McCain, Short On Black Volunteers, Hires Obama Supporters
By Cernig
Two women walk out of John McCain’s Mid-West headquarters carrying a pile of voter canvassing sheets, one sports a baseball hat declaring her a “team leader” of the Republican campaign. And both are black — an unusual sight in an election where Barack Obama’s support among African Americans is almost monolithic.
Are they volunteers? They look at each other sheepishly. “Not exactly,” replies one. “We work for an employment agency,” says the other. Who are they voting for? “I don’t want to say,” says the first woman. “Obama — of course!” whispers the braver of the pair.
They laugh, then look over their shoulders at the office behind them. “Don’t give him your name, he’ll put it in the paper,” says the cautious one, explaining that they cannot afford to lose their $10-an-hour (£6) jobs. “This is embarrassing. We’re doing this because we have to live. At least none of our friends can see us. We’re from Chicago — like Obama.”
Republicans have had to hire mercenaries for this ground war. And, if the experience outside the McCain headquarters was any guide, they may not all be shooting in the same direction.
Got to have those tokens as a smokescreen to distance Johnny and the Neocons from zealots like this (h/t C&L):
Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.
In court records unsealed Monday, federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.
Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.
The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.
"They said that would be their last, final act - that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."
Yet the GOP crawls ever closer to being a party only for dangerous rightwing extremists. Now, conservative critics are being told by one wing of the GOP that if they're against Palin, they are dead to the Republican party and by another that Mitt Romney, not Palin, is the heir-apparent. Jason Linkins writes:
the GOP is set splinter into a trio of factions: the Palin-philes, the Romney remainders, and those excommunicated from the movement for daring to make a lick of sense at one point.
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