J.D. zings McCain!
Finally, a little life in the candidacy of the man PHXated has its hopes on to knock John McCain out of the senate and then be a vulnerable GOP nominee in the general so the state has at least a chance to be represented from someone in the reality based community.
It’s an ad labeling John McCain a nominee for “Best Conservative Actor.”
Because, see, he only acts like a conservative. Get it?
McCain’s response, according to Dan Nowicki’s blog:
“Ex-Congressman J.D. Hayworth should immediately apologize and and take down his latest online ad, which is an outrageous offense to John McCain’s lifetime of honorable service to our state and nation, and insulting to Native Americans here in Arizona and across America," said Shiree Verdone, McCain’s campaign manager. "Mr. Hayworth is welcome to debate the challenges facing our state and nation, but this kind of character assassination has no place in the Republican Party, and Mr. Hayworth should ashamed of his campaign for running it.”
Now, if anything the ad would be insulting only to Pandorans, right? For McCain, though, the association would doubly sting, because Pandorans are the ultimate tree-huggers.
Anway, the ad also exposes how difficult it is to support the bozo-er of two bozos, running for the nominee of a group of backward as the Arizona Republican Party.
McCain’s problem isn’t that he’s a fake conservative. He’s a fake maverick, a fake moderate and a fake compromiser. The only reason he started departing from the GOP line was after he got caught in the Keating Five scandal, which is to say, after he got exposed as being a typical moralizing-on-the-outside, corrupt-on-the-inside Republican.
He went “mavericky” to distract attention from his crookedness.
New ad idea for J.D.: “For John Mccain, integrity is the real unobtanium!”
Nowicki also says that the Hayworth camp has fiddled with the ad to make it more Avataresque, here.
4:04 PM
Dumb Arizonan of the week!
Honors go to state Rep. Debbie Lesko, who just had a bill get out of the key state committee. The bill would essentially evaporate the state’s Corporation Commission’s renewable energy goals by the simple expedient of classifying nuclear and hydroelecric power as renewable.
Besides being dumb, bad policy, bad for the environment, and bad for the country’s future, the idea is .. bad for the state’s economy:
A legislative proposal that passed a House committee on Tuesday could quash a solar panel manufacturer’s plans to open a plant in Goodyear.
Officials with Suntech Power Holdings said passage of House Bill 2701 would force the company to reconsider the plant, which is set to open with about 75 employees in September.
“Passage of this bill will force us to reconsider our decision to put a factory in Arizona, moving those jobs and the accompanying tax base to another state,” said Steve Chadima, vice president of external affairs for Suntech.
9:33 PM
McCain still supports "Don't ask, don't tell"
Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last night said he would “work toward” ending the military’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. John McCain immediately said "he still supported it":http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/28/obama.dadt.react/?hpt=Sbin:
“This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in a news release. “At a time when our Armed Forces are fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield, now is not the time to abandon the policy.”
McCain didn’t mention the thousands of gays, both men and women, in the military “fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield” the policy threatens every day. McCain’s wife, Cindy, recently appeared in magazine ads decrying the recent California anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment.
1:07 AM
John and Cindy's very continental relationship
Little noticed in all of the Hillary Clinton-Sarah Palin-Harry Reid hullabaloo surrounding the publication of the book Game Change are some tidbits about John McCain’s home life.
The book is the story of the 2008 presidential campaign, done via a raft of off-the-record interviews by reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. (It lacks notes, too, reviewers say.)
Here’s a passage from the review of the book in today’s NYT that probably has the McCains’ neighbors at 24th and Camelback talking:
Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance, that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona “was rooted in truth,” and that the McCains “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that “when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.”
10:57 PM
Vernon Parker and Planned Parenthood
Vernon Parker, who’s running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has taken a strong stand on …
The state budget crisis? Its abysmal education standings? An intractable immigration impasse? The crushing societal problems caused by an unwinnable war on drugs?
No, women who need an abortion. Parker started the debate by trying to score a quick political point among the GOP anti-abortion nuts by criticizing his opponent, Gov. Jan Brewer, for having a fundraiser at the home of a Planned Parenthood official.
The letter, published on Sonoran Alliance:
I cannot support an organization that lobbies the legislature and courts on behalf of one of the most gruesome procedures imaginable, partial birth abortion.
Planned Parenthood has consistently lobbied against middle-of-the-road reform such as parental consent, parental notification, informed consent and a waiting period. By any reasonable standard, Planned Parenthood is far outside the mainstream of public opinion on all these issues.
Believe me when I say some of the conversations I’ve had with anti-choice men about late term abortion have been jaw droppers. They really do think we women, if left up to our own devices, will wait until we are 8 months pregnant and then casually decide to terminate it because we need to fit into a prom dress or to go on a jaunt to Barbados. They truly, honestly, believe women are dumber than dirt and have the moral and ethical fortitude of alley cats.
Vernon suggests he doesn’t trust women very much when he whinges about parental notification and waiting periods, calling them “middle of the road”. Yup, it’s just like how they make men wait 24 hours and sit through a lecture before they get Viagra or a vasecto… Oh wait, they don’t.
Left unmentioned: That sort of Planned Parenthood person would host a fundraiser for a Republican governor of Brewer’s antediluvian philosophies.
7:00 AM
Janet Napolitano's image is taking hits
So says Politico. Leaving aside the Republican carping after the foiled Christmas Day terrorist attack, others are questioning her oversight:
who closely watch policy developments at DHS say they’re still waiting for real action from the new leader.“The agency seems to be on autopilot, pretty much following the ideas of the previous team (to the extent they had any). Even simple steps, like getting rid of the idiotic color code or ending DHS’s silly double clearance for new hires have eluded the new secretary,” said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who said he dismisses the partisan attacks on Napolitano.
“It’s no secret that DHS has problems. There needs to be visible progress towards fixing them, and we haven’t seen any,” he said. “The lack of fresh thinking worries me. She needs to reset the agency, not just accept the inheritance and make it work smoothly.”
As for the Republicans, the lowest hit of all came from John Kyl and John McCain:
Republican critics, who already had Napolitano in their sights, spared no words in criticizing her — and show no inclination to stop.
One of them was her home-state senator, Republican Jon Kyl, who told reporters in Arizona that he no longer feels “totally safe” with his former governor at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security. Kyl was flanked at the Phoenix news conference by fellow Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
On the other hand she gets a sympathetic portrait from Maureen Dowd in the NYT this a.m.:
Janet Napolitano and I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Eve together.
But there we were on this soggy Thursday, sitting in her office on the outskirts of the city, beside a big, black leather saddle that was a gift from the governor of Sonora, Mexico, when Napolitano was governor of Arizona.
I was working on the last night of the decennium horribile dictu, so I had tried to think of who else might also be burning the midnight oil instead of clinking the midnight bubbly.
The answer was obvious.
7:00 AM
The McCain push poll
A push poll is essentially a survey conducted by a pollster trying to get a fore-ordained conclusion. You do it by including disparaging information about one candidate in the questions. The process works for you in two ways: You can good poll numbers to crow about, and you’ve spread negative information about your opponent.
Last month, you’ll recall, a poll from Rasmussen, an established pollster, had John McCain and J.D. Hayworth running within a few points of each other in a potential matchup for the Republican senatorial primary next year.
The McCain organization, horrified at those numbers hanging over him, no doubt commissioned a more friendly poll, from a right-wing group called Tarrance, to combat it.
In the Republic the other day, Dan Nowicki did a story about it. Unsurprisingly, it showed McCain with a 20-point lede over a potential Hayworth challenge.
While Nowicki made it clear at the top it was a Republican poll, the hedline didn’t (in the print edition), and you had to read to the end of the article before you found out that the poll did smear Heyworth in the questions.
The pollster’s line is that McCain was winning before the questioners started disparaging Hayworth.
Still, I think the story should have led with the fact that it was a push poll. And Nowicki should have asked the pollster who specifically paid for it.
That said, he also didn’t report what to me was a big difference between the two polls. The Rasmussen one was a “robo poll” that questioned about 600 Arizonans via automated calling. The Tarrance one asked the same number by a live person over the phone. The latter is the superior process.
7:00 AM