LOL. For some reason this made me think of the song, “I Wanna’ Be A Cowboy” by Boys Don’t Cry.

:) I’m not sure McCain really knows who he is and what he stands for, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Dan and jjohnson, if Satan, Huckabee, or Ron Paul actually got the nomination, I’d cast a write-in ballot for Oliver North.

LOL. I don’t actually believe that Huckabee is Satan. But don’t Mormon’s believe that Mike Huckabee is Satan’s brother?

Say what you will about McCain, the man has style. I think he is the best-dressed candidate on the trail right now. Maybe his high-class wife Cindy picks out his clothes. The McCains blow the entire field– candidates and spouses– out of the water when it comes to fasion (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton). And that’s saying something because these people have all had access to serious money for a long time.

As an Arizona resident, I do think of McCain as somewhat of a carpetbagger. But I’d probably vote for him if he was the nominee. His Achilles’s Heel is his stance on immigration, but I actually support open borders.

John Hamer, thanks for the compliment. I think Photoshop deserves a lot of the credit, too.

annegb, I agree with you about that. The “straight talker” nonsense is a clever way for him to disguise his lousy legislative record — like someone who says something terribly insulting under the guise of “just calling it the way I see it.”

cheryl, I’m glad you got a good laugh.

arj, the balloon is from Comic Life, but the export for Comic Life sucks. So I created the balloon, saved it as a very high resolution image, and then I scaled, edited, filtered, and placed it using Photoshop (along with the badge, which required some additional touch-up to remove the name and county that were still legible on it at the size that I wanted it to appear on McCain’s chest). I’ve used Photoshop since version 1.0 in 1988, when it was typical to use it on a black and white Mac SE. Those were heady days for Mac Software, and when a groundbreaking new program came out, you bought it and became an expert at it. I’d been using Illustrator for close to 2 years by that point, since I’d started using that at version 1.0, too. Or maybe it was FreeHand. Or both. I can’t remember. Which one had the Panda tutorial?)

California Condor, actually his Achilles Heal (hey, Achilles never had a heal problem in the Illiad!) is a lot more than just immigration: he opposed the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, he supports the global warming garbage like greenhouse-gas regulation, he is against ANWR drilling, he does not want to repeal the inheritance tax, he vilifies pharmaceuticals, that his name is attached to McCain-Feinfold, and he supports actively increasing the number of stem cells harvested from embryos. Add to this the fact that he whines about negativity any time that anyone actually points out any of these things, and you have a pretty unpalatable candidate.

All these candidates are going to irritate the crap out of us by the end of a year. The primaries were too early! And with the writers strike, there’s nothing else interesting to talk about. We’ll be parsing out their sound bites for the next 11 months.

I like McCain okay, but I worry he would institute a draft (I’m sure he’d give a straight answer to that if asked), and even worse, name Huckabee as his running mate. In short, I like “straight talk,” but I don’t love what he says.

“Does anyone else see the two John McCains?”

I’ve seen photos of the four John McCains, but two of them are dead.

#17 Yes he does have the support of mormons most of the time.

McCain’s leading the poles. Maybe because of this:

“The Republicans look like dead men walking. Almost two-thirds of Americans regard the Iraq war as a mistake. A similar proportion think that the country is on the wrong track. Americans regard the Democrats as more competent than Republicans by a margin of five to three and more ethical by a margin of two to one”

“The party is divided into warring factions. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have as much in common as their respective alma maters—Harvard Business School and Ouachita Baptist University”
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10498758

Although I’d love to see a member of the church serve as president, the more time passes the more it seems that this just won’t happen.

Margaret Young, that’s exactly my take on the debates. Huckabee is difficult to listen to when he talks about foreign policy because he’s so damned ignorant on it.

Regarding the difference between “heel” and “heal,” a spell checker can only do so much to correct my phonetically-oriented method of (mis)spelling.

DKL – I may not know much about foreign policy, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night…

huckablewit, you should run for president!

DKL–just so you know, it has taken me YEARS to become a decent speller. My spanish ruined my spelling, because Spanish makes sense. I still misspell, and am grateful for spell-checkers. My children would be lost without them. I really have noticed a huge shift in spelling abilities since spell-checking. I’m glad we have it, but the only really good spellers are the kids who compete in spelling bees, I think.

How do you predict Michigan? I desperately want Romney to win there. It seems to me that Michiganians would far prefer a message that there’s a way to get manufacturing jobs back than one that claims to tell “the truth” that the jobs are GONE.

One of the big things I’ve been wondering as I’ve observed Romney is if rigidity is part of Mormonism. I guess I contrast it to African American worship services I’ve attended, where things are so spontaneous and fluid and open (including embraces). There is just a stiffness in Mormonism. In the famous documentary (which will debut on Jan. 19th at the LDS Film Festival and then at a festival in San Diego), one of our interviewees says, “If you go to a Black Baptist Church, you can expect the right hand of fellowship. Not so in all the stakes of Zion. It’s pitiful when I have to tell an investigator, ‘You can expect this.’” Or another: “When I first went to a Mormon Church, I thought, ‘Is this a funeral or what?’ I mean, I was used to saying amen to the preacher, stomping my feet, and everybody having a joyous time. I thought, ‘Well, this is different.’”

I am seriously suggesting that Romney’s rigidity is directly tied to his Mormonism. Too far a stretch? Obama is a little rigid too, but he danced on Ellen Degeneres’s show. Can you even imagine Mitt doing that? (And Obama wasn’t bad, either.)

Clark,

Everyone believes that the climate may be warming. The difference is that some people think that climate change is a civilization ending apocalypse and others do not.

Whether sea level is going to rise 23 inches or not over the next century is not a political question. What is a political question is whether we should spend five, ten, or twenty percent of the GNP attempting to stop it.

McCain belongs to the clear and present danger crowd that believes that we should turn our lives upside down if necessary to stop the sea level from rising two feet. I think that is stupid, not as a scientific question, but as a political question.

Yes. That is why I said “may”. My point is that even if one accepts UN projections for climate change, there is nothing projected remotely so cataclysmic as to justify the economic cost of any regime capable of making a measurable difference.

I can’t imagine anything less serious than a one hundred percent tax on carbon based energy sources would make much of a difference. At those levels, one would force the world economy into a 1970s style recession or worse.

So what we are faced with is a situation where even relative conservatives like John McCain and David Frum are endorsing health and wealth destroying taxes and regulations to forestall a climate apocalypse that doesn’t exist – not even in the consensus projections of those sympathetic to the idea.

I am inclined to conclude that lefties have become so insured to the strategy of social mobilization through crisis manufacture that they have unwittingly manufactured a crisis with draconian remedial measures that serve the interests of no one. Why not fight real pollutants instead of imaginary ones?