If you support McCain, wouldn't this make you happy?

McCain should check in with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Looks like the meme is changing.

The fat lady is clearing her throat.

2010?

Let the healing begin.

Buckeye State Blog:

After 16 years of defending the Clintons against this very man, I get to watch as she goes to sit with him to get her shot at smacking Barack Obama.

BSB asks: With Friends Like These…who needs enemies?

Via Columbus Dispatch:

President Bush will headline a Dayton area fundraiser Thursday whose co-chairmen include a man convicted of three misdemeanor money-laundering charges and another who owns a leading outsourcing company.

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In 1993, Gunlock pleaded no contest in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to three misdemeanor counts of laundering campaign money to former Franklin County Auditor Palmer C. McNeal. Gunlock was fined the maximum of $30,000.

The case involved McNeal's acceptance in 1990 of a $1,500 gift from an executive of Sabre Systems and Service, a Dayton property-appraisal company that Gunlock founded. The company received millions of dollars in no-bid contracts from McNeal's office in July 1990.

According to court documents and testimony, Gunlock wanted to donate $12,000 to the Franklin County GOP in 1990 to help McNeal win re-election. But Gunlock did not want the contributions traced to him, so he gave Sabre Systems' employees the money and had them make the donations in their names.

Glenn Greenwald on Charlie Rose's two-part show to survey the Iraq War on its fifth anniversary:

So when Charlie Rose arranges a five-year anniversary discussion of Iraq purportedly involving American foreign policy experts on "both sides," it completely excludes any Americans who unequivocally opposed the war in the first place — i.e., it completely excludes those who were right and offers only those who were wrong. As always, unadorned war opposition is mutually exclusive with Foreign Policy Seriousness, and those who are unequivocal in their opposition to the underlying premises of the war (rather than its tactical execution) are almost never heard from in media discussions — still.

Read the full post.

Blog of Mass Destruction:

After I witnessed the police state descend upon Kent in 1970, I knew then that those that have a say about the military industrial complex will do anything to maintain the status quo of a militaristic America. Even have the state's National Guard kill some unarmed Ohio college students….that's how far they would go. Since then I've never underestimated the ruthlessness of those who conduct wars for profits.

So with that perspective in mind, I'm inclined to remark, during the 5th anniversary of Iraq, that nothing that the Bush administration has done in the wake of 9-11, including invading and occupying Iraq, in any way, surprises me. It's just what America does.

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Eisenhower warned that it would happen, it has, and now today's America has come to embrace war profiteering as smart economic planning. Any and all stigmatic shame has been neutralized. Profiting from the slaughtering of American soldiers, profiting from the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis…..once regarded negatively as unpatriotic and shameful…..is now considered smart mainstream business thinking….no different from investing in Starbucks or Wal-Mart. America eats it's young…..but as it is doing so it enables the wealthiest of us to make a profit on the cannibalizing process.

Read the full post.

All Da King's Men on the 1.1 million Ohioans on food stamps:

I would say the lack of good jobs is far and away the number one reason for this situation, with all the other cited reasons running second. This begs the question, why does Ohio lack good jobs ? The entire country was hit with the loss of manufacturing jobs, but other states have recovered much better than Ohio. Why ? One big reason is that Ohio has one of the worst business environments in the entire country. According to The Tax Foundation's rankings, Ohio has the 5th highest state/local tax burdens in the country, and is ranked 46th out of 50 for it's business tax climate. Ohio had one of the lowest tax burdens in the 1970's, and now has one of the highest.

Read the full post.