Cheryl: that’s true to an extent. But then, Obama hasn’t done anything truly boneheaded apart from his FISA vote. One could argue that the media have spent a disproportionate amount of time airing negative chatter about Obama. (“Obama is a Muslim!” “Obama hates America because he doesn’t wear a flag pin!” “A guy in Obama’s church said bad things!” “Obama is black and will steal your TV!”) The problem with scurrilous chatter is that the news outlets have to air that crap in order to debunk it, thus giving it more exposure. The fact that as of only two weeks ago, 12% of Americans still believe Obama is Muslim shows that exposure to negative commentary, whether debunked or not, plants a seed of belief in the minds of certain sectors of the populace.

Hillary perhaps didn’t deserve the thrashing she took, but she didn’t help herself by burning bridges throughout her campaign. She and her people were fairly hostile to the media, and they were hostile in return.

Personally, I could not support Hillary for a couple of reasons. I won’t go into some of it because she’s out and it’s pointless now. But my single largest objection to Hillary as President is that we need to put an end to American political dynasties. By the time the next President takes the Oath of Office, there will be not a single person under the age of 20 who has known a President who was not either a Bush or a Clinton. There may be no such thing as a political outsider President, but we can at least choose one from outside the predominant GOP and Democrat families.

Getting back to McCain, I’ll let y’all in on a prediction. McCain’s running mate will be Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty was singled out for political grooming years ago by Shrub’s people, when Pawlenty was Minnesota’s House Majority Leader and Jesse Ventura was governor. He got a bunch of tax breaks pushed through at a time that the state had a huge budget surplus. Back in ‘02, he was going to run for Senate, and Norm Coleman was going to run for Governor. Dick Cheney personally stepped in and told Coleman the White House wanted him to run for Senate instead, and for Pawlenty to run for Governor.

Thanks to those tax breaks, Pawlenty inherited a $4.5 billion budget deficit, which he turned around within only a couple of years without raising taxes. How? He pushed the tax burden to the local level by cutting state funding to towns and cities. He also created a whole new class of revenue that he said were not taxes but “fees”. For instance, there is now a 70¢ “health impact fee” on every pack of cigarettes. This way, he was able to successfully get re-elected on the notion that he reduced the deficit without raising taxes. Sure, our property taxes have doubled, and everything from our license plates to our parking tickets have “fees” attached, but he didn’t raise taxes.

It was no surprise to me that St Paul was selected to host the Republican convention in Sept, and less of a surprise to hear that Pawlenty was on the VP short list. I would not be surprised if the VP announcement happens at the convention itself. If Pawlenty is the VP pick, you can be assured that McCain did not choose him; he was told to select him. Shrub’s cabal have coordinated Pawlenty’s rise every step of the way.

You heard it here first.

As a left leaning person, however, I do agree with conservative cranks that the press embraces Obama with a warm fuzzy towel. Kind of the way they turned a blind eye to eight years of Bush admin misdeeds, and hung Hillary Clinton in the town square. Fair and balanced, they aint.

Cindy

I was going to suggest that you OCR this post so Google can pick up on it, but then I realized that Senator McCain can’t actually use a computer, and so this would merely be wasted effort. A telegraph transmissions seems just about right, unless Cindy can stop to read it to him, when she’s not <a href=”http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/070503/scifigallery/v_l.jpg”?draining Earth’s oceans for her homeworld, that is.

Someone needs to get Obama’s people on the phone. I think we’ve found our running mate.

I’m giving you a standing ovation, mister.