4 flats and no forward mo’? Make fun of people who inflate their tires!

Shit, shit and double-triple shit. It’s going to be Pawlenty, and the tire pressure gauge is the proof of that. Once again Al Giordano waits, waits, waits and then pounces with the definitive analysis:

Rewind to Saturday: Pawlenty, in swing state Iowa (“tell” number one) stumping for McCain, waves a tire gauge as if a magic wand to mock something Obama said about gasoline conservation from keeping car tires inflated:

Pawlenty a few minutes later pulled a prop out of his pocket.  ”Barack Obama stood up at a speech recently and said that one of the things that is really important from energy policy from his standpoint is to check the pressure in our tires, so here’s a tire gauge and you can go out in the parking lot here and check your tires.  Now, that’s an interesting thing – - we want you to have good pressure in your tires, you know, it will very mildly add to your fuel efficiency — but checking the air pressure in your tires is not an energy policy for the United States of America,” Pawlenty said.  The crowd applauded.

But that wasn’t “the tell.”

“The tell” came today, when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis (he of injecting the word “race” fame) sent out an email to the campaign list and, lo’ and behold, they’ve already got thousands of little tire gauges with Obama’s name on them ready to send out to donors:

What does that tell us?

It’s “the tell” that the “tire gauge” strategy was pre-planned, not as an afterthought to some spontaneous prop wielded by Tim Pawlenty 48 hours ago, but, rather, that once the plan was in place, the trinkets for donors had to be designed and manufactured, while Pawlenty was sent out there as the messenger.

But much as I hate to see our local Commander Codpiece elevated to the national stage as McCain’s running mate, the tire gauge was a truly moronic move on their part. Here’s the makings of the campaign commercial I’d be running if I were Obama:

[Obama voiceover] Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is mocking my campaign by handing out tire pressure gauges. That’s not at all surprising. Checking your tires is the best way to save on gas and to get the most use out of your tires.

Gov. Pawlenty doesn’t believe in husbanding our resources or valuing our infrastructure. Despite obvious corrosion and buckling, Gov. Pawlenty wouldn’t let his Transportation people properly maintain Minnesota bridges.

(swiped from Grace Kelly)

This close up is from the I-35 bridge that fell into the Mississippi river on August 1, 2007. Thirteen people died and more were injured. A bus filled with school children narrowly missed falling into the river. 

Now that you know how Gov. Pawlenty has husbanded his home state’s resources, do you really want to take his advice on how to take care of your car?

If McCain picks Pawlenty, thirteen dead people will be put into play, giving more meaning to their untimely deaths than all the memorial services to date. That report on the I-35 bridge collapse will come out before the November election, and it will not reflect well on Tim Pawlenty or the “drown government in the bath tub” crowd.

And there is no end to all the ways in which Obama could go after the big talk do nothing conservatives. On their watch corporations have figured out a new way to steal workers’ pension money to fund executive retirement programs. Conservatives are screaming for us to find more domestic oil, yet it turns out we’re exporting 1.6 million barrels a day! Conservatives tell us that Canadian bus riders and American college students are all liberal cowards, but the only heroes I’ve heard about in these situations are all liberals. 

Thanks to conservative message control, no one seems to know what to think about Bruce Ivins suicide or the real status of the anthrax attacks investigation. David Gergen is calling foul on all of McCain’s racist attacks on Obama, even as McCain’s campaign singles out a black reporter and evicts him from a Florida campaign event.

And to this and all other counter-charges the right says, Arugula! Arugula! Arugula! (Because only an effete elite would stand in the middle of an Iowa field of arugula and have the temerity to ask the farmer how much he’s making by growing the stuff.)

Which is why nearly every corporate media prediction about this race has gone awry. None of the pundits picked Obama to win. He won. They all said whites would never support him, yet a new poll shows Obama leads among the poor and working poor in all categories, even among white men.

So bring it on. Send in your tired Pawlentys and his wagon-circling bitterenders, the wretched refuse of your failed governance. Send these who make others homeless and tempest-tost to me. Etc.

  ☭  ☭  ☭

In other news, I’m suddenly considered to be the 12th most influential blogger in Minnesota. Not bad for a guy who killed his first blog at birth, strangled his second blog while it was still in the crib, abandoned his next few blogs to the City Pages Borg, then killed his comeback blog and now writes an unpublicized blog that has successfully driven off all but a couple hundred of my former readers. 

But I think The Big E summed me up best when he wrote:

I find it funny that I’m writing posts about the details of the MN-SEN race (and other MN races as well) and am getting 3-10 comments per post.  You, Mark, write one flame-bait post per month and get more comments than I get in a year on the hundreds of posts I write.

[comment on this post at Daily Kos]

E, never underestimate the power of troll bait, especially at DK where the community’s biggest troll factor is their irrational fear of trolls, coupled with the religious zeal with which some Kossacks attack anyone who criticizes Al Franken.

At any rate Blognetnews says I’m in the 3rd most active MN blogger tier, a category I don’t pretend to understand as I outpost all of the higher ranked blogs except for the largest of the group blogs. 

Sorry I don’t work harder to be #1, but that would just put me into competition with Minnesota’s biggest #2 blogger, Minnesota Democrats Exposed.

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