Obama rebukes Palin on earmarks

“I know the governor of Alaska has been saying she’s change, and that’s great,” Obama said. “She’s a skillful politician. But, you know, when you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient, and then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that’s not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make [...]

Where was McCain for Woodstock Earmark Vote

The game is to contrast McCain’s heroism with Clinton as a hippie leftover, and never mind that her only student excess of the time was in seriousness. Still, McCain has bona fides here. He has been a longtime and very vocal opponent of the constituent- stuffing pork that members of both parties feed their districts.
But — surprise?— matters are not quite as the politics would have you suppose.
Thanks to Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post, who bothered to do some actual reporting — remember reporting? — we know that the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which opened last year and of which the museum would be a part, includes a concert pavilion and an amphitheater. And the museum would not so much celebrate Woodstock as explore its context — the baby boom, the Cold War and Vietnam War, early rock ‘n’ roll.
The center is an economic development project for a region depressed from the loss of its once-fabled resorts. New York state has put $15 million into the $100 million complex. The museum is not quite the silliness its partisan detractors imply. (And imply to the considerable annoyance of the Republican town supervisor of nearby Bethel, a booster.)
Nonetheless, this flaplet, in its small way, plays successfully to the galleries for the simple reason that Woodstock never really ended. Jimi Hendrix may have died, but the reverb hasn’t, at least not yet.
To an extent little remarked and even less remarked upon, our current social and political standoffs are rooted in the time Woodstock symbolizes. One side went to Vietnam, the other to Canada, if not always physically. One side protested the war, the other protested the protests.
College campuses were the playgrounds of counterculture activism, some ideological, more merely prankish, and the disaffected, marginalized took refuge in such bunkers as Young Republican Clubs and Young Americans for Freedom. They began coming out with the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, the first step in a movement that became today’s doctrinal conservatism. They got angry, and even.
America’s politics today is a fight among the aging over who was right in the 1960s, but there’s good news: It can’t last. Social Security may not be a universal solvent for all grudges, but it at least softens most. Excerpt of opinion piece by Tom Teepen; Arizona Daily Star

John McCain Still fighting the last war

In making wasteful spending a presidential campaign theme, Sen. John McCain overlooks the progress that’s been made.
Year after year, McCain has railed from the Senate floor on the issue, voting against appropriations bills he considered too fat, and now as a presidential candidate he is making wasteful spending a theme of his campaign.
“Earmarked dollars have [...]