John McCain

If John McCain really knew what the American people wanted then wouldn’t he be President McCain?

Joe the Plumber has finally seen the light:

Joe, also known as Sam Wurzelbacher, told an audience in Pennsylvania this week that McCain "is no public servant."

"McCain was trying to use me," Wurzelbacher said, according to public radio correspondent Scott Detrow. "I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy.”

"I don’t owe him s—," Wurzelbacher continued. "He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.”

In fact, Wurzelbacher's dislike for McCain is so strong that he no longer supports Sarah Palin simply because Palin will campaign for McCain's re-election.

It only took 1 1/2 years for Joe to realize that he was nothing but a sock puppet for the McCain campaign. I guess that beats having to take that pesky plumbing test to become a true plumber.

John McCain blasted off a campaign email last night that stated the following:

During his first year in office, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have amassed a $12.4 trillion deficit that is growing each day.

A trillion dollars a month? Wow that’s amazing for a party that hasn’t accomplished that much due to Republican obstructionism. So we need to mark that as a flat out lie.

But it gets even better. This is from Media Matter’s fact check:

In fact, the FY 2009 deficit, which totaled $1.4 trillion, was already estimated to be $1.2 trillion when Obama came into office and "virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years" are due either to policies implemented under President Bush or to the recession, which began during Bush's tenure, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Now what big policy implemented under Bush would have raised it so much? Maybe TARP – the bank bailout. And yes this would be the very same bank bailout that McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington and help make sure it passed.

I would much rather see some tea bagger win McCain’s seat than him get sent back for another term. This guy isn’t just a hypocrite – he’s a flat out liar.

(h/t Cesca)

My previous post got me thinking even more. The Louisiana Purchase brought us a lot of red states. As a matter of fact, 11 of the 13 states from the Louisiana Purchase voted for McCain in 2008. The devil has to be involved in that somehow.

Now it’s time to exit Snarkville and point to a great piece on Salon examining the myth of the “pact with the Devil” that Haitians made and what it really means.

And check out who it is:

This week, John's exclusive guests are Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) LIVE from Jerusalem. We'll get their insight on the foiled airline terror plot and President Obama's strategy on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Benen points out:

Hmm, McCain and Lieberman, talking together about foreign policy and national security. Now that's a balanced pairing.

CNN – The worst rated name in news! Keep this crap up and before long CNN will lose the ratings game to public access.

Al Franken has shown the most balls we have seen from Democrats in a long time, and today was no exception. Here is Al shutting up Joe Lieberman, which then enraged McCain:

Call the Pope because hell is freezing over:

Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell are joining forces to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagal [sic] Act of 1933, which separated commercial banking from Wall Street investment banking. According to Newsweek, the two plan to announce the bipartisan McCain-Cantwell bill on Wednesday morning.

The Glass-Steagall law was repealed in 1999, allowing for commercial and investment banking to combine. Bloomberg notes that its repeal has sparked debate as to whether it "helped spawn reckless lending practices and financial speculation that led to the meltdown of credit markets last year and the $700 billion U.S. bailout of troubled banks."

There is something here that really has me scratching my head. Glass-Steagall was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act  in 1999 and proudly signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. The main author of that bill was Phil Gramm, who also served as the top economic adviser to the McCain/Palin campaign. So Gramm was good enough to advise McCain on economic issues, yet McCain now wants to repeal Gramm’s keystone legislation?

I love the idea of us getting back to real regulation in the banking sector but I really question the motives of McCain on this issue.

Apparently John McCain decided to use campaign money to put out a robo-call urging passage of his healthcare amendment. Here is the script:

On Monday I introduced the first Republican amendment to the massive health care bill, which would send the bill back to the Senate Finance Committee and stop the Democrats from cutting vital Medicare coverage for our seniors. I need Sen. Blanche Lincoln to join me in this effort. If you agree with me, please go to our website at www.healthcaretaskforce.org and sign a petition to Sen. Lincoln urging her to join my effort to fight a Washington DC government takeover of your health care.

CREW points out that using campaign money for official Senate business is a big no-no and has filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee over it:

CREW’s complaint alleges Sen. McCain violated Senate Rule 38, which prohibits senators from maintaining “unofficial office accounts,” meaning they cannot use private donations to support official senate activities and expenses. By urging voters to call their senators to urge them to support his motion, Sen. McCain was engaged in grassroots lobbying. This activity clearly was related to Sen. McCain's official duties. By using an outside entity’s funds -- those of the NRSC -- to pay for expenses related to his official duties, Sen. McCain violated Senate rules.

Melanie Sloan points out that if McCain wanted to send this message out then he should have used his own money. Apparently McCain either doesn’t believe in the ethics enough, or he didn’t really care about his amendment since he decided to break the rules when he has more than enough money to pay for the calls himself.

Steve Benen explains:

I especially loved the "Exclusive!" with the exclamation point, as if this were a rare, special occurrence.

For those keeping score at home, as of this weekend, there will have been 47 Sundays since President Obama's inauguration in January. With this 16th appearance on a Sunday morning talk show this week, John McCain will have been a guest on one of the programs every 2.9 weeks. No other official in the country has been sought out by bookers this often.

Since the president took office, McCain has been on "This Week" three times (September 27, August 23, and May 10), "Fox News Sunday" three times (July 2, March 8, and January 25), CNN's "State of the Union" three times (October 11, August 2, and February 15), and "Face the Nation" four times (October 25, August 30, April 26, and February 8). His appearance on "Meet the Press" this weekend will be his third (December 6, July 12, and March 29).

This pattern should really be troubling to the GOP, especially the more conservative end of the party. The Sunday talking heads act as though McCain is the defacto mouth piece for the party, and he clearly isn’t. On top of that, this love of McCain is probably a big factor in the decline of viewership when it comes to Sunday talk shows. It’s old and stale, much like McCain himself.

Once President Obama announced a timeline to start drawing down troops in Afghanistan we knew that the right would start attacking it. Right on cue we have John McCain telling Good Morning America that the timeline will “embolden” the enemy:

"I trust his [McChrystal's] judgment enormously but I also understand that both our enemies and our friends will hear the message that we are going to be leaving at a certain date. That was unnecessary," McCain said. "I'm confident we can succeed but when you tell your enemies there's a date and you're going to start leaving, it emboldens your enemies and dispirits your friends."

We have heard this same argument time and time again when it comes to trying to end a war. John McCain would rather see us stay in Afghanistan for the next 100 years than try to come home. It’s funny how these so called fiscal-hawks never have any problem throwing away billions upon billions of tax dollars in the name of  war.

It’s also really interesting the way McCain is trying to dance around supporting General McChrystal. Whenever the left criticized one of our commanders, people like McCain would come out swinging. McChrystal has very publically supported President Obama’s plan, so why can’t McCain? Is John McCain trying to undermine the leadership of the military now? It sure sounds that way. We even have General Petraeus saying that this timeline is very ‘realistic’:

During last year’s campaign, McCain continually held up Petraeus as being the authoritative answer on the wars. Now McCain wants to disagree with him? Thankfully this is Senator McCain and not President McCain, or we might also be talking about the Iran war right now.

Next up we have John McCain, America’s most famous veteran:

Since leaving the military John McCain has enjoyed the benefits of the VA, as well as the extensive coverage of his Congressional health insurance. Today John McCain has a chance to show he supports the rest of our veterans by supporting healthcare with a public option. It will be a perfect homage to the 2,200 veterans that didn’t have healthcare and died in 2008.

Sen. John Sidney McCain (R) Website http://mccain.senate.gov/public/ Phone 202-224-2235 Fax 202-228-2862 Contact http://mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Con Additional Information

What if we had President John McCain right now? With everything going on in Iran, I wouldn’t doubt one bit if we would be at war. No matter what Obama says about Iran, McCain thinks he is being “too soft”. Anything short of him saying “upon my orders our troops have entered Iran to remove the regime” would be too soft for McCain. I keep thinking back to his old “bomb Iran” moment and thank my lucky stars that he didn’t win.

As much as it kills me, I need to give credit to Malkin on this image:

Now McCain is all against these bailouts? I guess he figures we forgot about his entire “suspension” of his campaign last year to fight for the TARP.

Why don’t the conservatives embrace John McCain? I thought the very base of the conservative movement was fiscal conservatism. Well John McCain went off yesterday about the recent earmarks, like the $250 million David Vitter won, or the $114 Richard Shelby won, or even the $86 million Kit Bond won, but conservatives will rush to these guys before McCain. Perhaps the Republicans, and conservatives in particular, can now see where their identity crisis lays – when it comes time to stand up for their beliefs their asses seemed to be glued to the seat.

I posted the email last night that John McCain sent out stating he would be running for re-election in 2010. The email, as with all of these, was mainly for the purpose of fundraising. But let’s take a look at one key paragraph and what McCain is using to stimulate his fundraising:

The economic challenges currently confronting our nation are immense and unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress propose addressing these challenges through increased spending that wastes billions of taxpayers dollars and saddles our children and grandchildren with a staggering debt. Their proposals will not stimulate economic growth or create jobs. While the leader of the Democratic Party, President Obama, has pledged to change business as usual in Washington and spoken of bipartisanship, I have been saddened to watch as Congressional Democrats try to use their majority to advocate more of the same failed policies and wasteful spending of the past. With so much at stake, now is not the time to step away from my work in the Senate.

Now let’s put this in a little perspective. When it came to bailing out Wall Street, McCain was gung-ho to the point he suspended his presidential campaign. He even used his support for the bailout to raise money for his campaign.

Here we are only 4 short months later and we are looking at bailing out a much more serious part of the population – main street and the people. McCain doesn’t like that. He is out front in the opposition to it, and now he is using his opposition to raise funds for his Senate run in 2010.

If you ever needed any proof that McCain does not care about you or me, or 95% of this country, then you just got it. He only worries about the super rich and believes that we should distribute the wealth from the bottom up, in the form of our taxes. Hopefully we can unseat him in 2010.