The question remains, is this a good thing or a bad thing for John McCain’s campaign?

By a nearly six-to-one margin, voters say Republican presidential candidate John McCain is running a negative campaign against his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Nearly three in 10 voters, 29%, pointed to McCain as the candidate running a negative campaign, compared to just 5% who said Obama is running a negative campaign. McCain’s 29% rating is the highest of any one candidate in the previous two presidential elections according to the WSJ/NBC News survey. WSJ

On a personal note, I’m pleased that my party’s candidate is running a positive campaign thus far and is leaving the mud-slinging to the other side.

I’ve upped the number of recent comments that show in the sidebar on my website so comments don’t slide into oblivion hours after they’re posted. Also going to be putting in a couple changes on the blog in the next few weeks to highlight a couple of side projects in the work and to deal with the recent increase in traffic caused in part by huge amounts of page reloads from the Milwaukee County network proxy that coincide with any posts about Scott Walker.

I hate the meta-blog stuff as much as the next guy, but thought I’d throw it out there while imagining the possibility of a Joe (Biden) vs. Joe (Lieberman) Vice Presidential debate.

Maybe some enterprising right-wing talk radio show host will take notice of County Executive Scott Walker hiring his former political campaign manager for $76,000 as a “community liason”. Many of those same talk show hosts have been decrying “cronyism” for years now. This move by Walker smacks of the worst kind of cronyism and it has no place in government.

Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker today said he hired his campaign manager to a county job as an assistant in Walker’s office.

Tim Russell, a real estate agent who most recently served as Walker’s campaign manager for his spring re-election, will be paid $75,982 a year. Russell is temporarily filling the vacant post of community liaison, but will likely shift to another job in his office soon, Walker said.

But fear not, it’s just a placeholder job according to Walker! I think a lot of people would like to be “placeholders” for that kind of money.

Apparently, bigger and better things (and paychecks) are in store for his campaign manager Tim Russell.

It’s funny how on the same day the Journal Sentinel is ripping into a Republican State Senator for owning stock in several adult companies, their website has a giant ad promoting a Harley anniversary party being sponsored by Silk Exotic strip club and featuring porn star Jenna Jameson, wet t-shirt contests, and other “adult entertainment”.

The funny thing about getting “slammed” by right-wing talk radio hosts are the emails that follow shortly thereafter. My favorite one from today:

Stoopid leftie! Scott Walker has done more for this city than you’ll ever realize. If it weren’t for him we’d all be paying thousands of dollars to live in a socialist city. I noticed you have pictures from some exotic beach! Were you on vacation with Barrack Hussein Obama or something?

And that’s just my favorite! Anyways, thought I’d share some of the more amusing correspondence.

If only I had a radio show to get my opinions disseminated instead of my “lowly lefty” weblog.

Then I could just respond to criticism by sending out emails, which totally dodge the issues but get in jabs against “lefties”, to the hosts of those radio shows.

Kind of like Scott Walker did again today in response to my questioning his teen like obsession with being on the phone with right-wing talk radio hosts while he should be doing the business of the residents of Milwaukee County.

In response to part of my point about him emailing right wing talk radio show hosts he… wait for it… sends in an email response to Charlie Sykes defending the fact that he’s spending considerable amounts of time emailing right-wing talk radio show hosts!

It’s not much of an excuse on Walkers part to be sure. In fact, it’s mostly filled with right-wing code words like “liberal bloggers” and “fairness doctrine” to try to hide the fact that indeed, Scott Walkers phone bill to right-wing radio talk shows is getting a bit high.

In fact, the rest of my point about spending his mornings on the phone with talk radio wasn’t addressed, which is interesting and telling in itself. Of course, it’s hard to dispute the fact that he’s spending so much time on right-wing talk radio when the evidence is there to prove it.

So once again, instead of actually refuting any points, we have a Republican dodging the issue by blaming liberals.

That’s accountability?

Between ramping up his campaign for Governor and crafting plans to privatize Milwaukee County Government, it’s amazing that Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker has any time left in his day to spend calling in to right-wing talk radio shows or crafting sternly worded emails to the hosts of those shows for immediate and unfiltered dissemination.

And yet he does.

You want to talk about a waste of taxpayer money? Why am I paying the salary for our County Executive to spend a good chunk of his day advocating partisan Republican party rhetoric on right-wing talk radio when there are literally hundreds of issues in Milwaukee County that need the immediate attention of our County Executive?

As always, take with a grain of salt:

If the election for President were held today would you support John McCain, the Republican or Barack Obama, the Democrat?
Barack Obama 47%
John McCain 42%
Undecided 11%

Strategic Vision

Why can’t John McCain break out of the low 40’s in Wisconsin?

Imagine living in a place that realizes the benefits that mass transit provides to it’s community.

Instead of constant cuts in service and delaying new fleet purchases so your politicians can claim to “HOLD THE LINE!”, the number of routes were increased, service was improved and the transit fleet was upgraded.

Philadelphia is doing just that.

More frequent buses. Late-night trains. Better weekend service.

After decades of cuts, SEPTA will announce today a $10 million project aimed at easing overcrowding and improving daily service. The first of the 65 upgrades will begin Aug. 25, and all of the changes are to be made by Nov. 3.

With commuters reacting to higher gasoline prices and switching from cars to public transit, SEPTA’s ridership has increased by about 6 percent, or 38,000 trips a day, from a year ago. Rail ridership is up 12 percent, to its highest point in 25 years, and many rush-hour trains are packed with standing passengers.

- Philly.com

One week you have a right-wing radio fanatic bust into a “liberal” church and start shooting it up, the next you have idiots vandalizing a Democratic headquarters with racial slurs, and today someone walked into the Arkansas Democratic Party HQ and shot the Party Chair.

State Democratic Party Chair Bill Gwatney was shot at State Democratic Party Headquarters on Capitol Avenue about 11:50 a.m. today, witnesses at the scene said. Police were not releasing the vicitm’s identity, but it was supplied by several people on the scene.

The suspected shooter man had entered the office and asked to see the party chairman. He was led to an office and the shots were fired. The man ran out and drove off. - Arkansas Times

Seriously, what the heck is going on out there?

Having been watching a fair amount of Olympic coverage the past few days, I’ve been having some fun watching some of the advertisements playing in between events, especially on NBC.

Some are well done, classy and inspirational, like the Visa ads with Morgan Freeman doing the voice over. The Home Depot ads highlighting the number of athletes who work for them are nice too.

Others, like the McDonald’s chicken sandwich ads, are just cheesy and ridiculous mockeries of reality. The idea that any serious athlete, much less the acceptably accented “olympians” being portrayed by actors, would ever eat any McDonald’s sandwich is about as probable as the Jamaican bobsled team winning gold or a Dutchman breaking the world record in the 100 meter dash.

There’s a reason the athletes we’re watching on TV, at least the real ones, made it to the Olympics. And it’s not because they’re tossing down McDonald’s sickly white looking chicken sandwiches as a part of their training regimen.

Not to mention the product placement in the ads, chicken sandwich in hand at mouth level, is Wayne’s World-esque in it’s absurdity and hilarity.

Besides credit cards and fast food, we’re also being sold a Presidential candidate between events, and honestly speaking from an objective place here, there’s a big difference between them as well.

Sen. McCain’s ads don’t really mesh well with the content of the Olympics to put it mildly. I’m frankly quite surprised that they didn’t cut a new series of ads to coincide with the overall message of the Olympics: possibility, hard work, perserverance, etc.

Instead, they’re using the same cynical (and as I’ve called them in the past, silly and childish in my opinion) ads they’ve been using for the past few weeks. When you’ve just come off watching the story about how Michael Phelps overcame some childhood problems and then just destroyed the world record and won gold, here comes John McCain to be cynical and bring you back to Earth. It’s kind of a downer, and I don’t think it’s something people want to see between the stories of athletes overcoming the odds and reaching their potential.

By contrast, the Obama campaign ads (especially the “hands” one) about the future, solutions to problems, and hard work seem to mesh better with the overall message of the Olympics instead of providing a jolt of negativity between the mostly uplifting content of the games.

Some won’t take that as objective of course, but I call ‘em like I see ‘em, and I have a feeling that most regular people hearing about these two guys for the first time may feel the same way.