“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

Now, what I think Holtz-Eakin was referring to was pieces of legislation that allowed for, um… telecoms to… hell, I don’t know! It sounds like he’s saying John McCain invented the BlackBerry! Shit, I’d be surprised if McCain even knew what a BlackBerry was.

Although, if he did invent it… as a proud owner of a BlackBerry Pearl, I thank him.

About time somebody hit back.

I wish beyond wish, hope beyond hope, dream beyond dream that Obama would say something like this. Unfortunately, though, while I love the guy I just don’t think he has the cajones to come out and say it.

You know, I never thought about it but… he’s right. This sounds like one of those Disney movies from the mid-90s. Hell, this may have even been the rejected first draft of First Kid.

As a former United States Army soldier who has been to war and has seen first-hand the strife and hardship families who have been through the same situation, I think can speak for all military families when I say loudly and proudly…

Fuck you.

You can put lipstick on a pig… It’s still a pig.

Sure, it may sound sexist if you’re a complete dumbass, but to the rest of us this is nothing more than a tried-and-true analogy that has been around the political world of politics. But, for the first time that I can remember, the McCain campaign did not have a response to Obama’s speech pre-packaged and filed under “Sexism”.

Instead, they had an entire God damn conference call about it.

Pretty funny, innit? How every time Obama or Biden dare do so much as imply her very existence, the Republican Party leaps on the sexism soapbox and gives us a sermon about how the Obama camp must hate women.

So, going off that logic, I have to ask: Why does John McCain hate women?

McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health-care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan, he said it was “eerily reminiscent” of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the 1990s.

“I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he said of her proposal.

…uh oh. Well, thankfully Hillary didn’t win the nomination. We wouldn’t want the McCain camp calling her whiny, now would we?

Now, according to *gag* FOX News, an anonymous McCain Supporter who worked at at Invesco Field then took the flags and gave them to the McCain campaign, saying that the DNC was planning on throwing them out. The DNC says that they were going to redistribute the flags at rallies across the area.

Nevermind that the flags being stored in garbage bags a moment: I have to believe that my contributions to the Obama campaign helped to pay for those flags. So, by stealing those flags and giving them to the McCain campaign, you stole my donation.

So, to anyone in the McCain campaign who may read this: I want my $15 back. Or one of those flags. And an apology to the Obama campaign for trying to imply that they were going to throw flags in the trash.

But mostly my $15 back.

If you were watching the convention coverage last night, you may have seen the grotesquely inappropriate 9/11 “tribute” video that was run at the Republican National Convention. In a video of 2:49 in length, 2:07 of it was spent showing slow-motion footage of one of the aircraft hitting the World Trade Center, the collapse of the towers, and smoking ruin of the Pentagon.

I lost family and friends in the September 11th attacks. Deep down when I see video of the towers burning, I can’t help but to think of them, or the hundreds upon hundreds of others who were senselessly slaughtered for doing nothing more than going to work, or visiting family, or taking a vacation. When I close my eyes, I can still hear the wails of the sirens from police cars and firetrucks that had been crushed by falling debris. I remember sitting in my Uncle’s empty apartment next to a telephone that never rang, watching television coverage of events that were occurring not two miles away. I still remember watching Dan Rather, a pillar of integrity in television news for 30-plus years, breaking down into tears on David Letterman and finally feeling like it was okay to weep.

These images have been used and abused by the Republican party in their attempts to scare the American people into voting for them, and in the process they have sucked the humanity out of the imagery. When you see the footage of the North Tower collapsing, you don’t think of the thousands of people who perished. You don’t feel the pain of the families who lost loved ones, of the wives who lost husbands, or the mothers and fathers who lost sons and daughters. You don’t feel sorrow for the people on the airplanes who sat in their chairs, calling home to tell their families that they loved them for one last time.

When you see that footage now, you feel the worst thing of all: Nothing.

If you were watching the convention coverage on MSNBC last night, you saw Keith Olbermann take the initiative and do what CNN, ABC, and most assuredly FOX News did NOT do. Keith Olbermann tried his best to humanize that which had become little more than stock footage for Republican shock ads. For that, I thank him.

But we’re not in a recession. Oh no.