Month: August 2008

The Good Old Days

by digby

Mike Barnicle and Doris Kearns-Goodwin chatted earlier this week about those halcyon days of the civil war when bipartisanship reigned and the country wasn’t divided like it is now:

BARNICLE:Doris, can you, in your wildest imagination—and I know you have a pretty good one—could you ever imagine Barack Obama making John McCain his secretary of defense, or John McCain placing Barack Obama in his cabinet, in this world filled with, as we talked about, bloggers, 24-hour cable news channels? Do you think could it happen? DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, HISTORIAN: What it would depend upon, obviously, is the temperament of either McCain or Obama. They would have to have an enormous amount of self-confidence to be willing to do it. They would have to have a great degree of humility to be willing to do it. And you‘re right, it is much, much harder today. You know, In Lincoln‘s time, those rivals were able, in the middle of cabinet meetings, to call each other all sorts of name; you‘re an absolute scoundrel; you‘re a thief; you‘re an unprincipled liar. One would get so mad at the other, they wouldn’t to go cabinet meetings for months on end. Can you imagine if every night on the cable news we heard about these kind of arguments going on inside Washington? Yet, on the other hand, the country is so desirous of having some sort of break to the paralyzing partisanship that we have in Washington that you have a feeling that both these guys, in talking about it, may just try to reach across the aisle at some point. I suspect they will…BARNICLE: Do you think in that period of time that you covered so ably in your book about Lincoln, even in your work on Roosevelt, do you think partisanship was as pronounced in those eras, the Civil War era, the World War II era, as pronounced as it is today? Or is it just that the coverage of it is so much more available today, so much more in our face today?

Do tell. Is it really “much, much harder” today to work across the partisan divide than it was during the civil war? Apparently yes. And why is that?

BARNICLE: I don‘t want to be a downer here. And I don‘t want to appear too overly cynical. I would love to see a day just as you described, where one candidate took the other into his cabinet and a new era of bipartisanship did flourish. Yet, we in a sense—you can disagree with me or agree with me. We live in a nation of 300 million newspaper columnists, many of them crazy people with access to computers, and they blog all day long. The separation, the ideological separation of these people are such that I don‘t know that bipartisanship is still possible. What do you think?

If only the damned people would stop being so ideological maybe the Village could be civilized again! Damned citizens.
Kearns-Goodwin goes on to spout the tiresome warmed over conventional wisdom about how everybody used to get along because instead of going back to their districts and states they would hang around DC getting drunk and playing poker with each other.

I hate to be too mean to her. The idea of having a “team of rivals” is a common enough organizational principle. Some executives like the results that come from creative competition among his or her underlings. In politics it has another dimension, of course — co-opting and neutralizing your enemies, the old “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” thing. But having a couple of members of the opposing party in your cabinet doesn’t actually mean much. The term “bipartisanship” more accurately refers to legislative coalitions and compromise and that’s a much different issue — particularly when one side is so much better at rolling the other.

And anyway, this trope that there was ever a time of real bipartisan comity is a complete myth. Even during WWII the Republicans agitated against Roosevelt — he was one of the most hated (and most loved) presidents in history and this during the most mythic period of American consensus of all. The fact that Kearns-Goodwin trots out the time of the civil war as being less partisan and angry than today — even as she describes duels and assassination attempts and cabinet members not speaking to one another for months — is just bizarre. And again, one can’t help but notice that we just came through six years of ruthlessly bullying Republican dominance in which bipartisanship wasn’t even mentioned by these people as being desirable or necessary.

Apparently, it’s the damned bloggers who are causing all this trouble. I suppose the villagers can always hope that it’s only a fad and soon politics can go back to the respectable golden age of consensus between Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich (or Gettysburg!) when everyone was reasonable and respectful to their rivals. Those were the days.

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Today’s The Day

by digby

Of the Strangebedfellows Big Money Bomb for government accountability. If you haven’t pledged, you can go here.

It looks like it’s going to be huge …

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Words To The Wise

by tristero

Paul Krugman:

…{R}emember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

Yup.

When Phyllis Schlafly Met Hans Von Spakovsky

by digby

A reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch attended the Von Spakovsky vote stealing seminar yesterday:

Last evening, the subject was election fraud, the locale was Cardwell’s Restaurant in Clayton, the convener was the St. Louis Chapter of the Federalist Society, the atmosphere was convivial, and the talk was … well … fierce.

Featured guests, billed as an All Star Panel on Contemporary Election Law Issues, were big time GOP operative Randy Evans of Georgia, as well as Asheesh Agarwal and Hans Von Spakovsky, both of whom were senior lawyers in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during a time of controversy over the enforcement of Federal voters rights laws.

All are in town for a sold out election law seminar sponsored by the Republican National Lawyers Association. It will be held in Clayton, Friday and Saturday.

I was invited to cover last night’s program by the Federalist Society, and was welcomed by local chapter president and attorney Jennifer Wolsing and her colleagues.

On hand were two long tables of Federalist Society members and friends, including that icon of the American political scene, Phyllis Schlafly.

The panelists covered a wide range of hot button elections issues. They made a lot of claims about the current electoral system being fraught with, or at serious risk of, widespread voter fraud. I am skeptical about many of these claims — but require more time to consider and evaluate what the panelists had to say.

Which I will do and follow up with a Part 2 to this post.

Also I wondered why no mention was made about the still unresolved scandal involving politicization of federal prosecutors over election law matters, including the apparent firings of U.S. Attorneys for refusing to bring what they thought were unmeritorious voter fraud cases.

It’s hard to see how any serious discussion about the integrity of the system could ignore that development.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of items of interest. Click on the link below to hear Mr. Agarwal’s analysis of a recent Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a case brought by the Justice Department over the state of Missouri’s voter registration rolls:

read on to listen to MP3s of the discussion, including one very odd comment from Von Spakovsky.

They may not have felt comfortable about talking about the US Attorney purge because, as Murray Waas reported yesterday, there is rumbling that a special prosecutor may be named in the probe. Loose lips sink ships…

As I wrote yesterday, this election is going to have special challenges because Democrats have registered so many new voters, which means they are people who don’t know how the system works, especially young people, and there will be a lot of opportunity for vote suppression and intimidation, not to mention casting doubt on the results. Democrats couldn’t make vote suppression charges stick over the past eight years, but the right has a much more sophisticated understanding of how to create and then flog such controversies to make it difficult for a Democrat to govern. All those years of complaining about what went wrong in Florida and Ohio are going to look like child’s play when these guys take that meme and run with it.

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No Apologies

by digby

Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside, putting it on a table.

Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple’s two dogs and seizing the unopened package.

In it were 32 pounds of marijuana. But the drugs evidently didn’t belong to the couple.

Police say the couple appeared to be innocent victims of a scheme by two men to smuggle millions of dollars worth of marijuana by having it delivered to about a half-dozen unsuspecting recipients.

The two men under arrest include a FedEx deliveryman; investigators said the deliveryman would drop off a package outside a home, and the other man would come by a short time later and pick it up.

Now, federal authorities say they’re looking into how local law enforcement handled the July 29 raid. FBI Agent Rich Wolf said late Thursday that the bureau had opened a civil rights investigation into the case.

[…]

Calvo insisted the couple’s two black Labradors were gentle creatures and said police apparently killed them “for sport,” gunning down one of them as it was running away.

“Our dogs were our children,” said the 37-year-old Calvo. “They were the reason we bought this house because it had a big yard for them to run in.”

The mayor, who was changing his clothes when police burst in, also complained that he was handcuffed in his boxer shorts for about two hours along with his mother-in-law, and said the officers didn’t believe him when he told them he was the mayor. No charges were brought against Calvo or his wife, who came home in the middle of the raid.

Prince George’s County Police Chief Melvin High said Wednesday that Calvo and his family were “most likely … innocent victims,” but he would not rule out their involvement, and he defended the way the raid was conducted. He and other officials did not apologize for killing the dogs, saying the officers felt threatened.

[..]

Police announced Wednesday they had arrested two men suspected in a plot to smuggle 417 pounds of marijuana, and seized a total of $3.6 million in pot. Investigators said the package that arrived on Calvo’s porch had been sent from Los Angeles via FedEx, and they had been tracking it ever since it drew the attention of a drug-sniffing dog in Arizona.

Police intercepted it in Maryland, and an undercover detective posing as a deliveryman took it to the Calvo home.

Calvo’s defenders — including the Berwyn Heights police chief, who said his department should have been alerted ahead of time — said police had no right to enter the home without knocking.

But officials insisted they acted within the law, saying the operation was compromised when Calvo’s mother-in-law saw officers approaching the house and screamed. That could have given someone time to grab a gun or destroy evidence, authorities said.

Neighbors in Berwyn Heights, which Calvo described as “Mayberry inside the Capital Beltway,” have rallied around the couple. On Sunday night, supporters gathered on a ballfield to pay tribute to the family and the dogs. A banner on the wooden fence around Calvo’s yard read, “Cheye and Trinity, We support you, Friends and Citizens of Berwyn Heights.” Around it were dozens of handwritten messages from supporters.

In addition to being the part-time mayor, Calvo works at a nonprofit foundation that runs boarding schools. His wife is a state finance officer.

[…]

Calvo said he was astonished that police have not only failed to apologize, but declined to clear the couple’s names.

I don’t even know what to say. Apparently, this is the way things are done in America these days. The police can shoot you full of electricity for any reason they choose and can deliver marijuana to your house and then burst in without warning, shoot your dogs down in cold blood and then when it turns out you are an innocent victim, shrug and say what they did was perfectly appropriate. This could happen to any one of us at any time.

And it’s not like this was a mistake in chasing down a dangerous killer. It was over marijuana for crying out loud.

This is actually a familiar tale. It reminds me of one of the very first posts I ever did on this blog:

The Smoak family was pulled over the evening of January 1 on Interstate 40 in eastern Tennessee by officers who mistakenly suspected them of a carjacking. An investigation showed James Smoak had simply left his wallet on the roof of his car at a gas station, and motorists who saw his money fly off the car as he drove away called police.

The family was driving through eastern Tennessee on their way home from a New Year trip to Nashville. They told CNN they are in the process of retaining a lawyer and considering legal action against the Cookeville, Tennessee, Police Department and the Tennessee Highway Patrol for what happened to them and their dog.

[…]

“What did I do?” James Smoak asks the officers.

“Sir, inside information is that you was involved in some type of robbery in Davidson County,” the unidentified officer says.

Smoak and his wife protest incredulously, telling the officers that they are from South Carolina and that their mother and father-in-law are traveling in another car near them.

The Smoaks told CNN that as they knelt, handcuffed, they pleaded with officers to close the doors of their car so their two dogs would not escape, but the officers did not heed them.

Pamela Smoak is seen on the tape looking up at an officer, telling him slowly, “That dog is not mean. He won’t hurt you.”

Her husband says, “I got a dog in the car. I don’t want him to jump out.”

The tape then shows the Smoaks’ medium-size brown dog romping on the shoulder of the Interstate, its tail wagging. As the family yells, the dog, named Patton, first heads away from the road, then quickly circles back toward the family.

An officer in a blue uniform aims his shotgun at the dog and fires at its head, killing it immediately.

For several moments, all that is audible are shrieks as the family reacts to the shooting. James Smoak even stands up, but officers pull him back down.

“Y’all shot my dog! Y’all shot my dog!” James Smoak cries. “Oh my God! God Almighty!”

“You shot my dog!” screams his wife, distraught and still handcuffed. “Why’d you kill our dog?”

“Jesus, tell me, why did y’all shoot my dog?” James Smoak says.

The officers bring him to the patrol car, and the family calms down, but still they ask the officers for an explanation. One of them says Patton was “going after” the officer.

“No he wasn’t, man,” James Smoak says. “Y’all didn’t have to kill the dog like that.”

Brandon told CNN that Patton, was playful and gentle — “like Scooby-Doo” — and may have simply gone after the beam of the flashlight as he often did at home, when Brandon and the dog would play.

If it hadn’t been for the video nobody would have believed this family. And as sickening as the shooting of the dog is, I have to say that the way this family was treated on the basis of that flimsy, absurd “evidence” is even more shocking, as is the treatment of the family in the first story. Here we have somebody report that they saw some money flying from a car and the first assumption is that these two middle aged people and a teenage boy are car jackers and must be dragged out of the car, shoved to their knees and handcuffed? Don’t they train police or require they have any common sense anymore?

The Smoaks sued and won $9,100 in a federal excessive force civil case last spring and 77k in an earlier case against the county. Good for them. Not many people would have spent five years pursuing justice but they did it and good for them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have deterred police anywhere else.

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Meeting Of The Masterminds

by digby

It looks like Missouri is ground zero for election stealing symposiums this summer. Tonight we had the exciting panel with Hans Von Spakovsky and starting tomorrow the full fledged RNLA vote suppression summer seminar will be taking place featuring many big name Republican election stealers. (I particularly love the fact that you can earn one CLE hour for ethics! Hah.)

2008 National Summer Election Law Seminar

8/8/2008 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Ritz-Carlton
100 Carondelet Plaza
St. Louis, MO 63105

The 2008 RNLA National Election Law Seminar is one of the best ways to prepare for the 2008 General Elections and discuss ways to promote open, fair and honest elections.

The annual CLE Seminar is a professionally-taught school for attorneys who wish to receive basic or advanced election law training. You can earn up to 10 CLE credit hours, including 1 Hour of Ethics.

The Seminar runs Friday and Saturday, August 8 and 9 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis, Missouri.

Speakers at this Election Law Seminar will be the foremost leaders in the Election Law Field, including:

Rep. Roy Blunt, Republican Whip and Former Secretary of State for Missouri

The Honorable John Ashcroft, former U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator (MO)

The Honorable Trevor Potter, General Counsel, John McCain 2008; former Chairman, Federal Election Commission

Chris Gober, Chief Counsel, National Republican Senatorial Committee

Beth Beacham, Chief Counsel, National Republican Congressional Committee

John Fund, Wall Street Journal; Author, Stealing Elections

Jonathan Bechtle, Election Education Committee, RNLA; Legal Counsel, Evergreen Freedom Foundation

Charles H. Bell, Jr., General Counsel, California Republican State Party and First Vice President, RNLA

Elliot Berke, former Counsel, Office of the Speaker of the House and Office of the House Majority Leader; Vice President for Membership, RNLA

Mark Braden, former Chief Counsel, Ohio Elections Commission and Election Counsel for the Secretary of State in Ohio

Douglas Chalmers, Secretary of the Board of Governors and Georgia Chapter Leader, RNLA

Randy Evans, former Outside Counsel, Speakers of the 104th-109th U.S. Congresses; Board of Governors, RNLA

Heather Heidelbaugh, former Pennsylvania Election Counsel, Bush-Cheney 04; Vice President for Election Education, RNLA

Rob Hess, Vice Chair, Election Education Committee, RNLA; Husch Blackwell Sanders, LLP

Ronald Hicks, Partner, Meyer, Unkovic & Scott, LLP and co-chair, Litigation Section, Meritas

Larry Levy, Election Education Committee, RNLA; former General Counsel, Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee, Inc.; Partner, Holtzman Vogel, PLLC

Cleta Mitchell, former Legal Counsel, National Republican Senatorial Committee; Vice President for DC Operations, RNLA

Michael Roman, National Election Day Operations Director, John McCain 2008

John Ryder, Harris, Shelton, Dunlap, Cobb & Ryder, PLLC

Peter Schalestock, former Deputy Counsel, Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee;
former Regional Director of Election Day Operations, RNC; Election Education Committee, RNLA

Lawrence Tabas, General Counsel, Pennsylvania Republican Party

Harvey M. Tettlebaum, Outside General Counsel, Missouri Republican State Party; Chair, 2008 Election Law Seminar Host Committee; former President, RNLA

W. Alan Wilk, Team Leader for the Dykema’s Political Compliance Team, Dykema Gossett PLLCCounsels to key Congressional Committees dealing with Elections

Leading State elected officials, including a Secretary of State to be announced later

Counsels to the national Republican Party Committees

Leading State Republican Party Counsels

More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks!

The Friday Evening Reception will be hosted by Husch Blackwell Sanders, LLP at their St. Louis office.

Program Highlights:
Receive up to 10 CLE credits! Including One Hour of Ethics credit.
“How To” Classes taught by National Election Law Experts
State-specific Election Law Breakout Sessions with leading state Republican lawyers.

Sponsors: Charles Bell, Mark Foster, John Hancock and Associates, Ronald Hicks, and Holtzman Vogel, PLLC.

Individual Sponsors: Michael Grote, Ralph Johnson, Mark Mittleman, and Beverly Weiss Manne.

This is a meeting where Karl Rove has been known known to address the crowd. (They carried it on C-SPAN!)He’s busy working on the QT for Freedom’s Watch right now so he may not have time to attend this year. But he’ll definitely be there in spirit.

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Good News

by digby

Frederick Clarkson at Talk to Action reports:

There was a controversy recently, when Jim Wallis and allied evangelicals proposed “abortion reduction” as a central feature of the Democratic Party Platform. This has been concerning as religious right ideas have been percolating in the party of late as part of efforts to appeal to conservative religious voters.

The just published draft platform clearly rejects such a view, even while shoehorning in the word “reduction” in a way that will probably not alarm the vast majority of Democrats who are prochoice.

You can read the relevant pieces of the platform at the link. I’ve always felt that the emphasis in the party should be less on reducing abortion and more on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which every liberal, pro-choice or pro-life, can agree upon. This does that while acknowledging that reducing unwanted pregnancies naturally leads to reduced abortions, which is true without unnecessarily stigmatizing the procedure or the women who find themselves in need of it.

Pro-choice advocates have always been in the forefront of reducing unwanted pregnancies. If we had our way the government would give free birth control and reproductive health information to all Americans. But then, that’s really the issue. We don’t think sex is the problem (it’s pretty uhm, unstoppable) — we think unwanted pregnancies are the problem. The social conservatives clearly do think sex is the problem or they wouldn’t be intent upon keeping kids ignorant, making birth control unavailable and then forcing women to have children against their will.

Good for the platform committee for adopting language that everyone who is engaging in good faith can probably support.

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Groceries

by digby

Huffington Post has a copy of a leaked McCain campaign memo:

John McCain was widely ridiculed several weeks ago for fielding reporter’s questions in the cheese aisle of a grocery store. But the location of the impromptu press conference was hardly random. The McCain camp, in a strategy memo, has pinpointed grocery stores as an important venue for the Senator to push his economic agenda.

In a McCain campaign “Economic Communications Plan” that was obtained by the Huffington Post, an aide to the Senator lays out several themes, tactics and objectives to shore up the Arizona Republican’s standing on the economy and paint Barack Obama as a “job killing machine.”

“Our polling tells us that Americans are still not tuned into what the candidates might do to fix the economy,” reads the memo. “We have an opportunity to fill in that gap.”

The strategy, which was authored by Taylor Griffin — a veteran of the Bush White House and Treasury Department who serves McCain as a senior adviser — seems built around traditional themes. The McCain campaign will paint Obama as being “aligned with trial lawyers” and “unions (card check, trade, education reform),” and push the frame that he “raises taxes” and “will kill jobs.”

In contrast, McCain will be positioned as a bold leader on economic matters, someone who has a “record of taking on corporate interests” and will “fight speculation driving up prices of oil and food” as well as “the lawsuit culture.”

“People are tired of big corporations, lobbyist and special interests who they feel prosper at their expense,” the memo reads. “People must understand that John McCain is not only thinking of their future, but their children’s futures as well.”

To do this, McCain’s camp plans to utilize a number of tactics, including “family budget roundtables, grocery store visits,” and “roundtable events heavily tilted towards women to discuss the pressures the economy is placing on family finances and how McCain’s plan would help.” The campaign also will work the fourth estate. As detailed in Taylor’s memo, McCain will “provide compelling set of programming and surrogate activity to drive media interest,” and “mobilize economists in target states supporting the McCain plan to engage the media in support of our plan.”

I belong to a non-political website that includes women across the country from all economic strata, educational backgrounds and ages. Those who are working class and young as well as retirees are starting to talk, non-stop, about the economy, specifically prices. These aren’t political people, as I said. Indeed, they don’t even frame these discussions in political terms. They just comment on how hard it’s getting for them to adequately feed their families, budgets are tight, they are cutting back. They ask for advice on how to make their dollars stretch and complain that they can’t give their kids what they want. The pinch is very real.

McCain is smart to focus on that particular group, if that’s what he’s doing, because they are really looking for help. The fact that he’s the last man on the planet to give it to them isn’t relevant. If he’s speaking to them and they feel they can trust him they may just vote for him. All they know is that they are having a hard time making ends meet and the details are probably less important than the idea that he knows they are hurting and promises to help.

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Seven Years For This?

by dday

One of the most absurd trials in American history ended today when Salim Hamdan was sentenced to 5 1/2 years for “providing material support to terrorism” in his capacity as Osama bin Laden’s driver. After seven years on the so-called war on terror, we have the guy who changed the oil to show for it, and we held him so long (he got time served) that he’s eligible to leave in six months (not that the US government will comply). Mind you that material support for terrorism was not considered a war crime subject to a military tribunal at the time that Hamdan was bin Laden’s driver. This is an ex post facto conviction based on the Military Commissions Act of 2006. And what a commission it was. ACSBlog notes:

Salim Hamdan, who is being held at the military’s detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and served as Osama bin Laden’s driver, was convicted by a military tribunal of providing material support for terrorism and acquitted of conspiracy charges, the New York Times reported. ACSBlog published reports from the trial by observers Sahr MuhammedAlly, Aaron Zissler, and Frank Kendall, who represented the organization Human Rights First.

The Associated Press reported “Hamdan’s attorneys said the judge allowed evidence that would not have been admitted by any civilian or military U.S. court, and that interrogations at the center of the government’s case were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.” […]

Yesterday evening, Military Commission Judge Keith Allred acknowledged that he “may very well have instructed the [military commission jury] members erroneously,” but the prosecution and defense apparently agreed to let the original jury instructions stand, the Times reported.

More than anything, this is embarrassing. And meanwhile, there’s a whole new generation of tortured prisoners being held to this day:

The U.S. military is segregating violent Iraqi prisoners in wooden crates that in some cases are not much bigger than the prisoners.

The military released three grainy black-and-white photos of what it calls the “segregation boxes” used in Iraq. They show the rudimentary structures of wood and mesh. Some of the boxes are as small as 3 feet by 3 feet by 6 feet tall, according to military officials. They did not release a picture of a box that size.

The military said the boxes are humane and are checked every 15 minutes. It said detainees, who stand in the boxes, are isolated for no more than 12 hours at a time.

Shut up, do-gooders, the boxes are checked, what more do you want?

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Trolling For Fun And Profit

by dday

You knew somehow it would come to this. John McCain’s campaign is offering their supporters redeemable points to troll websites and write pro-McCain comments. It’s the professionalization of astroturfing. Because it’s a conservative effort, they give them the exact words and invite them to cut and paste them onto the sites.

Activists and political operatives have used volunteers or paid staff to seed radio call-in shows or letters-to-the-editor pages for years, typically without disclosing the caller or letter writer’s connection to a candidate or cause. Like the fake grass for which the practice is named, such AstroTurf messages look as though they come from the grass roots but are ersatz.

McCain’s campaign has taken the same idea and given it an Internet-era twist. It also has taken the concept one step further.

People who sign up for McCain’s program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification by McCain’s webmasters). The points can be traded for prizes, such as books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, even a ride with the candidate on his bus, known as the Straight Talk Express, according to campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.

Just because I’m hoping they have some of those spare tire gauges, let me give this a shot.

“John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan which rewards personal responsibility and entrepreneurship! Juice!”

OK, give me a golf tee.

This is just an evolution of the Bush Administration paying Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to carry water for their policies. It’s wingnut welfare at the micro-level. And it’s kind of sad that you can’t find a conservative who is legitimately excited enough about John McCain to promote him online for free. I think the accurate response to any McCain supporter on the Web at this point is “how many buttons did you just win for that comment?”

UPDATE: There’s apparently a virtual army of six on this project. We’re doomed!

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