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Blog For Arizona
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Links for 2008-10-27 [del.icio.us]
Posted: 28 Oct 2008 12:00 AM CDT
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BlogForArizona/~3/434338519/mbryan
E&S Machines flipping votes
Open source: How e-voting should be done | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-27 | By
Paul Venezia
AP INVESTIGATION: Palin pipeline terms curbed bids - Yahoo! News
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New Obama Ad: A "defining moment" - this election is about our future
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 10:39 PM CDT
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BlogForArizona/~3/434046691/new-obama-ad-a-defining-moment---this-election-is-about-our-future.html
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
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The long knives are out as the GOP civil war has already begun
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 02:30 PM CDT
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BlogForArizona/~3/433915800/the-long-knives-are-out-as-the-gop-civil-war-has-already-begun.html
Posted by AzBlueMeanie :
These guys don't even wait for the body to be buried first. The post-mortems
for the McCain campaign have already begun,Chris Cilizza blog: McCain Campaign
Post-Mortem. In a New York Times Magazine article by Robert Draper on Sunday
The Making (and Remaking and Remaking) of John McCain, Draper takes the first
cut (of many) at explaining what went wrong with the McCain campaign and, more
importantly, who is to blame.
The cast of villains includes Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt, John Weaver,
Mark Salter, Rick Davis, and Sarah Plain, but more importantly, John McCain
himself.
"McCain, it's fair to say, was not a big believer in organization," Draper
writes. "The important decisions were all made by him, with various confidants
of ambiguous portfolio orbiting around him and often colliding with one
another."
The warring camps within the GOP have formed a circular firing squad and are
already playing the blame game.
"Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard
the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally
tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters,
inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched
roll-out and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame
the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public
performance, for McCain's decline. Palin allies report rising camp tension -
Ben Smith - Politico.com
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over
the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative
leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate
voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential
future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain
aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame
from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief
strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has
taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in
particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a
high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content
of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and
they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider
fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
"But other McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was
mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — "green,"
sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain ... Some McCain aides
say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the
national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object."
The recent revelations about the RNC outfitting Caribou Barbie (and her family)
with $150,000 worth of new clothing from designer clothiers in New York City -
you know, the anti-American part of America actually attacked on 9/11 - has
also caused some consternation within the campaign. Ben Smith's Blog: Going
rogue
Sarah Palin on Sunday sounded off on the $150,000 wardrobe that was purchased
for her in September, denouncing the report as "ridiculous" and declaring
emphatically: "Those clothes, they are not my property."
A senior adviser to John McCain told CNN's Dana Bash that the comments about
her wardrobe "were not the remarks we sent to her plane this morning."
Palin wandered off the reservation and was "going rogue"?
The recent McCain campaign aid leaks to CNN about Palin "going rogue" Palin's
'going rogue,' McCain aide says apparently have been attributed to Mitt Romney
aids now working for the McCain campaign. Former Romney aides on McCain
campaign behind Palin trash-talk:
"According to the right wing American Spectator, Mitt's people have been
undermining Sarah Palin, because they're trying to set up Mitt for 2012:
Some former Romney aides were behind the recent leaks to media, including CNN,
that Governor Sarah Palin was a "diva" and was going off message intentionally.
The former and current Romney supporters further are pushing Romney supporters
for key Republican jobs, including head of the Republican National Committee.
That means Romney and his people have already written McCain off for this race.
Expect some retaliation from Palin's people."
The 2008 campaign contenders are all jockeying for a narrative that will
position them to run for the top of the ticket in 2012 before this election is
even over. How classy.
The coming GOP defeat will result in recriminations and accusations, and lead
to a civil war within the GOP as the party attempts to restructure its stale
message and old coalitions that are no longer useful to the party, in order to
remain competitive and relevant in the 21st century. We may very well see two
or more political parties emerge from the wreckage of this Republican Party
train wreck. It is too early to predict how the old coalitions may realign
themselves into a new political party or parties. I only hope that they will
wander in the wilderness for a generation or more to come as they try to work
it all out.
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"There is an alignment of elites taking place..."
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 06:53 PM CDT
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BlogForArizona/~3/433913474/there-is-an-alignment-of-elites-taking-place.html
by David SafierChristopher Buckley, conservative, novelist, essayist and son of
William F., recently said he's voting for Obama. The right is piling on, so
he's fighting back. In an essay on The Daily Beast, he goes after Rush Limbaugh.
Buckley actually likes Limbaugh. Go figure. But now that Buckley is the object
of the Rush-man's scorn, he's simultaneously perturbed and amused. The column
has a clip from one of Rush's shows where he says,
Folks, there is an alignment of elites taking place, pseudo-intellectuals who
don't want . . . they think of Obama as one of them . . . he's smart, he's
cool, he's eloquent . . .
This is what's happening. The right wing intelligentsia is criticizing the
Republican Party, and the stalwart are showing they hate thinking people
without regard to party affiliations-- if they express divergent opinions, that
is. If the writers toe the party line, they're great, brilliant, the finest the
pundit class has to offer. But when they utter a discouraging word, watch out!
McCain referred to these renegade conservatives as "Georgetown Cocktail Party
Conservatives."
It looks like the GOP big tent has shrunk to the size of a Boy Scout pup
tent.There's no one more elite than the toney-private-school-educated Chris
Buckley, so he clearly takes all these insults hurled at him as compliments. At
the end of his column, he quotes E.J. Dionne, a liberal columnist who happened
to attend the same toney private school.Dionne makes as elite a pronouncement
on the state of the conservative movement as you'll find anywhere. And it's
right on the money.
The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley
Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity—and Sarah Palin. Reason
has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by
direct-mail hit pieces.
It's going to be interesting watching the Republican Humpty Dumpty try to put
itself together again over the next few years.
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