No, he has sold his maverick soul and, just on foreign policy alone, has allied himself with the neo-conservative Bush advisors from the Project for a New American Century, including William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the guys who, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, are the same guys who surrounded President Bush and helped him formulate his foreign policy... and has that really been a resounding success?

His campaign is being run by Karl Rove, (who said Tim Kaine was too inexperienced to be a VP), disciples and Sen. McCain went negative when he was trailing Obama in the polls despite stating negative campaigns fail. When Mitt Romney complained about McCain's own negative ads during that primary, McCain replied, "You started it!"

That depends on your point of view. If you're filthy freaking rich (which ain't nowhere near being extraordinarily WEALTHY) than, yeah, you're going to take a hit from Obama.

However, if you fall into the lower 90 percent or so of income, you're gonna get a nicer taste of the rewards generated by your productivity.

In a new book called, "Unequal Democracy," by political scientist Larry Bartels, it is demonstrated that if historical economic trends continue, our country's economy will get better if Obama becomes president.

For the last 60 years, Republicans have been in the White House 34 years to the Democrats 26. Bartels - who says he started his book with the intention of being an "apolitical political scientist" and that the last time he voted was for Ronald Reagan in 1984 - asserts that over those last 60 years, the average Joe makes out better under the Democrats.

"Under Democratic presidents poor families did slightly better than richer families (at least in proportional terms), producing a modest net decrease in income inequality; under Republican presidents, rich families did vastly better than poorer families, producing a considerable net increase in income inequality."

To go into deeper detail would require someone with a better tolerance for wonkiness than mine.

Check out the author's description of his work. and read reviews from the Washington Post

and New York Times

for charts and graphs.

Sarah Palin will make a great candidate for VP, but is a cynical choice to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Karl Rove agrees AND he asserts a small town mayor and short-term governor would only be an "intensely political choice where he (the Presidential candidate) said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?"

Now, to be fair, Mr Rove was not speaking of Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska for twenty months and before that mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, pop. ca. 9,000.

No, he was speaking on Face the Nation on August 10, 2008 talking about prospective democratic VP candidate Tim Kaine, three year Governor of VA and former mayor of Richmond, VA.

As a running mate, Palin will play to the conservative base' main issues, "God, guns and gays!" and if McCain wins yet leaves this mortal coil or becomes incapacitated, this right-wing ideologue will ascend to the Presidency with less international experience than Barack Obama!

The GOP is run by a bunch of Mayberry Machiavellis who will do anything to consolidate power for their corporate masters.

From a purely political point of view, McCain's choice of Palin was a masterstroke. He had slung the entire kitchen; range, sink and refrigerator at Obama and had closed the stupid daily polling figures. So what next? Pawlenti? Romney? Ridge? What does any of them do for McCain who has already used up his best stuff? Going back to the race/gender issue and using Hillary Clinton as a smoke screen to put an ideologue on the ticket to satisfy the red-meat base was brilliant.

The POW hero and the Hockey mom.

They will talk her up as a "maverick" to re-bolster McCain's BS reputation for being the independent guy he used to be... before he gave his gonads to Bush in SC eight years ago and never took 'em back. She fought against her own party... to turn down money for a superfluous pork barrel bridge that had been thoroughly scorned by the entire news media.

Ignore for the moment that in order to win, the GOP needs to have a ticket that swears it will fight its own party, the party that has been in total control of the government for most of the last eight year. Grrrr....

This maneuver, by the Karl Rove crew running this campaign, is going back to the Lee Atwater playbook, which is to divide the country in half and win 51-49 per cent by any means necessary.

For right now, and if they are very lucky, for the next week, the GOP convention will drive the news cycles. McCain's campaign has to hope this will ignite the conservative base and that base will now get behind McCain without having to hold their noses.

Was it a ploy, or an event? Because most campaign events are just that; events - a way to attract attention and raise money.

What was the announcement of McCain's running mate before noon the day after Obama's historic - and indeed it was historic - acceptance speech, but a ploy to mute reaction to Obama and focus the media spotlight on McCain? Regardless, ploy or event, it was a masterstroke of political theater. Well played, Mr. McCain.

A close friend of mine lived in Germany for the better part of this decade. He told me he would be ashamed of himself as he amped up the Brooklyn Jamaican accent when conversation turned toward US policy in the run-up to the Iraq War. He said he got tired of defending what he thought, and has proven to be correct, indefensible. About Obama's event he said, "Two hundred thousand people in Berlin were waving American flags... and none of those flags were on fire! That's a bad thing?" So what was so wrong about staging an event on the campaign trail... even if the event was not on native soil? The problem everyone really has, but won't say out loud, is that we all KNOW that John McCain and Sarah Palin could plan an event at the Statue of Victory in Berlin and have no one show. Obama turns out 200K.

Why is my country so afraid of this guy?

I agree with almost everything you postulate with one exception... the 2004 Presidential Election. Like you, I thought the two parties were totally in the pockets of big corporative power. My thoughts were that Bush and Gore were basically no different except that the folks who owned Bush were just a little scarier. I live in Washington, DC so I traded votes with a guy in Oregon who wanted to vote for Nader. Well, you know what happened and if you have seen nothing else in the last eight years you HAVE to see there is a huge difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Power corrupts and Democrats have been as guilty as anyone when it comes to passing legislation favorable to their donors and lobbyists and getting caught with their hands in the till. However, Democrats never wanted to destroy government because then they would have no reason to run for office.

In the last seven years the Bush administration has overseen the greatest transfer of public wealth into private coffers. The number of "sole source" contracts have grown exponentially at home and abroad. The tough guy party who always run on national security fears was on watch when we suffered the greatest attack on our home soil ever. Their response? Blow up Iraq even though they didn't have anything to do with 9/11. So we wreck their national infrastructure and instead of helping the folks we liberated from tyranny rebuild their society, we bring in Haliburton, KBR, Bechtel and a host of other crony corporations on no-bid or "sole source" contracts. Where do you think $10 billion a month is going? It wasn't war for oil; oil contracts were the icing on the cake. No, it was Grand Theft USA - the looting of the treasury along with massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Katrina drowns New Orleans and instead of helping residents reclaim their homes, FEMA gives out sole source contracts for toxic trailers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/22/AR2007082200049.html

Gore-Lieberman may not have been ground shaking but you can bet the treasury wouldn't be under such unbridled assault. And for sure we wouldn't have Alito and Roberts on the Supreme Court and the court only one vote away from legalizing the Police State the Bush administration is foisting on the nation.

Hillary Clinton was the odds on favorite to win back in 2007 so the GOP fielded a bunch of empty suits like Rudy Giuliani as their serious contenders.

Like it or not, Clinton represented the status quo for the monied elites, why else would Clinton take her campaign to the bitter end making Obama burn millions of dollars on the campaign for months after the primary was all over except for the shouting? Obama threw a wrench into the works by having an impeccably organized campaign - and if you heard his acceptance speech you would see he is doing anything but cowering.

This is it. This is the year. There is a HUGE difference between the parties.

It would be easy to say that the two parties are the same, especially if you go with the theory that all of "Washington" is corrupt and venal. That would go with the "pox on both their houses" point of view. Unfortunately that view misses the evidence of the vast differences in the party philosophy even if it doesn't address the similarities between individuals.

Is Joe Lieberman a Democrat or Republican?

Unfortunately, both parties usually fail to follow their own philosophies - in 2006 Congressional Democrats were elected in large numbers in part because of their seeming mandate to end the Iraq War. However, the ensuing months saw a major escalation in the number of troops by the Republican administration that was sanctioned by the newly elected Democratic congress.

The Republicans have longed portrayed government and taxes

as the scourge of America, whereas the Democrats produced the New Deal and Great Society.

When the Clinton Administration ended the Republicans were left with a healthy budget surplus and a fairly robust economy - tech bubble not withstanding.

By enacting massive tax cuts for the wealthy while mandating massive expenditures, the Republican administration seems to be trying to bankrupt the government. In the words of prominent anti-tax neocon Grover Norquist, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" One could wonder if the GOP is bent on destroying the government

The Republicans claim the desire to make government efficient but just view the differences between FEMA operated under James Lee Witt (Clinton Administration) and Micheal Brown (Bush Administration).