The land irony forgot

Now they're importing toxins.

From the edge of town, one can see huge berms at the landfill where General Electric plans to bury the dried sludge that is tainted with 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. They flowed into the upper Hudson from two G. E. factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977. In high doses, the chemicals have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are considered a probable carcinogen in people.

The landfill lies five miles away in Texas, right across the state line, and belongs to Harold C. Simmons, a Dallas billionaire who was a large campaign contributor to former President George W. Bush and Gov. Rick Perry. (He also helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and the advertisements linking President Obama to William Ayers in 2008.)

Not only has Mr. Simmons’s company, Waste Control Specialists, landed a lucrative contract to take the Hudson River sludge to Texas, but this spring it won a permit from the state to store low-level radioactive waste as well.

Executive pay

I'm really sick of the McCain campaign.

Meanwhile, it's now McCain's campaign manager and his transition adviser who have been found to be on the retainer of the institutions McCain blames for the financial crisis. That is to say, the most powerful individual in McCain's campaign and the most powerful adviser in the planning of his presidency have been vacuuming in money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Try to square that with McCain's explanation of the crisis: "There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." That's the sort of "educated guess" you can only get from the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who helped persuade Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!

Corrupt, deceitful, dishonorable. And then there's their friends.

The advertisements running here against Mr. Obama come from a group called Freedom’s Defense Fund, a political action committee based in Washington that was formed four years ago and raises money from conservatives around the country. The advertisements have stood out because of the group’s connections — including to its paid consultant, Jerome S. Corsi, the author of the highly negative, largely discredited political biography of Mr. Obama, “Obama Nation” — and what local critics say are their racial overtones.

“That’s all they are — race oriented,” said Ed Bruley, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Macomb. “I think some people will be affected by it, others will see it for what it is.”

It is a view shared by Democratic leaders, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who, in a recent interview with MSNBC, said of the advertising campaign, “The fact that it is being run in a predominantly white suburb tells you that there is an explicit effort to try to divide people by race.”

Todd Zirkle, the executive director of Freedom’s Defense Fund, said race had “zero” to do with the spots. “That’s the standard retort when you want to say ‘Don’t listen to these people,’ ” Mr. Zirkle said.

He said the group’s intention was to show Mr. Obama’s affiliations — although Mr. Obama and Mr. Kilpatrick were never known to be close.

He said coming spots would highlight Mr. Obama’s ties to two white men, the developer Antoin Rezko, a former financial backer of Mr. Obama’s who has been convicted of fraud, and to the Weather Underground founder William Ayers, with whom Mr. Obama worked on an education commission in Illinois and whose past Mr. Obama has repudiated.

Mr. Zirkle said a fifth spot would highlight Mr. Obama’s supposed support for the Kenyan prime minister, the opposition leader Raila Odinga. Mr. Zirkle did not share that script, but Mr. Corsi’s book asserts, without substantiation, that Mr. Obama has been a close supporter of the African leader. Mr. Obama remained neutral in the Kenyan elections.

Next they'll say Obama is for infanticide. Oh, wait...

"The United States of America does not torture."

Not now. Not ever.

In case you missed Kerry's speech, since I understand that unless you were watching C-Span, you missed it.

Bedfellows and the Corsi bullshit

Media Matters does an excellent job of running down the "falsehoods" in former Swiftboater Jeremy Corsi's new book about Obama.

But I have another question...

Today's New York Times has a run-down on the book, and the paper reports that Corsi is planning to work with some conservative groups to run Swift-Boat style ads against Obama, and the wingnut noise machine is already going full throttle, with talk-show hosts promoting the heck out of it. The chief editor of the publishing house behind the book is GOP operative Mary Matalin.

...which is this: I can't hold it against a man if he chooses to marry a woman who is shrill, ugly, and an apologist for Dick Cheney; but why would any Democrat listen to him if he stays married to a woman who seems intent on undermining everything he claims to believe in? I understand the strange bedfellows of the beltway, but this relationship has to be considered pathological.

Nixonland

I've been reading Rick Perlstein's fantastic Nixonland. So it's not a surprise to see how an African-American presidential candidate, no matter how accomplished, well-educated, conciliatory, and ground-breaking, would prompt the culture warriors to roll out language from the 1960s.

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices.

In other words, guard your daughters, 'cause the coloreds are comin'.

And remember, white folks, we're the aggrieved ones.

For decades, teachers have been inculcating an alternative tradition and belief system. The beliefs may be based on such amorphous and sophistical ideas as “social justice,” “tolerance,” and “multiculturalism,” the traditions may lead back to the communist ideology of the nineteenth century and then through the heyday of radicalism in the sixties, but the means for inculcation are entrenched.

The conservative traditions and beliefs, in contrast, are rarely to be found in college syllabi and high school textbooks. Obama connects with audiences because they have been primed for him and his message. Obama, with his scantly [sic] resume, is an affirmative action candidate. But his record as a “community organizer” places him at an advantage with those who believe in “social activism” in the classroom.

"Social justice" -- you know what that means. I'm sure the rumors about handing out AK47s on the South Side will be proven true any day now.

I suppose we should laugh at this, it is Clown Hall, after all. But this is just the extreme fringe of a tact the RNC and their talking monkeys will take in the next few months. Expect to hear a lot about "rising crime" and affirmative action.

Speaking of their talking monkeys.

Fear and loathing

I can see it now, Hawaiian Pot Smokers for Truth.

McCain, soft money, and swift boating

The maverick's integrity slip is showing once again.

The group running the commercial in South Carolina is registered as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation. As such, it is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts from individuals without any disclosure, as long as it can argue that it is more concerned with the promotion of an issue — like the final passage of the Wounded Warriors bill — than the election of a candidate.

The lack of disclosure makes it hard to tell how the group spends its money, and impossible to say where it gets its money, and whether its donors have already donated directly to candidates.

The group was started by Rick Reed, whose firm helped produce the 2004 Swift Boat advertisements that questioned Senator John Kerry’s war record in a way that Democrats, and even Mr. McCain, said was unfair — but, also, in a way that both sides agree did great damage to Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign. Mr. Reed is also a long-time strategist for Mr. McCain, working for his 2000 presidential campaign and briefly for his 2008 campaign, before it ran short on money and trimmed its operations.

The group is running its first advertisements in a crucial early voting state, South Carolina, just as Mr. McCain’s campaign is poised to accept federal matching funds and thus internal spending limits. Mr. McCain was badly beaten in the state in 2000.

Mr. McCain immediately called on the group to cease its activities when its existence was first reported, by The Associated Press, on Friday. Mr. McCain said on Fox News Sunday that he had not spoken to Mr. Reed to ask him to do so directly.

“I have not called Rick Reed because I don’t know what his involvement is,” Mr. McCain said. “I have condemned those ads.”

Mr. McCain’s opponents have called his condemnation disingenuous. Referring to the 2002 campaign finance law that Mr. McCain sponsored with Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, a spokesman for Mitt Romney, Kevin Madden, said, “Isn’t it ironic that the author and champion of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill now has a soft-money effort created on his behalf?”

Mr. Reed said in an interview that his group was indeed financed largely by supporters of Mr. McCain, but that it was not expressly put together to help his former client. Mr. Reed declined to name the group’s backers, and said he was duty bound to ignore Mr. McCain’s request to stop running the commercial.

Mr. Reed said his group intended to be around after the presidential election to promote candidates who were in line with the group’s considerably broad stated purpose: to inform “the public and opinion leaders as to how we can best assure that America remains secure and prosperous.”

Duty bound, indeed.