DO VOTERS NOTICE McCAIN'S POLICIES?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

John McCain’s domestic and foreign policies are opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans.

His economic policy is to soak everyone but the very, very rich, whose tax cuts he favors preserving and extending into perpetuity.

His health care plan? He has none, other than to preserve socialized medicine for him and his family and to leave as many people as possible at the mercy of insurers and drug companies, who paid him and his Senate colleagues handsomely for that privilege.

Now he says he wants to rip up the coasts for more oil so when we run out we’ll not only have no oil, but dead beaches.

He wants to send police after women who choose abortion even when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. He also wants to criminalize the doctors who treat them. To ensure this he will dig through the sludge to find more people like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, etc. and get them lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.

He intends to maintain Iraq as a colony even though the elected government there wants us out. At the same time he claims he wants to foster democracy there.

He equates military duty in Iraq to the occupations of Germany and Japan, where G.I.s were treated, for the most part, decently, and could walk the streets alone without being harmed. Despite his military heritage he doesn’t identify with the enlisted men who must carry out mad edicts from above. A good officer looks after his men and women, but this grandson and son of four-star admirals has other ideas.

Bush and Cheney have succeeded in arranging sweet deals for pet oil companies to move into Iraq. And they've also succeeded in quadrupling petroleum's world price. But even if McCain were to get at all the oil in and around Iraq through Exxon-Mobil and other global corporations, you have to ask whether they would share it with Americans. Of course the answer is they would sell it to Americans at the same world price anyone else would pay. The oil companies, through the special tax breaks arranged by their lobbyists, don’t even pay their fair share of the ten billion a month we pay to occupy Iraq for them. But McCain does favor giving us a gas-tax holiday, which would save the average family a couple dollars a month and further deprive our broken-down insfrastructure.

But our hopelessly inept and corrupted corporate media don’t even try to get at such issues. They consider it more important to corner politicians into wearing American flag pins.

Americans, who for the most part are able to see the Bush administration as a gang of law-breaking, lying incompetents, are almost evenly split when they’re asked to choose between a candidate who will continue the Bush-Cheney policies and one who won’t. That’s quite a disconnect.

But ignorance reigns during this perfect storm of failing education and failing media. An increasingly ill-educated public doesn’t notice the failures of the news media so much as long as new “American Idol” segments are provided each week.

BUSH QUOTE OF THE WEEK: There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal.

EVERY WELL-INTENTIONED HILLARY VOTER CONSIDERING McCAIN NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT DEBBIE SHANK

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Debbie Shank is the reason I would have voted for Hillary had she been the Democratic nominee. Yes, I who have railed against this devious royalist for reasons I won’t repeat now, would have pulled the Hillary lever. And Hillary backers should pull that Obama lever for the same reason -- Debbie Shank.

Mrs. Shank was the Wal-Mart employee from Jackson, Mo. who was brain-injured by a truck that collided with her vehicle. She and her husband got $417,000 from a lawsuit against the trucker’s insurance company (all that was left after legal fees, etc. from a $1 million judgment). But then Wal-Mart demanded back the $470,000 its health insurance had paid toward Mrs. Shank’s hospitalization.

Mrs. Shank is permanently brain-injured, and her husband works two jobs. Like most Wal-Mart employees, they’re perilously clinging to their low place on the economic ladder. In fact, they're broke. Oh, and their son was killed in Iraq.

When they protested the Wal-Mart demand they lost in court, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court, five of whose members were appointed by the Bush family, refused to even hear the case. The court concluded justice had been done.

That’s what Hillary and Barack supporters have in common. We don’t even want to think about what will happen to the country if John McCain fills the next life-time vacancies. John Paul Stevens, one of the last of the liberal justices, is 88. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had health problems. McCain has already said he’d nominate the same sort of justices that George Junior did. That would be Roberts and Alito, two justices that never saw a ruling in favor of a global corporation against actual people that they didn’t like.

Next time a friend tells you he/she is too upset over Hillary's loss to pull the Obama lever, tell them about Debbie Shank. Ask them to look her up on the Internet. It’s all there. I wish I’d made her up. But unfortunately, I didn’t.

HILLARY TO OBAMA: CHOOSE ME OR I'LL BURY YOU

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When it comes to a spot on the Democratic ticket, that’s no signal Hillary is sending to this upstart who dared to defeat her. It’s a Mafiosa-style message. Put me on the ticket or your presidential campaign will sleep with the fishes.
A signal is something you send out privately. But Hillary broadcast her demand in a conference call with a group of congressional Democrats, which is like shouting it out on the Larry King show. The purpose was to communicate with her supporters, especially the zombies who'll follow her across the River Styx. Now they know what she wants, so she can drive them into further fits of rage when she doesn’t get it. If Hillary can keep them from pulling the Obama lever in November, she can set herself up for 2012.

But here’s the clinker, the true Clinton-esque twist. If Obama gives in, he’ll appear weak to the independents and wavering Republicans he must have to beat McCain, which also sets Obama up for defeat this November and gives Hillary a boost for 2012. The mantra would then be, Well sure we lost. That 2008 ticket was upside down. Obama’s too black, too untested, and worst of all, he’s not even a Clinton.

Meanwhile, Bill has already signaled he’s going to stick to his foundation from now on. The implied promise to Obama is that if he gives Hillary the Number Two spot he won’t have to worry any of those red-faced Bill outbursts will soil the campaign. But anyone who believes that is naive enough to believe Hillary really wants an Obama victory in November. Narcissist Bill never saw a TV camera or a microphone he didn't love.

Obama and his strategists understand all this. The question now is, what to do about it. What they have going for them is they've grown used to figuring out the Clintons, who've succeeded in making themselves the biggest impediment to a Democratic victory in the fall. That's been their purpose ever since they realized months ago that their 2008 campaign was a walking corpse. Defeating a 71-year-old mini-Bush ought to be relatively easy for Barack, but not when a couple of Doberman Clintons have their teeth sunk in his ankles.