By Michael Crawford
Cross-posted at Bloggernista

Okay, we were told that there was no money to provide healthcare to poor kids, properly take of our soldiers who had their minds and bodies shattered in Iraq, fix our crumbling schools, repair our national infrastructure or rebuild New Orleans. But, now George Bush is requesting $700 billion to bail out the financial services industry that he, Dick Cheney, John McCain and the rest of the “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich” Republican Party has destroyed?

Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration on Friday laid out a radical bailout plan with a jawdropping price tag _ a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions.

And, now John McCain, who is still in some economic Never-Neverland thinking the “fundamentals of our economy are strong,” wants our healthcare system to be more like the banking system.

Seriously?

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By Pam Spaulding
Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up with the lies. Additions are below the fold. Jeebus H. Christ, from the man who needs his wife to surf the Internets, this breathtaking boast from a spokesbot:

Move over, Al Gore. You may lay claim to the Internet, but John McCain helped create the BlackBerry. At least that’s the contention of a top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he told reporters Tuesday, “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.” McCain has acknowledged that he doesn’t know how to use a computer and can’t send e-mail, one of the BlackBerry’s prime functions.

Paging Al Gore…Ari Melber at the Washington Independent:

Within the hour, [Obama] chief spokesperson Bill Burton released a statement putting the falsehood in context: “If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week.” Now let’s briefly correct this latest McCain campaign whopper.

McCain did not “help create” the “miracle” of the BlackBerry — he does not even know how to use email or a computer. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee was not even pivotal: the BlackBerry was invented by a Canadian company, Research In Motion. So this claim is false and absurd, obviously, and it may seem like a distraction from the current debate over the candidates’ economic agendas.

And the damage control begins:

According to a McCain campaign pool report, senior aide Matt McDonald said that McCain “laughed” when he was told about Holtz-Eakin’s comment. “He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer,” McDonald said.

There’s already a Facebook group up, Thank You John McCain for inventing the BlackBerry!

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By Waymon Hudson
Cross-posted at Bilerico

“If there be no bread, let them eat cake” — Marie Antoinette.

The historical portrait of Marie Antoinette is one of legendary excess and disconnection to the common man. When confronted with a starving populace, myth has it that she blithely responded with the line above- not understanding that perhaps working class people did not have the luxuries in life she had come to know and depend on.

It seems history always has a way of repeating itself. John McCain, once seen as a maverick and an “everyman”, has continually been exposed for what he truly is- completely out of touch with the needs and realities of the American people. Not only does he not grasp the hard times that most Americans are going through, he surrounds himself with advisors and staff that do nothing to educate him to the issues facing the American people.

McCain’s standard response to people in times of trouble has become a simple: “let them eat cake.”

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