I Billy Glad, The Yellow WASP loser:

fully opposed the nomination of Barack Obama, and every thing that John McCain has said and done is brilliant and wonderful, while Obama has done everything wrong. But let me, Billy The Yellow WASP loser, tell you something folks; when that Obama guy, that I have been completely opposed to, every step of the way, gets sworn in as president, then I will point to the rest of the world and say; look world, we have just elected a black man as our president, and therefore we are the planet's superior moral authority.

I, Billy, The Yellow WASP loser, sure hope that it does not happen, but if it does, then I will use it to taunt the rest of the world.

The Whine Of The Yellow WASP Loser, as sung by Billy Yellow WASP Loser Glad.

I miss August. August was neat. The Dow was over 10,000 and nobody had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It’s only in retrospect that we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain campaign’s golden era. Now, he’s beginning to act like one of those movie characters who steals the wrong ring and turns into a troll.

During that last debate, while he was wandering around the stage, you almost expected to hear him start muttering: “We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious.”

Remember when McCain’s campaign ads were all about his being a prisoner of war? I really miss them.

Now they’re all about the Evil That Is Obama. The newest one, “Ambition,” has a woman, speaking in one of those sinister semiwhispers, saying: “When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied.” Then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, she starts ranting about Congressional liberals and risky subprime loans. Then John McCain pops up to say he approved it. All in 30 seconds! And, of course, McCain would think it’s great. For the first time, the Republicans appear to have captured his thought process on tape.

WASHINGTON — Colin Powell, the retired Army general and former secretary of state, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court Friday as a "trusted individual" and man with a "sterling" reputation.

"He was someone whose word you could rely on," said Powell, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then "dabbled a bit in diplomacy."

Stevens, on trial for lying about gifts on financial disclosure forms, has the right to ask character witnesses to speak on behalf of his "truthfulness and veracity." The first such character witness, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, spoke Thursday. Three others are set to testify on Stevens' behalf but the highest-profile witness, by far, will be Powell.

3. Church and State

Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will. When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen, I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will. I have begun practicing this kind of supreme confidence on a smaller scale, but I am sure that I can quickly move to national issues. Starting with the sartorial, I know that it is God's will that I have the entire Chanel collection for the fall season, including those adorable high-heeled booties that were all over the runway shows.

(A couple things I'm still having trouble with regarding the will of God: I knew it was God's will that I win the Grammy in 2007 for my last record, but Bob Dylan won. This is clearly the work of Satan, but shouldn't my will/God's will have been strong enough to override that? And this Alaska pipeline--if it is God's will to have the pipeline built, then why isn't it built already? On a related topic, I don't own a single piece of Chanel.)

Premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage currently average $12,680 this year, of which employees pay $3,354, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation 2008 employer survey.

Those numbers have spawned concern that the McCain plan wouldn't cover the cost of a policy, and that the gap would grow in the future. The McCain plan is expected to adjust the credit for inflation, but health-care costs usually rise far more than the cost of living.

Some also are concerned that the plan would undermine employer-based coverage. "The employer-based insurance system could unravel," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington study group, because employers would lose incentive to cover employees, leaving them with less coverage.

Business leaders have voiced similar concerns.

"We believe the employer-based system is the foundation of health insurance coverage in this country," said Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Original Mav-Erratic Indeed!

McCain is the original windsock. Hey Barbiecuda, your running mate can not stop blinking.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14414.html

Excerpt:

The McCain campaign knows that Obama isn't a Muslim or a terrorist, but they're willing to help a certain kind of voter think he is. Just the way certain South Carolinians in 2000 were allowed to think that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black child.

But words can have more serious consequences than lost votes and we've already had a glimpse of the Palin effect.

The Post's Dana Milbank reported that media representatives in Clearwater were greeted with taunts, thunder sticks and profanity. One Palin supporter shouted an epithet at an African-American soundman and said, "Sit down, boy."

Brooks also spent time praising Obama's intellect and skills in social perception, telling two stories of his interactions with Obama that left him "dazzled":

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

According to two former senior US diplomats who served in the Balkans, Davis and his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, received several million dollars to help run Montenegro's independence referendum campaign of 2006. The terms of the agreement were never disclosed to the public, but top Montenegrin officials told the US diplomats that Davis's work was underwritten by powerful Russian business interests connected to the Kremlin and operating in Montenegro. Neither Davis nor the McCain campaign responded to repeated requests for comment. (Davis's extensive lobbying work, especially on behalf of collapsed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has already attracted critical media scrutiny.)

In both 1993 and 1994, McCain voted against the anti-terrorism measure. On each occasion, McCain was one of thirty radical anti-choice Senators to oppose the bill Fortunately, despite McCain's opposition, it passed the Senate by a 69-30 margin.

At the time, right-wing anti-choice extremists were terrorizing women, doctors, and clinic staff across the United States with thousands of acts of physical violence and threats of violence each year. The new legislation was necessary because in early 1993, the Supreme Court had ruled that even though the terrorism crossed state lines, the federal government could not protect clinics without a specific grant of statutory authority.

Meet The Real John McCain. Here is where he stands on the issues.

Clinic Violence

• McCain voted against the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes it a crime to forcibly interfere with women's access to reproductive-health facilities. Learn more on NARAL Pro-Choice America's voting record.
   
• McCain voted to allow perpetrators of violence or harassment at reproductive-health clinics to avoid paying the fines assessed against them for their illegal acts by declaring bankruptcy.