http://www.dailykos.com/...

Desperate for any type of press coverage for his irrelevant campaign during Obama's world tour, John McCain is turning to sadder and sadder publicity stunts to get anyone to pay attention.

This may be the worst of them all. A buddy of mine sent me this, and hopefully the MSM picks up on it soon.

McCain Announces Wednesday Publicity Stunt

Working to focus attention on his campaign while Democratic rival Barack Obama soaks up non-stop coverage for his Middle East tour, Republican nominee John McCain announced that he would be staging a dangerous stunt to signal his commitment to protecting America, promising to stay awake past 11 pm, eastern standard time, in a live broadcast from the den of his Washington, DC home on Wednesday.

* * * BREAKING * * *
SOUTH PORTLAND, MAINE - Somewhat calling into question the conventional wisdom of the 2008 campaign, it was discovered Monday that Arizona Senator John Sidney McCain III, 71, is also running for president.

[Inspired by real events ...]

Dozens of protesters lashed out at a plan to thin the human herd, causing the Grand High Council to curtail its activities for now.

There is an excellent diary discussing the comments made in the Austin Statesman by Patrick Beach.
Just think of the shiesse storm that would erupt if the Star-Tribune published similar comments about the right wing?

O’REILLY: Okay, now he shows up on Saturday at the most hateful - there is not — and I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here — there is not a more hateful group in the country than these Daily Kos people . . . Hateful, hateful, hateful. The rhetoric that they use and the rhetoric that the Klan and the Nazis use are the same rhetoric. It’s hate. Everyone knows that.

Note: Blow Riley asked me if I would post this for him, and since I didn't have another diary planned for today, I agreed. Evidently, he attended NN'08 in Austin, and was so excited by what he saw there that he immediately registered on Daily Kos. When he found out he'd have to wait a week before he could submit a diary, he got frantic. I figured posting this was the least I could do for him. From the looks of it, it seems like The Bill O'Viator had a somewhat different experience than the rest of us had. But let's let him tell it in his own words and pictures, shall we? - o.h.

NOTE: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES WHICH MAY SHOCK SOME READERS.

We've seen cheap political use of the military before, but never something this disgusting. After it's already been revealed that Condi Rice made sure no embassy helped Obama's trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, now we find out that the Pentagon doesn't want to set a timetable for Obama's withdrawal, despite national demand.

The story: Pentagon Refuses Obama Withdrawal Timetable

The quotes below show just how low this administration has fallen.

My wife left for her all-female yearly vacation and retreat (this is something that i highly recommend to every couple out there). Good for her, she really deserves some down time without me. So, i was left lonesome roaming the house and bored. At my age (66 years old) nothing usually good comes from being lonesome and bored in a house full of electronics.

After my golf session this morning, i got home, watched "There will be Blood"--excellent movie by the way-- ate something and i got bored again. Foolishly, i had the not-so-brilliant idea of watching some news, which i don't do or haven't done since 1984. Oh boy, that's gonna be interesting. So, i unblocked CNN, FOXNews, CNBC, MSNBC and sat passively in front of the tube as if i was lobotomized.

The rest is in the body...there are a couple of funny clips that i added to illustrate my diary.

The following parody news story appeared seven years ago today. It was published and distributed by Yossarian Universal News Service (YU), the world’s first satiric news syndicate founded in 1980.

YU News Dispatch 033
Yossarian Universal News Service 072001
5:01:45:103 PM PST
START

BERLUSCONI OPENS G-8 SUMMIT AND MAKES OFFER NO ONE CAN REFUSE
Bush Learns To Speak Italian By Listening To Government Surveillance Tapes Of John Gotti

Genoa, Italy (YU) -- Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, dressed in the traditional black shirt and white tie of his ancestors, welcomed delegates, dignitaries and hundreds of other invited guests from all over the world to the Group of Eight summit in Genoa today, by ordering everyone to empty their pockets, lie face down on the ground and remain very still as select members of his special security forces demonstrated precisely how globalization worked.
   

I'm a fan of Digg. I was reading through the top ranked stories the other day and came across a January 17, 2001 story from the Onion, the title being Bush: "Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over".

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

President-elect Bush vows that "together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us."

"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."

You would think those are just "general" things from the Onion, a site based on satire and humor. Well normally I laugh when reading the Onion, not this time.

Not that we in the netroots need to be told, as we lamented his 2000 loss, saw his movie, heeded his environmental call to arms and clicked on his ads on the top of this site. But as he laid out his challenge to the Presidential nominees and America as a whole, Al Gore reminded everyone that he was "the fucking man."

No surprise that this part of his speech wasn't covered, but I thought it was the most fitting, and truthful, part of the landmark speech he gave yesterday. I have dropped an anchor in this link so it takes you right to the part I'm talking about:

Gore Lays Out "Awesome" Goals for Next President

Former Vice President Al Gore, a leading crusader for all things badass since the Supreme Court handed him a controversial defeat in the 2000 Presidential election, on Thursday challenged the winner of this November’s election to "be like Al" and make the country completely awesome within ten years.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.  What a horse race we have in this country.  Barack Obama and Senator John McCain are competing for the highest office in the nation.  Can Obama win?  Alas, no.  Here is why:

Not sure if anyone picked up on this story, but I think it's a major revelation that needs to be exposed. It's pretty shocking.

Bush Admits To Not Being An Economist

The nation was shocked to learn on Tuesday that President George W. Bush was in fact not an economist, shattering a commonly held perception of the fiscally-savvy President.

So I got really angry at the reaction here people had to the New Yorker cover. Sure, it should make you angry. That was the intent. But don't get mad at the New Yorker. They are pointing out how stupid the attacks are.

So I had a huge rant building up inside me. I was going to go though and grab comments from people that run counter to the 1st amendment. I was going to compare comments here with comments from people on the right (there was a plethora that were equally inane as the tripe of right wing blogs).

But time, and the comic strip This Modern World have eased my anger...

I am a recent college graduate, from a prestigious institution, struggling to find even part time work here in New York City. My apartment's electricity bill just came in, and my roommate and I owe $209 for our tiny little place in Brooklyn. My roommate is selling his car for way below market value, because he can't afford the gas. We eat Ramen every night because food prices are insane. In plain English, this economy sucks, and I'm feeling the pain.

So it makes it that much easier to take when the President gives me the middle finger rhetorically, like he did yesterday when talking about the economy. And believe me, I know that I don't have it 1/100th as bad as some people, so I can't even imagine how they felt. Check this out:

President Says His Economy "Fundamentally Sound"

In his first extended press conference since April, President Bush worked to calm frayed nerves nationwide about worsening economic conditions, telling reporters that his personal economy was fundamentally sound and reassuring nervous Americans that he was confident that his bank account would weather any minor fiscal uncertainty.

I've been thinking some more about the New Yorker cover and the question of satire (my first post is below). Long-time readers may recall that we've had disagreements here over Stephen Colbert, whose "satire" I have claimed is often not (although I feel that less so recently than I did a year or two ago).

Expanding on things I've written before, here's my working definition, which applies to Colbert and the New Yorker: if the only thing that distinguishes alleged "satire" from an original is the source, it isn't satire, it's "imitation." It may or may not be funny, but it isn't satire.

If you could take a transcript of a Colbert interview, hand it to Bill O'Reilly, and have him read it without batting an eye, then it wasn't satire - it was imitation.

I wrote the other day about the now-infamous New Yorker cover:

Andy Borowitz has the list of official, campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes in the wake of the now-infamous New Yorker cover flap, undoubtedly the silliest Outrage! of the election yet. Reasonable people can disagree about the success of the cover as satire—personally I think it works, and I think the ensuing shitstorm is pretty strong evidence of that—but whether it's a "good" satire or not the meaning is absolutely clear, inoffensive, and pro-Obama: it's the morons who believe this crap and the media figures who cynically peddle it who are being mocked, not the Obamas.

I'm even not sure who these mythical people are supposed to be who are with it enough to have heard of the New Yorker in the first place yet still clueless enough to take the cover at face value.