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Cindy McCain’s hand was sprained yesterday when she shook hands with a supporter at a campaign fundraiser in West Bloomfield, exacerbating an “existing carpal tunnel condition for which she has had previous surgeries,” said Cindy’s personal spokesperson, Melissa Shuffield.

The injury occurred at a noon luncheon at the Shenandoah Banquet, Golf and Conference Center in West Bloomfield, Mich., the first of the day’s three McCain fundraisers. 

Here at the Women for John McCain strategy center, we know just how hard on the wrists it can be to spend hours tabulating one’s millions, baking Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies for the First Ladies’ Recipe Contest, and still find time to cook Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Slaw, Farfalle Pasta with Turkey Sausage, Peas, and Mushrooms and whip up a bowl of the family’s favorite Passion Fruit Mousse before arm wrestling John for the remote in time to catch “Big Love“.

“…[H]andshaking is a common source of people having sore hands,” says Dr. Leon Benson, professor of orthopedic surgery at Northwestern University School of Medicine. But surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, unless it was within the last six to nine months, probably wouldn’t make the hand or wrist any more vulnerable than normal, he said.

McCain left the fundraiser and visited a nearby hospital where she was x-rayed and given pain relief for what Shuffield called “a minor sprain.”

Thank goodness the doctor was able to hook you up with some of Mommy’s little helpers! Our prayers are with you, Cindy.

John McCain, scoping for PUSA at the Fudge Haus.

John McCain is second to none when it comes to womens’ issues - as evidenced by his perfect 0% scores from NARAL and Planned Parenthood - and as the Original Maverick™, there’s no candidate that matches John McCain when it comes to reasoned discussion of reproductive freedom, patient privacy, access to birth control, and sex education, as Sarah Blustain reports in The New Republic:

John McCain was mad. Fuming mad. It was then the early days of his political career, and he had paid an unscheduled visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Mesa, which was within his Arizona congressional district. That’s when Gloria Feldt, then the CEO of the group’s local chapter, got a phone call. “Congressman McCain is here,” a staffer told her, “and he is screaming and it is upsetting the patients.”

Feldt says McCain had always refused her offers to visit a clinic, but had apparently decided to make a spot visit of his own… “He was screaming, ‘I am going to defund her, I am going to get the federal government to defund you.’… [H]e rants and he raves and finally he hangs up on me.”

“I relive it every time I see the man on TV,” [Bozack] told me over the phone from Phoenix. She and Feldt had run into McCain, introduced themselves, and asked if they could speak with him. He agreed, and they got on the train that runs between Capitol buildings. Bozack was talking to him about international contraception access. Suddenly, she recalls, he was no longer calm, cool, and collected. “He turned toward me and put his index finger out and started pounding me in the chest saying, ‘You know my position on this,’ and ‘How dare you ask me about this,’ and ‘You are just trying to intimidate me.’”

John McCain will “never surrender” when it comes to fighting important issues like birth control, sex education, and womens’ right to privacy and choice.

John McCain. More experience with women than Barack Obama.

Standing on firm moral ground, John McCain may never have had a need for access to birth control or family planning services during his years of “deliciously unimaginable things with women” on “nocturnal sojourns”, “accessorized with a new Corvette and ‘women, the flashier the better’,” escapades with Marie, the Flame of Florida and an anonymous Brazilian model, or his multiple affairs with other women and nine months with Cindy while still married to Carol McCain.

And as Women for John McCain, we’re proud to support a candidate who not only takes strong stands on the issues, but endears voters with charming humor and warmth.

Women for John McCain are proud to welcome the latest constituent booster group to the winning coalition of supporters helping to elect our next president of the United States, John Sidney McCain III - the one candidate in this election who voted against the Martin Luther King day holiday in 1993, backed a 1987 effort to rescind the executive order declaring the Martin Luther King Day holiday in his home state of Arizona, later opposed Federal funding for the holiday, told USA Today that King’s assasination wasn’t “meaningful news”, admitted to a “sacrifice of principle for personal ambition” in pandering to racists in controversy over the Confederate flag in his 2000 South Carolina primary campaign, skipped the lone black issues debate of the primary season last September, and likes to say that affirmative action should be abolished, because the military is the United States’ best equal opportunity employer.

The site’s second post today, its inaugural day, asks:

In the store @ John McCain.Com, they offer personalized t-shirts for just about every ethnic and cultural minority imaginable. Currently available:

Women For McCain, Irish For McCain, Jewish Americans For McCain, Hispanics For McCain, Asian & Pacific Islanders For McCain, Arab Americans For McCain (!).

Now I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but, uh…I’m black, proud, and I want a damn T-shirt. I have contacted the McCain campaign and received no reply. I think it’s safe to assume that if Arab Americans get their own shirt, Black Men are not asking too much…

We’re not sure where to find a t-shirt for you, Black Men for McCain, but if we happen to see one, we’ll be sure to pick it up as a token of our appreciation for your less than subtle anti-Arab American racism. As long as you promise to stay away from our country clubs, gated communities, and our table at Bullfeathers.

As John McCain’s 72nd birthday - and the GOP convention - draw ever-nearer on the joint aspirational time horizon, enthusiasm for our next president’s message continued to build this morning in York, PA, where McCain stopped for another town hall meeting before heading to New Jersey for a fundraiser, as the York Daily Record reports:

9:35 a.m. The anti-John McCain crowd has converged at the Carlisle Avenue entrance of the York Expo Center hours before the senator is slated to speak.

9:45 a.m. York County Clerk of Courts Don O’Shell is one of several elected officials seeing McCain speak this morning.

9:52 a.m: ”He’s a presidential candidate, why not come and see him even if I disagree with everything he has to say,” Ryan Mosser said.

10:08 a.m: ”It’s not as bad as we expected,” Nancy McDonough said.

10:20 a.m. He said he respects McCain’s military record, but said his service as a senator has been “less than exemplary. Veterans of the U.S. need to recognize there’s no friend in John McCain,” Avillo said.

10:51 a.m. Organizers have tried to start a McCain chant as Dire Straights [sic] plays on the public address system.

11:01 a.m. “A lot can be gained by seeing someone in person,” she said. Williams did not believe any of her former students attended the event.

11:15 a.m. Republican delegates tried to fire up the crowd and encouraged them to cheer and do The Wave.

11:25 a.m. He had people from each county cheer “John McCain” when he called out the county. Only one man yelled to show he was from Lebanon County.

12:41 p.m.: A woman asked McCain a three-part question about whether he would be able to move forward with a conservative agenda. McCain said, “Yes.”

A Women for John McCain model shows off a classy and flattering "Wide Stance Elephant" longsleeve at the official 2008 GOP Convention Gear Fashion Show in May.

And anticipation continues to build among supporters eager to fly in to the same airport where Senator Larry Craig demonstrated his special “wide stance” men’s restroom tap-dancing and hand-gesture techniques for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, as Politico reports:

Of the 12 Republicans running in competitive Senate races — five of whom are incumbents — only three have said they will be attending the convention. Six are definite no-shows, and three are on the fence. 

“Nobody likes a funeral,” said a Senate Republican press secretary who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing “the overall climate of general malaise about the party” as the reason for hesitance on the part of Republicans. 

On the House side, according to a report in The Hill, during a July 31 conference call National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma discouraged congressional hopefuls from attending, saying that doing so would potentially be a “waste of time.”

“Overall, Republicans have an intensity problem,” added a top Republican lobbyist who requested anonymity. “I have a lot of friends that are just not going that have gone in years past.”

“We certainly weren’t alone, a lot of venues hadn’t heard anything and were kind of wondering what might [have] happened,” said David Miller, general manager of the St. Paul Hotel.

Red, white, and blue 'Zubaz' pants straight out of Joey Buttafuoco's closet circa 1991, and an assortment of giant clown hats debuted at the official 2008 GOP Convention Gear Fashion Show in May.

No wonder they’re holding the convention at the “Energy Center” this year - it’s going to be a doozy. Time to go shopping for that special outfit. What will you be wearing this year?

“So our apologies to all the people of St. Paul,” [CBS anchorwoman, Katie] Couric said, “along with a reminder that the man for whom your city is named encouraged his followers to be patient and forgiving.”

Campaign advisers were worried McCain would look too much like a senior in an R.V., but the tan BarcaLounger easily puts such fears to rest.

Exotic and un-American Barack Obama is vacationing on foreign soil in Hawaii, the U.S. state where he was born, to allegedly participate in the radically un-American activitiy of visiting his grandmother - and NPR and ABC political analyst Cokie Roberts does not approve, taking her expert analysis of the issues that matter most to American voters to both ABC’s This Week and NPR’s Morning Edition.

“I know Hawaii is a state, but …”

“…but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know…”

With Obama “out of the country” for the week, our next president, John Sidney McCain III, will follow up on his Sausage und Fudge Haus success with the playing field to himself, telling voters that he needs to take weekends off and sleep in if he works more than a few days in a row, and is already anxious to take some time off at his all-American “ranch” in Sedona, Arizona, “the New Age capital of the country“. And he’s making good use of it, spending Monday and Tuesday in Pennsylvania where he plans to focus on the tense conflict between Russia and Georgia. It’s a good thing that “John McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was a paid lobbyist for the former Soviet republic until March”, lobbying for a firm that “has earned more than $2 million since 2004 lobbying U.S. officials, including Sen. McCain and his staff, on behalf of various clients including Georgia” (who are still a client) - as the Original Maverick™, our White Tornado™ needs balanced, unbiased information to make informed decisions. 

The White Tornado in his element with what he calls "his base", the national press.

And speaking of the White Tornado™, the New York Times profiles the McCain campaign team behind the scenes, painting an exciting and inspiring picture of unity and leadership that the Obama campaign can’t hope to match. 

“Out of his hearing, Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. Throughout his presidential campaign, he has been the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps, unclear lines of command and an unsettled atmosphere that keeps aides constantly on edge.

…he routinely resists basic political counseling, such as when aides pleaded with him not to campaign sitting on a horseshoe-shaped couch in the back of his bus because they feared it made him look like an old man rumbling around the country in an R.V. He refused.

His management of his campaign offers a glimpse of how he might run the White House…  For now, Mr. McCain’s executive style looms as a potential obstacle to his hopes of getting to the White House. …for all the efforts to maintain discipline, he continues to be plagued by misstatements and apparent gaffes as he at times bucks what his own campaign is trying to do.

…unlike Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton, Mr. McCain has displayed no particular interest in or knowledge of the minutiae of politics. “…he’s not a client who has much tolerance for sitting through an hourlong presentation, or 30- to 40-minute presentation of slides and charts.” 

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