The Carter Gilson Report

This week, Republican Alaska Governor and Veep nominee Sarah Palin finally did something I can’t argue with and, in fact, support whole-heartedly.  She went back to Alaska to see her son off to Iraq.

Well, for Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, apparently this actual pro-family act is not pro-family for the group.  The Values Voter Summit, which is organized by the FRC, is this weekend. Sarah Palin had been scheduled to give a speech (probably the same speech she’s given right along), but due to her family commitments, she will not be able to attend.

She offered to present a short video, but Summit president Tony Perkins rejected it, reportedly saying, “That’s not enough.” McCain will be in Washington with no scheduled events this weekend, but will not be attending the summit.

So, being with your family for a major event like shipping off to war is bad values if Tony Perkins wants you to give a bad speech at his party?  Good to know.

Of course, yesterday, on the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA, Sarah Palin gave a speech officially seeing of her son where she conflated 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

So, she went and ruined the one thing I could support her on.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Apparently, while Mayor of Wasilla, the police wanted some cost-cutting, and thus started charging rape victims for the forensic rape kits. From the hometown paper, The Frontiersman, in May, 2000:

Gov. Tony Knowles recently signed legislation protecting victims of sexual assault from being billed for tests to collect evidence of the crime, but one local police chief said the new law will further burden taxpayers….

Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.

“In the past weve charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just dont want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer,” Fannon said.

It would be such a shame if the taxpayers were burdened by paying for forensics that would take dangerous people off the streets.  That’s Wasilla under Sarah Palin.  Imagine if she gets the reins of the country.

The gloves are coming off in the campaign this year, and it’s not pretty.  First, earlier this week, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) was quoted saying the following in front of reporters:

Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,

It was in front of reporters, so he knew he was on the record.  He tried to play it off later, releasing this statement through a spokesman:

He stands by that characterization and thinks it accurately describes the Democratic nominee… He was unaware that the word had racial overtones and he had absolutely no intention of using a word that can be considered offensive.

Yeah.  We buy that, right?

Well, then today we learn this nugget about Sarah Palin, Republican VP nominee, from LA Progressive:

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination….

The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

I know not all Republicans are racist.  It would be nice, though, if at an institutional level they didn’t drop these bombs all over the damn place.

Not sure if it means anything. She was mayor, but reported her occupation to the FEC as a housewife and homemaker.

This is video of Amy Goodman of Pacifica‘s Democracy Now being arrested in St. Paul today.

Journalists are being arrested.  This is beyond absurd.

Well, apparently my warnings last night came too late for the McCain campaign.

McKain(sic) aides say McCain and his wife Cindy will join Palin in traveling to Jackson, Miss., Sunday at the invitation of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. They said the McCains and Palins want to check on preparations because they are concerned about the people threatened by the storm, which is heading through the Gulf of Mexico and threatening the same area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina three years ago. The storm could hit the coast as early as Monday afternoon.

Even Bush and Cheney are doing better this time in actually looking prepared, but McCain heading there right now will rightly be seen as political opportunism.

(h/t Steve Benen)

Calculate your Obama Tax Cut (and see how bad it would be under McBush).

Damn, Bill can light up a room. This speech may well be better than Hillary’s last night. Happening earlier, it may get a bigger audience as well.

The audience at the Pepsi Center is eating out of the palm of his hand. Once he got them to stop cheering so he could speak, anyway.

Also, Bill mentioned Torture in Prime Time! Finally!

“Yes he can, but first we have to elect him.” Best ad-lib of the convention?

If Hillary hit a Grand Slam, what the hell is this? Game seven of the World Series?

Yeah, that was phenomenal.

It’s official, Barack Obama is the first black nominee of a major party. These are pretty amazing times to be an American. Finally.

Hillary Clinton is about to give her speech. Should at least be better than Mark Warner’s.

Liveblogging the speech in 3… 2… 1…

10:40–Bright orange pantsuit–coded message? (just kidding)

10:43–Bill is beaming. Just read his lips–”I love you.”

10:44–Too loud for Hillary to begin.

10:46–”A proud American. A proud support of Barack Obama.”

10:48–”Are you listening, you crazy PUMA bitches?” That’s Mary Ellen, not Hillary.

10:50–”No way, no how, no McCain!” “Barack Obama is my candidate and he must be our President.”

10:53–Memories from the campaign and the people she met…

10:55–Memorial for Bill Gwatney and Stephanie Tubbs Jones

10:56–I I I. I hope this is leading back to the opening points.

10:58–There we go. “Those are the reasons I ran for President, and those are the reasons I support Barack Obama for President.”

11:00–”Were you in it for me or were you in it for the Marine, the mom, etc.” That’s what we need.

11:02–”Government must be about we the people and not we the favored few.”

11:03–Healthcare is still huge for HRC.

11:04–Praise for Michelle and Biden.

11:05–Don’t need 4 more years of the last 8 years.

11:06–HRC was sorely disserved by her campaign staff. This Hillary could well have won and had my support.

11:06–Keep Going! This is one of the best speeches I’ve seen any Clinton give.

11:07–I was right. Orange is a coded message. Hillary is on fire tonight. If this doesn’t end the PUMA craziness, then it truly is craziness.

Thoughts…

Mary Ellen says that all the respect she lost for Hillary over the course of the campaign is back tenfold. I have to agree. Keith Olbermann called it a Grand Slam, I think I have to agree with both of them.

Bill Clinton was beside himself with pride. Now I’m really looking forward to Bill’s speech tomorrow night.

John McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

And yet, somehow Obama worrying about the price of Arugula make him an elitist. WTF?

John McCain made big noises about wanting to run a clean campaign. We knew it was crap, but we weren’t expecting it to be shown quite this clearly and stupidly.

Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan. He hadn’t been to Iraq in years. He voted against funding our troops. And now, he made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras. John McCain is always there for our troops. McCain. Country first.

Well, not quite.  The Pentagon told the Obama campaign at the last minute that he could visit if he had his Senate staff with him, his campaign staff would not be allowed.  This is consistent with the stated policy of not using troops for political purposes, but hadn’t been explicitly communicated to the campaign before that point.  Since after leaving the Middle East Obama’s Senate staff had gone home, the campaign was not going to risk the appearance that the visit to Landstuhl was a political stunt and didn’t press the issue with the Pentago.

Oh, and the cameras?  They weren’t going to be allowed no matter who was with Obama.  It was planned as a no-press event.

Update (from Carpetbagger):

First, in terms of the substance, the ad the demonstrably ridiculous and the most fundamentally dishonest campaign commercial of the cycle thus far. The claim about Senate hearings is wildly misleading. The attack about voting against funding the troops is ridiculous. The argument about Obama not spending time in Iraq is disingenuous. The notion that Obama would rather go to the gym than visit wounded troops is insane. The claim that Obama would only visit troops if he could bring cameras is an inflammatory, transparent lie. The notion that McCain is “always there for our troops” is demonstrably false.

I’m watching Obama’s victory speech right now. He’s spent a good deal of time thanking Hillary Clinton for helping to make him a better candidate and thanking her and the other candidates for helping him in the upcoming general election race.

And now he’s contrasting himself with McCain. I’ll have more on the differences later, but he’s hitting on the economy, on Iraq, on civil rights, on security (including diplomacy). This is an acceptance speech, not just a victory speech. This is a speech we should expect on November 4th, not just in Denver. This is the Barack Obama that we saw four years ago at the Democratic Convention in Boston.

And I love that he is giving this speech in the very venue where the Republicans will be having their convention.

In very little time, hours in fact, the Democratic Primaries will finally be over. (Yay.)

I’ve been keeping out of the fray for the most part.  My first choice was Chris Dodd, but that didn’t go so well.  After Dodd, I defaulted to Obama.

And Obama is going to be the nominee.  I am ready to take on the general election full bore.

It’s time to bring the Carter Gilson Report podcast back.  I’m looking at formats, but right now, I think once a week in a long format would be best for the show.  As always, we’ll see how it goes.

In case you’ve been living in a media bubble, you may not know this, but as the latest in a long string of reasons to not drop out of the race despite the lack of a mathematical route to the nomination, Hillary Clinton invoked the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

In a filmed meeting with editors of a newspaper in South Dakota, which holds the final primary of the Democratic race on June 3, Clinton hinted that she might not concede the nomination to Obama until the August nominating convention.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Clinton said. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Oh, but wait, it gets better worse:

Clinton released a statement attributing her Kennedy reference to this week’s brain cancer diagnosis of Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the US dynasty’s three iconic brothers.

“The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive,” Clinton said. “I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.”

I’m so tired of the non-apology apology. I’m sorry if you were offended, but there was nothing actually wrong with what I said.

I’m not the first to call bullshit on that, but there’s no way that she didn’t know what she was saying.