If McCain/Palin will lie to you to get elected, what on earth makes you think they won't lie to you once they ARE elected?

these are out and out lies, and the Bush administration lies have cost us dearly (the economy is sound, iraq has WMD and is linked to Al Qaeda, heckuva job brownie, etc.....)  Do we need to elect people who we KNOW are comfortable lying to us?

Insane.  Insane.  Insane...

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

(hat tip Naked Capitalism)

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”....

The Macomb County party’s plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans — the most likely kind of loan to go into default — were made to African-Americans in Michigan, according to a report issued last year by the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth...

Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told The Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues...

I guess lying about the Iraq war, the economy, and taxes worked for Bush, so McCain jumps on board the Straight Up Lies Express....

From WaPo - ". A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 found that 51 percent of voters think Obama would raise their taxes, even though his plan would actually cut taxes for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Obama has proposed eliminating income taxes on seniors making less than $50,000 a year, but 41 percent of those seniors say their income taxes would go up in an Obama administration."

When Obama says "they must think you are stupid" he may be on to something - PAY ATTENTION AMERICA.  You are being lied to again, and for the same reasons....

"Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage."

My god, I'm going to turn to economists for scathing political reviews from now on..... I get the feeling Mr Roubini didn't agree with Phil Gramm's assessment that the recession is "mental", but then he also didn't have a hand in precisely the deregulation that got us into this whole mess either.  If you aren't familiar with Mr. Roubini, here's his wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini

TPM's server keeps telling me there has been a time-out error, and to try again - that's why my posts keep appearing twice

The two candidates' tax plans would have sharply different distributional effects. Senator McCain's tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes, almost all of whom would receive large tax cuts that would, on average, raise their after-tax incomes by more than twice the average for all households. Many fewer households at the bottom of the income distribution would get tax cuts and those tax cuts would be small as a share of after-tax income. In marked contrast, Senator Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income taxpayers and would increase taxes on high-income taxpayers. The largest tax cuts, as a share of income, would go to those at the bottom of the income distribution, while taxpayers with the highest income would see their taxes rise significantly.

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In several important ways, the candidates' speeches and web sites differ from the plans as we've outlined them above, and, in several cases, descriptions of proposals provided by campaign advisors strike us as implausible. Senator McCain has said repeatedly that he would repeal the individual AMT, allow businesses to expense all investments in equipment immediately, double the deduction for dependents, and give individuals the option to pay tax under a simplified alternative tax system. The campaign advisers say that the AMT will be patched but not eliminated except under the simplified alternative system, that only short-lived investments (for which expensing is not worth much) would qualify for immediate deduction, that the larger deduction for dependents would phase in slowly (and never equal twice the current-law deduction), and that the simplified alternative tax system would be revenue neutral. The last assertion is particularly questionable: few taxpayers will choose to pay an alternative tax if it does not reduce their tax bill, so an optional alternative is only revenue neutral if almost nobody elects it, which is probably not what the candidate has in mind. We estimated the cost of Senator McCain's plan as described on the stump, assuming that all the provisions are fully effective immediately and that the optional alternative tax system is similar to the one proposed by the Republican Study Committee. Under those assumptions, the revenue loss attributable to the Senator's plan increases to almost $7 trillion over the 10-year budget window.

Senator Obama says he would subject high-income taxpayers to additional taxes "in the range of 2 to 4 percentage points more in total (combined employer and employee)" starting "a decade or more from now" to help shore up Social Security. Nonetheless, his campaign advisers insist that there is no specific proposal. We estimated the cost of Senator Obama's proposals assuming that the Social Security proposal would impose a 2 percent income tax surtax on adjusted gross incomes over $250,000 and a 2 percent payroll tax paid by employers on employees' earnings above that threshold and that all of the provisions-including the higher payroll tax-are fully effective immediately. Under those assumptions, the Senator's proposals would reduce revenues by $2.6 trillion over 10 years, or about $390 billion less than the proposals as described by his campaign advisers.

HTML clipboard From Wikipedia [with McCain quotes in brackets]

 Types of lies

The various types of lies include the following:

FabricationA fabrication is a lie told when someone submits a statement as truth without knowing it for certain to be true. ["You know what I enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor, and sold it on eBay -- and made a profit!"]
 Bald-faced lieA bald-faced (or barefaced or boldfaced) lie is a lie that is told when it is obvious to all concerned that it is a lie. ["Instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Senator Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies"] Lying by omissionOne lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. ["Reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs will let you keep more of your own money to save, spend and invest as you see fit". - which will only save 16.9 billion]
  Lie-to-childrenA lie-to-children is a lie, often a platitude that may use euphemism(s), that is told to make an adult subject acceptable to children ["We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much."] BluffingPretending to have a capability or intention one doesn't. ["We will attack the problem on every front. ...We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas"] Jocose liesJocose lies are lies that are meant in jest and are usually understood as such by all present parties. ["I told the Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks," on that bridge to nowhere."] Promotion liesAdvertisements often contain statements that are not credible. ["I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can. My opponent will raise them.”] Belief systemsIt is alleged[1] that some belief systems may find lying to be justified. Leo Tolstoy is cited[2] as describing religious institutions as "the product of deception [and] lies for a good purpose."
  Ok, so no McCain quote on that one...just odd how that describes the republican platform (in their own eyes it's justified).

So I was talking with my sister who will definitely vote democrat but isn't a huge fan of Obama, and we were debating why Obama is basically tied with McCain - here are my thoughts....

1. Obama does not take enormous (and many times disingenuous) liberties with the truth the way McCain does.  Take energy: McCain has supported the widely-derided gas tax holiday; Obama wouldn't.  More tellingly, McCain has made energy independance his mantra, but missed all the votes that would have renewed the renewable energy subsidies and tax credits the industry desperately needs to know is stable in order to invest in precisely the technologies we need.  Or on Iraq: McCain has claimed credit for his confidence in the surge - but the surge was only a part of the recent turnaround (the Anbar sheik's getting fed up with Al-Qaeda in Iraq and deciding a short-term alliance with the Americans was better for them had a huge effect but he doesn't mention that), but he still fails to present an exit strategy - Obama has outlined his, which leaves him more open to criticism.

2: When folks get nervous, they tend to go with something more familiar than risky.  Obama, for all his detailed positions, still embodies risk - change is, after all, risking something new.  Even though people may know, in their heads, that McCain isn't offering any solutions, he is, after all, familiar, and the devil you know....

3: Neither candidate is actually running on their record.  Obama is offering a stellar rise to the top, a carefully and well managed campaign, and his overall intellect and biography as his credentials.  McCain, for his 26 years in congress, can't run on his record all that much since he defines himself as a "maverick" which, by definition, goes it's own way and doesn't stick to a party platform.  McCain basically promises to use his gut and judgement to decide, not his ideological or even personal reasoning, which is a forward-looking-only position - the maverick title means he will decide based on what he feels at the time - not how he felt in the past.

4. Things pretty much suck for us right now, and there is no magic bullet to any of the problems facing the country.  We have a huge deficit, 49 million uninsured, a looming social security gap, rising unemployment, hardship at the state and local level, an enduring credit crisis (see fanny mae), a global slowdown, and 2 wars with no end in sight.  There is nothing in the traditional democratic platform Obama can point to as a solution - it will be, for better or worse, an on-the-job challange, and it's difficult to even point to what will be the biggest challenge in January.  McCain gets to run on his personality and social issues; what can Obama point to as the reason to vote for him in this environment, other than the failure of the current administration, and the failure of McCain to offer anything different?  Everyone knows that it will be very tough for Obama to pass the programs he wants when the economy is crumbling around him; promising a new economy built on solving our energy problems sounds great but it is untested of course (I for one think it will help a LOT).

So, there you have it - while I think Obama is definitely the man for the job (his intelligence, his big-picture understanding of things, and the quality of both the advice he is getting from the advisers he has chosen and his process of making decisions is what does it for me), these are the reasons I think he has a tough battle ahead of him.  I think McCain is an awful choice for the job come January, and hope the American people see it that way too....