Presidential Hopeful ...

[exgss]

McCain is too old and sick -- McCain has had 4 melanomas removed in the last 15 years: on his left shoulder in 1993, on his temple and upper left arm in 2000 and on his nose in 2002. The most dangerous was the one removed from his temple in 2000, classified by his doctors as an invasive melanoma, stage IIA, on a standard scale that makes stage IV the most serious. The 2000 surgery left McCain not only with a puffy jaw but also with a scar down his neck. It will kill him come election day.

The medical overview comes a week after Republican rival John McCain allowed some reporters access to his voluminous health records.

Although he hasn't had a physical in 16 months, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been in "excellent health" and is medically fit to serve as president, his longtime doctor wrote in a letter released by the campaign Thursday. Still, campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "With no surgery or hospital stays, this is a complete summary of his doctor visits and medical records for the past 2 decades." The letter, written by Dr. David L. Scheiner of Chicago, noted that Obama, 46, had a family history of cancer. His mother died of ovarian cancer and a grandfather of prostate cancer. A prostate-specific antigen test -- generally recommended annually for men over 45 who are African American or otherwise at a high risk of prostate cancer, and often suggested annually for other men over 50 -- detected no issues for Obama. The campaign did not say when he is expected to be screened again.

The Illinois senator has smoked intermittently over the years, Scheiner wrote in the overview, but is now "using Nicorette gum with success. His build was lean and muscular with no excess body fat," Scheiner said, based on Obama's last physical, conducted Jan. 15, 2007. "His physical examination was completely normal." The brief letter contrasted with Sen. John McCain's decision to let a selected group of reporters spend 3 hours with about 1,200 pages of health records last week. The records showed that McCain, 71, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, is in good health, although he has a 15-year history of skin cancers, including a minor case in February, and has had bouts with precancerous polyps in his colon, kidney cysts and bladder stones.

A POW lucky enough to make it out alive is always examined by psychiatrists and other doctors, and those examinations continue for several years. In John McCain's case they took place between 1973 and 1984, and are proving two decades later to be a godsend. For when his political enemies began whispering that his 5 1/2 years in prison had made the presidential candidate emotionally unstable, McCain had mounds of paperwork to prove otherwise. Last week his campaign staff allowed TIME to review those records -- roughly 1,500 pages of them. The upshot: not only has McCain never displayed signs of a psychological disorder, but also in many cases his doctors' reports read more glowingly about his mind than McCain's best-selling autobiography. Wrote a doctor in 1974: "Patient is a very intelligent, ambitious, competitive, intellectually curious, caring person."

The most revealing reports are from the early years. In March 1973, two weeks after McCain's release, a psychiatrist deems his "emotional status" to be "stable" and says McCain has an "overdeveloped superego," or sense of conscience and morality, and an "unrealistically high" need for achievement. "He may tend to expect too much of himself and take it hard when/if things don't go as planned." Imprisonment seems to have cured one of McCain's problems as well: as one who had long sought to escape the shadow of his famous Navy father, McCain "feels his experience and performance as a POW have finally permitted this to happen," according to his 1974 evaluation. McCain also tells a psychiatrist that among the benefits of his POW experience "he learned to control his temper better, to not become angry over insignificant things." Included in the records is a 1984 IQ test. His score, 133, would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history.

There are a few unflattering disclosures. References are made to McCain's "histrionic pattern of personality adjustment" or "mildly hysterical traits," but the technical terms sound more dramatic than they really are. In essence, the doctors were saying McCain was prone to emotional excitability. But they said he could control it. The campaign blotted out most references to his feelings about his family during the years when his first marriage was unraveling. Most of the documents pertain to the wreck of a body McCain brought back from Vietnam, specifically the five or so shattered bones that had either gone untreated or were mistreated by his captors.

In recent years, McCain has had several skin cancers removed from his face and shoulders. But the report from a 1980 physical included a potentially embarrassing mention of what the doctor believed to be "herpetic lesions" on his genitals. Navy doctors who reviewed his records in the past few weeks, however, say McCain has never had a recurrence of the lesions, making it "very unlikely" he actually suffered from herpes. That McCain felt compelled to release all this information is testimony to two things: first, to the power of the whispered allegations against him; and, second, to McCain's instinct for candor. At a holiday party last Friday night, McCain joked about how the moderators at last week's debate seemed obsessed with his temper. "They kept asking, 'Are you crazy? Are you crazy?'" Answer: No crazier than anyone else who would run for President.

--By James Carney/Washington

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992860,00.html

[containment]

Obama Should Spill a Little Red Ink to Turn a Few More Red States Blue

With 8 days to go before Election Day, both sides are worried. Republicans, while still holding out hope for a "McCain Miracle," are increasingly worried that McCain is losing in a way that, as David Frum put it, "threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him." As a result, Frum and other Republicans are urging party officials to shift the emphasis off the presidential race and on to preserving as many Senate seats as possible. Democrats, while being careful not to count their electoral chickens before they're hatched, are privately worried about winning without enough of a majority in the Senate to really change things.

The enduring theme of Obama's campaign has been fundamental change. But, with victory within sight, the question becomes: how much change can he deliver if Democrats don't reach a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate? If the recent past is prologue, the answer is: not nearly enough. In the just-ended 110th Congress, obstructionist Senate Republicans, led by human roadblock Mitch McConnell, mounted a record 104 filibusters (and that was with Bush in the White House; imagine how much more intransigent they would be with Obama). To put that number in context, in the previous Congress, the 109th, in which Democrats were in the minority, there were just 54 filibusters.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called the GOP tactic "obstruction on steroids." McConnell countered by deeming the filibuster flood an "ordinary procedure." And he makes it clear it's going to become even more "ordinary" if he's allowed to wield it in the 111th Congress: "I think the Senate works best when it makes things happen in the middle and that happens when you have 41 or more people who resist an idea to the point where you can compromise." In other words, to the point where you can derail, shut down, and gridlock real change. The specter of Democrats controlling both the executive and the legislative branches of government has become a useful late-campaign boogeyman for Republicans. In John McCain's version, voters need to elect him president to balance out a Congress led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Senate Republicans, facing potential losses in New Hampshire, Oregon, Minnesota, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Kentucky and Georgia, are making the pitch as if an Obama White House is a foregone conclusion. Elizabeth Dole, in a neck and neck fight with challenger Kay Hagan, has a new TV ad warning that if she loses, it will hand Democrats "a blank check." Norm Coleman, currently running behind Al Franken in Minnesota, ominously told voters: "If I lose this seat and one party has control across the board, then you'll see changes." Coleman's quote should go right into a Franken commercial, and commercials for every other Democratic Senate candidate. "Want real change? Put Democrats in control."

Republicans aren't the only ones warning about one party rule. On Sunday, the New York Times, falling into be-careful-what-you-wish-for mode, warned that gaining a 60 seat majority would put Democrats "at risk of overreaching." For the sake of the country, that's a risk Obama and Senate Democrats need to take. As Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse puts it: "I think we are in enough trouble in enough areas, that I would rather own it and then have to perform than continue with this back and forth, back and forth with Republicans, particularly while they are engaged in this absolute determined policy of obstruct, obstruct, obstruct." Obama, of course, needs to stay focused on winning the White House, taking nothing for granted. And he definitely should not repeat John Kerry's mistake in 2004, when he ended the race with over $14 million sitting in the bank.

The Obama campaign clearly recognizes that while 50% of likely voters prefer one party rule, among the independent swing voters they are so avidly courting, only 34% do. Which is why the campaign has been treading so carefully. But here's what he can and should do. Today. He should immediately guarantee a loan to the DSCC that will allow Democratic Senate candidates to spend whatever amount is necessary to secure a 60-seat majority. With Obama's donor list, he'll be able to wipe out that loan with a single post-election email. Money should not be the reason Democrats don't put themselves in a position to defang the obstructionists. Indeed, a significant chunk of that money should be directed to Kentucky where challenger Bruce Lunsford is running just a few points behind McConnell. Want real change in America? Imagine a Senate without McConnell in it. This is one of the times when deficit financing is definitely in the public interest. The Obama campaign should spill a little red ink to turn a few more red states blue.

Update: Politico reports today that the DNC is, indeed, uncapping the red ink well, "taking out a $10 million dollar line of credit to split equally between the House and Senate campaign committees." Memo to Howard Dean: Make the first check payable to the Defeat Mitch McConnell Fund. And get those Norm Coleman "you'll see changes" TV spots rolling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/obama-should-spill-a-litt_b_138301.html

[munee]

Included in the records is a 1984 IQ test. His score, 133, would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history.

So what about Obama's IQ? 124, 142, somewhere in the middle?

Anyone?

[Trope]

Obama's handlers keep his SAT and LSAT scores as a closely guarded secret. The most probable reason is that his scores are too low to justify his admission to Columbia or Harvard. It is a fact that Obama was active in promoting "minority rights" while at Harvard Law School. We all know what that means, he simply used race tactics to inflate his grades. Obama used his political skills to get elected as a president of Harvard Law Review. He even masqueraded as a college professor while he was a mere lecturer. Obama never produced any individual intellectual work  for a peer review. At the same time, he made plenty of gaffes that indicate his relatively low IQ. Keep in mind that his father was from Kenya and the average IQ in Kenya is 72.

[Your Local Jesus]

Obama's handlers keep his SAT and LSAT scores as a closely guarded secret. The most probable reason is that his scores are too low to justify his admission to Columbia or Harvard. It is a fact that Obama was active in promoting "minority rights" while at Harvard Law School. We all know what that means, he simply used race tactics to inflate his grades. Obama used his political skills to get elected as a president of Harvard Law Review. He even masqueraded as a college professor while he was a mere lecturer. Obama never produced any individual intellectual work  for a peer review. At the same time, he made plenty of gaffes that indicate his relatively low IQ. Keep in mind that his father was from Kenya and the average IQ in Kenya is 72.

First of all, one doesn't get selected to, much less become president of, the Harvard Law Review by using "political tactics." You must have excellent first-year grades and have demonstrated a prowess for legal writing in an essay competition. Secondly, what are you talking about when you say that Obama "simply used race tactics to inflate his grades"? Obama's professors gave him the grades he earned in his classes; Obama didn't have a thing to do with it. What do you think he would have said? "Give me good grades because I'm black"? Obama also graduated Magna cum laude from Harvard Law, and according to the HLS website, you must be in the top 10% of your graduating class to receive this distinction. Also, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. This is a fact. Lecturer, professor -- whatever you want to call it, he taught there. And regarding the Obama campaign's decision to keep his test scores private, they probably did so because they are completely irrelevant to this election. They want people to focus on the issues. Also (I can't believe I'm dignifying this with a response, it's such a stupid point), one's parents' IQs have no bearing on one's own IQ. Bill Gates has an estimated IQ of around 160, but the average American's IQ is around 100 (yours is much lower, though). Way to cite totally irrelevant statistics.

[The Liquid Laser]

First of all, one doesn't get selected to, much less become president of, the Harvard Law Review by using "political tactics." You must have excellent first-year grades and have demonstrated a prowess for legal writing in an essay competition. Secondly, what are you talking about when you say that Obama "simply used race tactics to inflate his grades"? Obama's professors gave him the grades he earned in his classes; Obama didn't have a thing to do with it. What do you think he would have said? "Give me good grades because I'm black"? [...]

Grades in law school can be strongly affected by professors' sympathies and political pressures. (Professors can raise or lower grades based on external criteria.) Some classes, especially those focused on race/class issues, tend to reward grades based on having the "right" politically correct views. Also, law schools generally have affirmative action policies to get less-qualified applicants onto law reviews.

Here it is an interesting article

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=74877

[The Alchemist]

Oh please stop it - when people get to arguing IQs and the like I can't help thinking of them being just like those adolescents comparing their penis sizes! Anyway, for the sake of the argument, here it is a site with some pretty good information: 

Intelligence tests have a very intellectualistic, I would also say one-dimensional, approach to the degree of giftedness. These IQ tests are also made more difficult by the fact that it is often possible to logically, or from one's own value systems, arrive at answers that are as plausible as the one designated by the test designer. In any case, it is imperative to control the strength of the logical connections within the test problems. It is also not especially advisable to use the rapidity with which a problem is solved as a criterion. Your slow colleague is perhaps on his way to solving Fermat's Last Theorem (Yes, I know it has already been solved by the English mathematician Andrew Wiles), even if it takes years. You are probably satisfied if you can use it. But you don't take the whole day when learning "Black Peter" (a card-game for children), as your friend does, thinking at a snail's pace.

http://hem.bredband.net/b153434/Index.htm#PersonalView


Some IQ scores of past presidents:

Bill Clinton - 137
Franklin D. Roosevelt - 147
Jimmy Carter - 156 (Nobel Prize Winner)
Richard Nixon - 143
JFK - 119
George W. Bush - 117

Hillary Clinton 140, McCain 133, Obama's estimated to be between 130 and 140.

[P e r c y]

Palin is really the heart and soul of McCain's candidacy at this point. She fired back immediately to Obama camp. She defended her claim that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists," saying the Democratic presidential nominee's association with a 1960s radical is an issue that is "fair to talk about." Obama has denounced the radical views and actions of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground group during the Vietnam era. On Sunday, he dismissed the criticism from the McCain campaign, leveled by Palin, as "smears" meant to distract voters from real problems such as the troubled economy. Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, launched the attack Saturday, repeating it at 3 different events and signaling a new strategy by John McCain's presidential campaign to go after Obama's character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeZOjypXefE

"The comments are about an association that has been known but hasn't been talked about," Palin said as she boarded her plane in Long Beach, Calif. "I think it's fair to talk about where Barack Obama kicked off his political career, in the guy's living room." At issue is Obama's association with Ayers. Both have served on the same Chicago charity and live near each other in Chicago. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s, the event cited by Palin. But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they "pal around" is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman. At a rally in North Carolina, Obama countered that McCain and his campaign "are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance." The Democrat described the criticism as "Swiftboat-style attacks on me," a reference to the unsubstantiated allegations about 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry's decorated military record in Vietnam.

During her stop in California, Palin was asked about an Associated Press analysis that said her charge about Ayers was unsubstantiated, a point made by other news organizations, and the criticism carried a "racially tinged subtext that McCain may come to regret. The Associated Press is wrong," Palin said. "The comments are about an association that has been known but hasn't been talked about, and I think it's fair to talk about where Barack Obama kicked off his political career, in the guy's living room." In fact, Obama was questioned about Ayers during a prime-time Democratic debate against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton prior to April's Pennsylvania primary. Palin, recharged after last week's debate, is animating the party's conservative wing with harsh attacks against Obama. She's courting high-dollar donors for campaign cash. And she is looking to wrestle away women and independent voters from the Democrats.

"The heels are on, the gloves are off," she declares, a threat delivered with a smile. With that message, the campaign is sending her on a whirlwind tour of political trouble spots. On Sunday, she was headed for a rally in Omaha, Neb., a defensive move in one of the two states in the nation that can split their electoral votes. Her visit illustrated the depth of worry within the McCain camp. Since 1964, all five of the state's electoral votes have gone to the Republican presidential candidate. On Monday, she begins a two-day, event packed tour of Florida that stretches from Naples in the South to Pensacola in the panhandle. North Carolina and Pennsylvania are next. After a hold-your-ground debate performance last week, Palin is back to where she was after her show-stopping speech at the Republican convention a month ago — the top draw in the McCain-Palin ticket.

About 10,000 people came to her rally Saturday in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson. She raised $2 million in one California fundraiser for the Republican Party's McCain-Palin Victory 2008 fund. She's getting the star treatment from the likes of Grammy winner Vikky Carr and actor Robert Duvall. She's still the carefully handled national politics greenhorn. Reporters traveling on her plane are kept at a distance. At fundraising events she doesn't take questions in public from donors, as McCain does. Contributors greet her privately before she allows the press in for her stump speech. She brushes off some of her criticism as if it were lint on her jacket. "People say that I speak too simply, or don't have quite the — I don't have my Thesaurus in my back pocket all along through my speeches," she told donors in Englewood, Col. "Well I don't have time for that."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gkpCxPShAoQW_1-Ip_nXika_IZzgD93KI2O00

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama. Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

[acme2]

Obama calls his grandparents who put a roof above his head "white folks"

Stop the crap! He'll even pay a visit to his grandmother in midst of the campaign:

Sentimental Journey: Obama's Bond with His Grandmother


Barack Obama with his grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham in New York City, where Obama attended Columbia University. The Senator is canceling nearly all of his campaign events to fly to Hawaii to visit Madelyn Dunham, 86, who is suddenly ill

"She poured everything she had into me." — Barack Obama

Barack Obama has said that his biggest mistake was not being at his mother's side when she died of cancer in Hawaii in 1995 at the age of 52. His first book, "Dreams from My Father," had come out only 4 months before, and he was starting his first campaign, for the Illinois state senate. Her death came quickly, and he didn't make it back in time. So it makes sense that now he would do things differently. Just two weeks before Election Day, Obama has decided to leave his campaign to be by his grandmother's side in Honolulu for two days later this week. Madelyn Dunham, 86, is gravely ill, although the campaign has not released details about her condition. Dunham is Obama's last living parental figure, and by his own accounts, she played as big a role in his upbringing as his mother did. In fact, since Dunham has declined to do interviews since the campaign began, most of what we know about her is from Obama himself, who referenced her in two of the most important speeches of his career.

HONOLULU – Barack Obama's grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, one day before the election. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died late Sunday night after a battle with cancer.



"She's gone home," Obama said as tens of thousands of rowdy supporters at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte grew silent in an evening drizzle. "And she died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side. And so there is great joy as well as tears. I'm not going to talk about it too long because it is hard for me to talk about."



But he said he wanted people to know a little about her — that she lived through the Great Depression and World War II, working the latter on a bomber assembly line with a baby at home and a husband serving his country. He said she was humble and plain spoken, one of the "quiet heroes that we have all across America" working hard and hoping to see their children and grandchildren thrive. "That's what we're fighting for," Obama said.



The Kansas-born Dunham and her husband, Stanley, raised their grandson for several years so he could attend school in Honolulu while their daughter and her second husband lived overseas. Her influence on Obama's manner and the way he viewed the world was substantial, the candidate himself told millions watching him accept his party's nomination in Denver in August. "She's the one who taught me about hard work," he said. "She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me." Michelle Obama's voice choked with emotion during a campaign appearance in Colorado as she asked people to remember the woman her husband called "Toot," a version of the Hawaiian word for grandmother, tutu.



After her health took a turn for the worse, her brother said on Oct. 21 that she had already lived long enough to see her "Barry" achieve what she'd wanted for him. "I think she thinks she was important in raising a fine young man," Charles Payne, 83, said in a brief telephone interview from his Chicago home. "I doubt if it would occur to her that he would go this far this fast. But she's enjoyed watching it."

[pop.that.one.more.time]

So sad her grandma did not actually see him win and become Prez... I'm pretty sure this event deeply touched the hearts and souls of all his fans...