McCain is decidedly middle-class?

Compared with his wife, McCain is decidedly middle-class. Based on his tax return, he collects his Senate salary ($161,708), a Navy pension ($58,358), and some Social Security income ($23,157). The money he's earned over the years writing books ($176,508 in 2007 and about $1.8 million since 1998), he gives to charity.

Add it up ( ignoring the book residuals ) and John McCain makes $243,223 a year. That's not middle class. That would put McCain and his wife in the top 2% of American households, even if she had no money at all.

I suppose compared to Bill Gates, John McCain is in a class with Somali refugees and subsistence farmers in Chad.

Is the gas tax holiday an April Fools Day joke?

The price of gas since January 2007. Data via randomuseless.info

Hillary Clinton and John McCain have decided that the cost of gas has become so oppressive they'd repeal the federal tax on it.

Clinton outlined a series of steps to address the issue [of high gas prices] at the beginning of the show, reflecting the growing importance of pocketbook concerns among voters. “I would also consider a gas tax holiday, if we could make up the lost revenues from the Highway Trust Fund,” she said, without specifying how to make up those lost revenues.

...

McCain, the likely Republican nominee, called for Congress to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor day last week. Economists have warned that the benefits of such a holiday are short lived.

If we repealed the tax today, we would return to a golden era of cheap prices not seen since .... April 1st 2008.

Speaking of disenfranchisement...

Who else remembered that there was a Republican primary in Pennsylvania today?

The bitter truth

Apparently, Pennsylvania's blue collar workers aren't as delicate as the political media hoped they would be.

[T]hey find it hard to get worked up about the comments -- as do other Pennsylvanians, judging by polls that so far show little damage from an episode Clinton has worked hard to exploit. Years of watching the decline of the town they have lived in since their family arrived from France in the 1920s has, they suggested, provided perspective that keeps them from getting caught up in 24-hour cable and Internet outrage.

I don't suppose we could get back to discussing issues people actually care about now.

Skin in the game?

via The Nation,

"We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources...They have got to have some skin in the game." - Rahm Emmanuel

When are people in D.C. going to realize that this isn't the Iraqis game?

"Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them."

- Hillary Clinton (April 11, 2008)

Strangely enough, she wasn't giving a concession speech.

So let's check the record.

• Barack Obama thinks some people are bitter at being unemployed or after losing their homes.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton's team has a problem with:

• "[L]atte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies"


• Voters


• Black voters


• Voters from insignificant states
  


• Voters in caucus states


• Voters who won't "get real"
  


• Independent, undeclared, moderate, Republican and newly registered voters


• Democratic activists


• Delegates elected by voters in caucus states

Other than that, she's got no problems at all.

Joe Lieberman: Still missing the point on the Iraq fiasco

Among all the other nonsense written by Iraq war cheerleaders Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham this jumped out at me:

In recent months, the Iraqi government, encouraged by our Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has passed benchmark legislation on such politically difficult issues as de-Baathification, amnesty, the budget and provincial elections.

See that's the funny thing, de-Baathification is what Paul Bremer did. Later, when even the Bush administration realized what a boneheaded move that was, they demanded that the supposedly sovereign Iraqis fix it. The "difficult issue" Lieberman is praising was de-de-Baathification.

But that would sound ridiculous.

So that's what he did with all that money

House Minority Leader John Boehner explaining why Republicans are going to win big this year.

“[Rep.] Ron Paul [R-Texas] wrote us a check for the first time ever,”

Paul's a pretty good sport considering the number of times Republicans accused him of working with al Qaeda during the campaign.