John McCain | Benny Dacks

mccain doll given away on conan obrien

Tonight on Conan, he announced that a doll company had given them their entire surplus of John McCain Dolls. Seeing how Obama won, they had no use for the dolls and decided to give them to the show. He started giving out giant bags of action figure goodness to the audience members and it hit me, these dolls are going to be worth a small fortune on ebay tomorrow.

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Now that the 2008 election is over, reporters are spilling all the juciest, and previously off the record, gossip from the campaign trail. Much of it is about the infighting between Palin and McCain’s staff, as Newsweek’s treasure trove of post-election gossip reveals.

However, perhaps one of the most astounding and previously unknown tidbits about Sarah Palin has to do with her already dubious grasp of geography. According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked “a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency,” in part because she didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA, and she “didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/05/palin-didnt-know-africa-i_n_141653.html

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By Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Nov 5 (IPS) - They sat glued to their television sets as the new president-elect of the United States. Barack Obama, during his acceptance speech in the early hours of Wednesday, made reference to those listening “in far off places” around the world.

As they danced, honked car horns and used their mobile phones to communicate with friends and relatives not only in the United States, but throughout the region, Caribbean nationals acted as though Obama had won the presidency of the entire English-speaking Caribbean and not the United States.

“If he (Obama) continues in the inspirational vein of the election campaign, it could mean a change in the world, especially in how the U.S. relates to the rest of the world,” said Chris Zacca, president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ).

The respected Caribbean journalist Rickey Singh suggested that the U.S. has undergone a “cultural and political metamorphosis, undoubtedly and ironically partly influenced by eight years of the ideology and governance politics of George W Bush“.

“Let therefore, all Caribbean citizens, not just those of the diaspora in the USA who will have voted for him, join president elect Obama in scoring one for a resounding triumph over racial bigotry,” Singh wrote.

Caribbean leaders have unashamedly expressed open support for the first ever African American to be elected to the White House, and in St. Kitts-Nevis, where Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas is due to face a general election soon, the ruling party staged a “dream is real” outdoor rally that allowed thousands of citizens to view the U.S. election results in a festive atmosphere.

“The St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party was built on the exact same principles as Barack Obama’s campaign to empower the working-class and the downtrodden,” the party said in an advertisement, urging citizens to “celebrate the long-fought dreams of men like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,” a reference to the iconic U.S. civil rights leader.

Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson, who has extended an invitation to Obama to visit his Caribbean island to recuperate from the arduous election campaign, said he was “thrilled” at the result.

“This is a dream come true for millions of Americans — and especially African Americans — who were anxious to see their country redeemed from an unflattering image emanating from a number of factors, including its civil rights history,” said Thompson, who was the only regional leader present at Obama’s presidential nomination earlier this year.

The president of Guyana, which in recent months has had a public squabble with Washington over efforts to eradicate the illegal drug trade, said the victory of the Democratic Party’s candidate over Republican John McCain was “well earned and historic”.

“We in Guyana are very excited about the prospect of change in the United States…and we look forward to working with him in the future,” President Bharrat Jagdeo told the state-owned Guyana Chronicle newspaper.

“I don’t think any president of the United States of America will have the kind of empathy that he will have with people from different countries and poor people because he understands it firsthand, and that is why I think he will understand the difficulties that small, developing countries face,” he had earlier told reporters.

The 47-year-old Democratic senator from Illinois, who will take the oath of office on Jan. 20 next year as the 44th president of the United States, sealed his victory on Tuesday, winning 349 electoral college votes against 163 for McCain.

As the new commander in chief, Obama moves into the Oval Office as leader of a country that is almost certainly in recession, and fighting two long wars, one in Iraq, the other in Afghanistan.

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General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for “maximum flexibility” going forward.

Obama had a choice at that moment. He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views “under advisement.” Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind. “You know, if I were in your shoes, I would be making the exact same argument,” he began. “Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential Commander in Chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security.” Obama talked about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the financial costs of the occupation of Iraq, the stress it was putting on the military.

A “spirited” conversation ensued, one person who was in the room told me. “It wasn’t a perfunctory recitation of talking points. They were arguing their respective positions, in a respectful way.” The other two Senators — Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed — told Petraeus they agreed with Obama. According to both Obama and Petraeus, the meeting — which lasted twice as long as the usual congressional briefing — ended agreeably. Petraeus said he understood that Obama’s perspective was, necessarily, going to be more strategic. Obama said that the timetable obviously would have to be flexible. But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.

Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain’s peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama’s quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public’s choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he’s far more comfortable when he’s able to think things through. “He has learned to trust his gut,” an Obama adviser told me. “He wasn’t so confident in his instincts last year. It’s been the biggest change I’ve seen in him.”

Read on at TIME

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With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign.

McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies.

Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat” rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character – and likely to lose him the election.

Palin, 44, has led the character attacks on Obama in the belief that McCain may be throwing away the election and her chance of becoming vice-president. Her supporters think that if the Republican ticket loses on November 4, she should run for president in 2012.

A leading Republican consultant said: “A lot of conservatives are grumbling about what a poor job McCain is doing. They are rolling their eyes and saying, ‘Yes, a miracle could happen, but at this rate it is all over’.

“Sarah Palin is no fool. She sees the same thing and wants to salvage what she can. She is positioning herself for the future. Her best days could be in front of her. She wants to look as though she was the fighter, the person with the spunk who was out there taking it to the Democrats.”

McCain, 72, has encouraged voters to contrast his character with Obama’s. The campaign launched a tough television commercial last week questioning, “Who is Barack Obama?”

Frank Keating, McCain’s campaign co-chairman, last week called the Democrat a “guy off the street” and said he should admit that he had “used cocaine”.

McCain believes the attacks have spun out of control. At a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, the Arizona senator became visibly angry when he was booed for calling Obama “a decent person”. He took the microphone from an elderly woman who said she disliked Obama because he was “Arab”, saying, “No ma’am, no ma’am”.

When another questioner demanded that he tell the truth about Obama, he said: “I want everybody to be respectful and let’s be sure we are.”

However, his campaign has stepped up its negative advertising against Obama, accusing him of lying about his relationship with William Ayers, the leader of the Weather Underground group responsible for bombing the Capitol and the Pentagon in the early 1970s, who is now a Chicago professor.

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JERUSALEM - MARCH 19: Presumptive Republican ...

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Matthew Dowd, a prominent political consultant and chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign eviscerated John McCain on Tuesday for his choice of Sarah Palin as vice president.

Dowd proclaimed that, in his heart of hearts, McCain knew he put the country at risk with his VP choice and that he would “have to live” with that fact for the rest of his career.

“They didn’t let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP,” Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. “When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race… as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible.”

Saying that Palin was a “net negative” on the ticket, he went on: “[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with… He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that.”

Huffington Post

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JULY 29: (FILE PHOTO) In this...

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William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.

Timmons’ activities occurred in the years following the first Gulf War, when Washington considered Iraq to be a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism. His dealings on behalf of the deceased Iraqi leader stand in stark contrast to the views his current employer held at the time.

John McCain strongly supported the 1991 military action against Iraq, and as recently as Sunday described Saddam Hussein as a one-time menace to the region who had “stated categorically that he would acquire weapons of mass destruction, and he would use them wherever he could.”

Timmons declined to comment for this story. An office manager who works for him said that he has made it his practice during his public career to never speak to the press. Timmons previously told investigators that he did not know that either Vincent or Park were acting as unregistered agents of Iraq. He also insisted that he did not fully understand just how closely the two men were tied to Saddam’s regime while they collaborated.

But testimony and records made public during Park’s criminal trial, as well as other information uncovered during a United Nations investigation, suggest just the opposite. Virtually everything Timmons did while working on the lobbying campaign was within days conveyed by Vincent to either one or both of Saddam Hussein’s top aides, Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon. Vincent also testified that he almost always relayed input from the Iraqi aides back to Timmons.

Talking points that Timmons produced for the lobbyists to help ease the sanctions, for example, were reviewed ahead of time by Aziz, Vincent testified in court. Proposals that Timmons himself circulated to U.S. officials as part of the effort were written with the assistance of the Iraqi officials, and were also sent ahead of time with Timmons’ approval to Aziz, other records show.

Moreover, there was a major financial incentive at play for Timmons. The multi-million dollar oil deal that he was pursuing with the two other lobbyists would only be possible if their efforts to ease sanctions against Iraq were successful.

Read the rest of the article from The Huffington Post

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WASHINGTON — During last week’s presidential debate, John McCain and Barack Obama sparred over what caused the financial crisis.

“The match that lit this fire,” McCain said, came from the government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which backed risky home loans “with the encouragement of Sen. Obama and his cronies … in Washington.”

Obama shot back: “The biggest problem was the deregulation of the financial system. … Sen. McCain, as recently as March, bragged about the fact that he is a deregulator.”

It was a classic example of Washington finger-pointing. McCain and the GOP blame Fannie and Freddie — which were taken over by the government last month — because the troubled mortgage agencies’ biggest backers were Democrats who said they wanted to increase access to homeownership.

Meanwhile, Obama and other Democrats highlight Republicans‘ longtime focus on limiting regulations for the financial industry.

No single government decision sparked the crisis, but collectively the candidates had a point: Both parties in Congress played important roles in setting the stage for the ongoing financial meltdown.

They did so in moves that reflected not just their ideological priorities, but also the wishes of special interests that have spent millions aggressively lobbying Washington and contributing to lawmakers’ campaigns.

By not reining in increasingly risky investments made by Fannie and Freddie — and by keeping complex financial instruments known as derivatives free from most government oversight — Congress chose not to impose barriers that economists widely agree could have helped stave off the crisis that continues, even after lawmakers approved a $700 billion emergency bailout package for Wall Street.

Here is a look at how Congress’ actions on two key fronts became significant factors in the financial crisis:

Read the rest at USATODAY

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — Polls in five key battleground states in the race for the White House released Tuesday suggest that Sen. Barack Obama is making major gains.

The CNN/Time magazine/Opinion Research Corp. polls of likely voters in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin reflect a significant nationwide shift toward the Democratic presidential nominee.

Obama has made significant strides in New Hampshire, the state credited with reviving Sen. John McCain’s Republican primary campaign in both 2000 and 2008.

Fifty-three percent of New Hampshire’s likely voters are backing Obama, while 45 percent are supporting McCain. Obama held a lead of 5 percentage points in the last CNN New Hampshire poll, taken in early September. Watch what the poll numbers mean »

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry narrowly carried New Hampshire — a one-time GOP stronghold. George W. Bush squeezed out a slender win by 1 percentage point in 2000. iReport.com: Are you in a battleground state? Share your story

CNN

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(CNN) — Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO turned top John McCain aide, said she doesn’t think Sarah Palin is qualified to run a major corporation. For that matter, Fiorina said, McCain, Obama and Biden aren’t capable of that kind of job either.

Ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO and McCain adviser Carly Fiorina said Sarah Palin could not run a major company.

The Republican presidential candidate has been trying to portray himself as someone who can fix the country’s economic woes. But that is a far different task than running a Fortune 500 corporation, Fiorina told MSNBC Tuesday.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s camp immediately circulated copies of her words — which didn’t exactly paint their candidate in a soft light, either.

“Well, I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation, I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation, I don’t think Joe Biden could run a major corporation,” Fiorina said.

“It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. So, of course, to run a business, you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Joe Biden or Barack Obama are doing.”

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/16/fiorina.mccain/?iref=mpstoryview

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