Ron Paul.

[snuffbox 0]

Saw something about Hillary having a plant ask questions at the GOP debate? Any substance to that?

 

Looks like there's plenty of substance.

 

I personally don't see any problem with declared voters (even for candidates of the opposing party) asking questions at debates or town halls but having a campaign worker, from an opposition campaign, planted in the audience to ask a lengthy question about a known GOP bankruptcy is pretty bad.

[The Robfather 0]

This is what makes people into cynics

 

If CNN was going to give the Clinton Campaign free air time to shill an issue, they should of disclosed that before hand. Don't tell me no one at CNN knew he was connected to Hillary. Bill Bennett found out easily enough. Someone at CNN knew and didn't care if he had ties to Clinton.

 

Too many gotcha moments, too many plants for this debate to be taken seriously.

 

CNN earned their Clinton News Network tag last night.

[NoCalMike 0]

I don't have a problem with the idea of you-tube debates, I actually think it is kind of neat, but after actually watching one for the first time last night, I think it is a waste of time if they are going to execute it the way they do. The questions are either the softiest-mcsoftballs or they are downright joke questions. I know there has to be a much better pool of questions being submitted.

 

I guess I just don't like the idea of debates being about asking these open-ended questions where the candidate just goes off on a tangent and isn't challenged on their responses.

 

For example, when the candidates keep using the 2004 Republican talking point of "following us home" there is no follow-up question or challenge to the generic response. I mean why not have the moderator challenge them a little and bring up the fact that Al Qaeda has only ever made up under 5% in it's peak, of attacks death in Iraq in the first place, and ask the candidates to clarify who exactly wants to follow us home, Al Qaeda which is not even based out of Iraq to begin with or Iraqis themselves who would seemingly be more anxious to do so as a result of our war/occupation of their country.

 

Or when the candidates talk about the drop in violence/casualties, why not challenge them a bit on the way the statistics are recorded, and how it seems every six months or so there is a new type of casualty/death that doesn't eally count as a battlefield casualty anymore as far as statistics go.

 

The moderator doesn't have to make the challenges as biased sounding as I just did, but it just kind of gets frustrating when cadidates can take a softball question and just blatantly ignore some of the facts on the ground and not even get called on it.

 

Not that this is unique to the youtube debates alone.

[snuffbox 0]

Sounds like piling-on to me.

[Danville_Wrestling 0]

I thought John McCain won the debate last night followed by a strong performance by Mike Huckabee. Rudy held his own but Fred Thompson was awful and Romney was stumbling over himself a lot. Before the debate I was strongly in Romney's corner but after last night's performance I am not so sure.

 

Was I the only one that was a little perturbed by Jeffrey Tubin's remarks that Mike Huckabee needs to get "serious" about some of his issues? Tubin wrote off the whole fair tax idea by simply saying it was dumb. No real substance, just asserting that Mike Huckabee was some whacko for wanting to get rid of the IRS. While I agree that the idea is radical it's not like the diea of a fair tax is a new idea or one that has never been implemented. In fact, Central European states have been using it for a while now.

[Guest Pizza Hut's Game Face]

There's a piece in Rolling Stone about Mike Huckabee entitled "the GOP's scariest nutjob" or something. I know he's a Christian, but that's not completely fair.

[snuffbox 0]

It was written by some guy trying really hard to be the new Hunter Thompson, or something.