The Texas two step bows to its partner

By Libby

Burnt Orange Report seems to have the most comprehensive coverage and is reporting that Obama is winning the second step conventions with 56.05% to Clinton's 43.95% with 46.13% of the Texas conventions confirming their counts. This represents 72.31% of the total delegate count so it seems unlikely that the totals will change significantly.

Meanwhile, the party honchos are overwhelmed by the turnout.

A weary Mr. West conceded that the process had flaws. In his convention, a computer system went down, a woman fainted and it was discovered that the delegates from some precincts were never recorded into the system.

"It's a nightmare," he said at one point. "The system wasn't designed for all these people. The process is a nightmare."

What a sad statement on the state of our electoral system that it's not prepared to deal with actual participation by the voters. The system is geared to voter apathy and power-brokered nominations. Revamping the primary system should surely be high on the list of priorities on the DNC's agenda come mid-November so we don't have to live through this hellish chaos again.

And in another stray thought, didn't Bill Clinton say that unless Hillary won Texas with a big blowout victory, that her candidacy would end? I'm not suggesting she necessarily do so, just recalling the rhetoric.

Obama shows his class

By Libby

I don't want to get into a electability argument but by any reasonable metric I've seen, Obama is leading in this race, even if only slightly, so I think this is really gracious.

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said at a news conference in a high school gymnasium here. “Her name is on the ballot. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president.”

I hope the overheated partisans on both sides will take his lead and similarly take a hard left onto the high road in the days to come.

The neverending primary

By Libby

When the WaPo editorializes in favor of an extended Democratic primary, my first instinct is to be against it. After all they're careful not to endorse anyone and hint that they might eventually endorse McCain, as one might expect considering their relentless cheerleading for Bush over the years. Nonetheless this is good point.

The list of issues to hash out is endless, and doing so in polite political combat could produce a stronger Democratic candidate for the fall and a better-informed electorate.

I'd be happy to see the race go on but only if the Democrats run by highlighting their differences with McCain instead of each other. The electorate needs to see how they will run against the Republican and an extended race under those circumstances would keep the attention on the issues and the Democrats but would leave both candidates strong for the general, no matter which one prevails. If they can't find a way to do that however, somebody has to find a way to end this quickly before we end up saluting President McCain in January.

Tribal values

By Libby

Dan at Pruning Shears has an interesting post this week. He wonders why the big Second Amendment proponents aren't more concerned about domestic surveillance. That's a point I've been making as well to the occassional winger who drops into my own little blog to misdiagnose me with BDS. I ask them why they don't realize that if the government decided to disarm the populace, the massive database they now have accumulated would allow them to pinpoint what guns they own, down to how much ammunition they have on hand. None of them have answered that question yet.

But Dan goes on to ruminate on the current acrimony that inexplicably permeates Blogtopia(y!sctp). This strikes me as about right.

Maybe I have been oblivious to it all my life, but it seems that the razor-thin and contested election in 2000 and terrorist attack the following year either created or revealed tribal identities that had gone unnoticed for a long time. Many retreated into territories defined by politics and religion. In this historic primary season it has happened again, now along racial and gender lines. It isn’t absolute by any means, just much more clearly marked. All of it is driven by group identification, and in that sense it comes from a level too low to be reached by persuasion. It may be dressed up in formal clothes, sober tones, a big vocabulary and impressive rationalizations, but much of the time what passes for dialog seems to come from some of our most primitive instincts.

It seems to me what's happening falls short of a mob mentality certainly, but might rightly be called what used to be termed group think, meaning one becomes so involved in an organizational effort that it obliterates the logical filters that would ordinarily temper one's thinking.

Hillary and Obama respond to critics

By Libby

The old and new media outcry over the latest round of negative politics in the Democratic primary seems to have had some effect. Hillary's latest remarks, in the miltary heart of North Carolina, were encouraging.

Clinton stressed that there are “significant” differences between her and Obama, but said “those differences pale to the differences between us and Sen. McCain.”

“I intend to do everything I can to make sure we have a unified Democratic party,” she said. “When this contest is over and we have a nominee, we’re going to close ranks, we’re going to be united.”

Meanwhile as Steven Benen sums up in his usual impeccable manner, Obama was even more responsive to the criticisms.

It looks like the Obama campaign got the message. The senator delivered a speech at Cooper Union in NYC this morning on the economy, specifically emphasizing “legal reforms needed to establish a 21st century regulatory system.”

From a purely political perspective, I’d just add that Obama did so a) while exposing the disaster of Bush’s economic policies; b) trashing McCain’s speech on the economy from Tuesday; and c) without mentioning Hillary Clinton, in any context, even once.

That's exactly what we need. I'm tired of hearing why one candidate or the other is going to run better against McCain. I want them to show us how they're going to do it by running against McCain now, instead of each other. I don't think I'm the only one.

McCain - Centrist Or Wingnut?

By Cernig

Think Progress has the text of John McCain's latest key speech - on foreign policy and to be delivered to the Los Angeles World Council.

He appears to be trying to span the divide between his wingnut base and the rest of America - and doing so badly.

The speech begins with an implicit appeal to genetic heritability of leadership quality.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My father immediately left for the submarine base where he was stationed. I rarely saw him again for four years. My grandfather, who commanded the fast carrier task force under Admiral Halsey, came home from the war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day.

And I suppose if you're one of those Religious Right wingnuts who don't believe in evolution (and thus genetics), you might think that such qualities can be inherited as the gift of the Sky Spook or achieved by osmosis. For the rest of us...nope.

But he then goes on to appeal to those Religious Right wingnuts and neoconservative wingnuts both with a bit about Manifest Destiny and Harry Truman.

President Harry Truman once said of America, “God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.” In his time, that purpose was to contain Communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn.

Of course, now the reason "God has blah, blah" is to fight Islamofascism and Islam in general - the "transcendent challenge of our time". It's all pablum for the scared-of-brown-people base.

Then he gets into his policy prescriptions, and here he really wanders of the reservation. One wonders how those on the far Right who are holding their noses while marching in lockstep are going to (privately) react.

- A new League of Democracies which presumably will mean the U.S. can ignore the UN. But if the new League doesn't like a U.S. proposal then the U.S. "must be willing to be persuaded by them". So much for the go-it-alone neocon dream of superpowerdom.

- A new Kyoto deal that America will back first and try to get China and India onboard for later (but still sign even if they don’t).

- Encourage support for the EU and…wait for it…a transatlantic Common Market (the CM was the predecessor of the EU)!

- Removal of border barriers to trade between South, Latin and North America.

- Unilateral nuclear stockpile reductions.

- Kicking Russia - who is on course to be the world's largest energy exporter - out of the G8 (and generally giving the Cold Shoulder to Russia on all fronts - back to the Cold War) but letting India and Brazil in.

But unlike Russia, oddly, "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries". Must be all those U.S. notes China is holding. Or maybe the Boeing factory.

- A total ban on enhanced interrogation techniques. (For "suspected" terrorists, is the quibble word.)

- But…no withdrawal from Iraq ever until Iraqis forget their sectarian and factional divides and become a "peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic" state" that poses "no threat to neighbors" and contributes "to the defeat of terrorists". That's the McCain definition of victory. At the same time he wants to throw the Saudis and Egypt under the bus and take on Iran face first (based yet again on faulty translations of the words of an Iranian President who will be gone by 2013 at the latest and spurious claims that Iran has said it wants a nuke).

- So the U.S. under McCain will stay in Iraq while simultaneously pissing of both the main Islamic powerbases in the region. Can anybody say "Proxy Wars"? McCain obviously can't. Not even while the Surge goes into meltdown.

- The same criteria for victory to be applied to Afghanistan, although no mention of how that's to be achieved while about half of promised U.S. aid to that forgotten front goes unspent and what does get spent gets spent on U.S. based contractors who bring most of the money back home again.

The two parts of the speech - the Manifest-Destiny, Cold-War-Redux hard-Right BS and the almost-progressive definitely-centrist policy prescriptions, simply don't go together. It's as if two different speeches were written, one by McCain's neocon advisors and one by his paleocon "realist" team - and then some poor slob had the job of spot-welding the two together.

Oh, and as Fifth Estate points out in TP's comments, Straight Talk McCain is flirting with plagiarism and recycling old speeches as new ones. Right where the spot-weld is.

McCain today:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.”

a) Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, July 4 1996–Seawolf Assoc. speech :

“…to the Navy for sending us to war. At the same time, none of us feel that in Vietnam there is a romantic remembrance. War is awful and when nations seek to resolve their differences by fighting, a million tragedies ensue. Look at Bosnia today. The story line should be hatred and ignorance. War is wretched beyond description. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought, nor the cause with which it serves can glorify war. Neither do we share the exhilaration of combat ”

b) McCain, speech at the RNC in NY, 2004
War is an awful business. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of statecraft are endangered as the demands of war and diplomacy conflict. However just the cause, we should shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. But there is no avoiding this war. We tried that, and our reluctance cost us dearly. And while this war has many components, we can’t make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct. That is not just an expression of our strength. It’s a measure of our wisdom.”

All in all, a speech that tried to appeal to two very different constituencies at total odds with one another - the hard Right and the rest of America - and will end up satisfying neither.

Update It's a recycling of a recycling! The HuffPo points to almost the exact same wording again, in a 2001 WSJ op-ed McCain wrote to drum up support for the war-of-choice in Iraq he'd been wanting for a decade. It appears originality isn't "maverick" McCain's strongpoint. Just war and more war. The HuffPo's Stein writes:

What these two, nearly identical, remarks suggest is that McCain's view of combat -- and, perhaps more importantly, its human costs -- has not really changed throughout the course of war. That is, despite five years of military operations in Iraq and more than 4,000 troop deaths, he still sees the "lives lost" and the "merciless realities" as necessary sacrifices to make.

It is a position that undoubtedly remains popular with a great number of primarily conservative voters. But it is also a sign of an unbending, almost stubborn, nature on the war that McCain's critics will certainly hold over his head during the presidential campaign.

You betcha. Because "Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must" just doesn't cut it when the enemies are ones of choice. It's illegal warmongering, plain and simple, and more than just a solitary tear should be shed to compensate for the blood on the hands of McCain and the other warmongers. A Nuremberg Trial is what is called for.

Update 2 It's a recycling of a recycling of a recycling! Think Progress now notes that the good Rear Admiral appears to have copied his words from an even earlier speech by McCain - back in the 90's, no less. Rinse and repeat.

Breaking my own plea for unity

By Libby

It would be a lot easier to keep my vow to focus on McCain instead of the Democrats' bickering if the Clinton campaign could please stop doing this sort of thing. Yesterday, nearly everybody was up in arms about Hillary reigniting the Wright controversy just as it was beginning to die. I held back, willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Neither was I willing to throw myself on the fainting couch just because Hillary spoke with Scaife. I mean it's a odd picture, but it makes sense to talk to a major newspaper in an upcoming primary state of importance. What is she supposed to do, boycott them just because they trashed her for years during Bill's presidency? I was willing to wait and see if it was just an unguarded moment and chalk it up to the fatigue of a prolonged contest.

But this morning, it appears she really is deliberately reigniting the Wright thing, apparently to take the heat off her misstatements on Bosnia. She repeated the remarks at a press conference and then there's this latest rumor. If it's true that "the Clinton campaign is distributing an article in the American Spectator (!) about Obama foreign policy adviser Merrill McPeak" and suggesting that Obama is an anti-Semite then the meeting with Scaife takes on a different color in my mind and it's not rosy.

Interestingly, I just posted yesterday on an endorsement Obama received from Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who has led the synagogue across the street from Obama's home for 27 years. He knows Obama well and had this to say.

Obama is no anti-Semite. He is not anti-Israel. He is one of our own, the one figure on the political scene who remembers our past, and has a real vision for repairing our present.

I realize that politics can get ugly and candidates will do what ever they deem necessary to win, but again, this is just the nomination and I would think someone with a "lifetime of experience" in the game could come up a strategy that keeps the long range goal in mind. As far as I can see, this sort of politicking helps McCain, not the Democrats and I don't see that McCain is returning the favor. Smelling blood, he has no compunction about exploiting our divisions and jumped on Hillary. I guess he's not that grateful for Hillary's kind remarks about him.

Steve Benen has a good dispassionate summation, so I'll let him speak for me. All I have to add is I'm really tired of dirty politics and I want it to please, please stop.

It's time to disown Joe

By Libby

I meant to blog earlier about this Connecticut newspaper's apology for endorsing Joe Lieberman during his last reelection campaign. I didn't think on the whole it was that good. They excused a lot of his anti-democratic positions, but the closing grafs were right on target.

Meanwhile, the junior Connecticut senator is not only backing the Republican nominee for the presidency, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, but appears to be making a contest of trying to get into every photo and TV news video with him. Perhaps Sen. Lieberman is taking delight in needling the chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, his 2004 opponent for the presidency, whose leadership he once dismissed as a “ticket to nowhere.”

Rather than building the bridges The Day expected when it endorsed Sen. Lieberman, he appears busy burning bridges with the party of which he is allegedly still a member. Perhaps the senator is positioning himself for a top cabinet post in a McCain presidency. But if the Democrats prevail, and enlarge their control of the Senate, it is hard to imagine this Connecticut senator being welcomed back with open arms.

This raised a question in my mind that I haven't seen asked and would love to see answered by our Democratic leadership. It's clear that Lieberman is now repaying the GOP for their support that was key in his successful bid. He's long ceased to have any resemblence to a Democrat. So why is he still the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee?

If he wants to run with the GOP, surely he doesn't deserve to be rewarded for his betrayal with such a plum assignment.

Why defeating McCain matters

By Libby

I can sum it up in the six words represented by the acronym SCOTUS. The impact of these appointments span generations, not just terms of office. Does anyone really want to take a chance on tilting the court any further to the right than this?

When the U.S. Supreme Court two years ago limited the First Amendment protections available to public employees, faculty groups thought that they had dodged a bullet. While the decision didn’t go the way professors hoped, it specifically indicated that additional issues might limit its application in cases involving public college professors.[...]

The Supreme Court case that has set off this concern has nothing to do with higher education. Rather, in Garcetti v. Ceballos, the court ruled 5 to 4 that normal First Amendment protections did not protect Richard Ceballos, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney who was demoted and transferred after criticizing a local sheriff’s conduct to his supervisors. In his decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: “We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”

Employer discipline? For whistleblowing? I can't imagine a greater need for First Amendment protection than in exposing wrongdoing. Especially in our justice system. But now this ill-advised precedent is being applied more broadly.

In the current case, Juan Hong, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Irvine, maintains that he was unfairly denied a merit raise because comments he made in faculty meetings offended superiors. Some of those comments concerned personnel decisions. More generally, Hong said that his department was relying too much on part-time instructors to teach lower-division courses, and that students were entitled to full-time professors.

The district court dismissed the suit, saying that these discussions were part of the “official duties” of professors, and thus under the Garcetti decision were not entitled to First Amendment protection. The court did not determine whether the lost merit raise was related to the comments, and the faculty groups’ brief focuses on the legal principles, not the specific cases.

I don't get the logic of that decision either. How is criticizing the administration part of the 'official duties?' Is it in the job description? The plaintiff's brief argues that "[t]he speech of university professors merits a special degree of protection...". I'd argue that every citizen deserves an unfettered degree of protection for dissent. But as the article notes, this isn't entirely unexpected.

While the brief expresses shock that the Garcetti decision would apply in higher education, the dissent in the 2006 ruling suggested just that possibility. Justice David Souter wrote that the majority decision “is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil the First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write ‘pursuant to official duties.’ ”

I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to imagine a day when this decision is ultimately used to squelch all criticism of the government by any citizen. If we allow a Republican nominee to fill the next vacancy, and there will almost surely be one in the next term, I'd say it's more than just a little possible.

More than words

By Libby [Updated]

Well my colleagues have been burning up the blog with their hot posts today so I'm just going to direct to you Spencer Ackerman's article based on interviews with Obama's foreign policy team. I found it through Media Matt, whom I think was impressed. Spencer was clearly impressed and it raised my respect for Obama, and even, dare I say, raised my hope that maybe he really means all that inspiring rhetoric about change and has the courage to follow through on it.

Of course, there's no sure way to predict what any candidate will do once they win, but I think it's the must read of the day for anybody who thinks Obama lacks substance.

Update: To be clear, but I wasn't so much impressed with his team. They actually scare me a bit. But then so does everybody's team. Too many old school conventional wisdom types for me.

I do like that his team at least seems to be somewhat diversified but that isn't what impressed me either. What impressed me was that he assembled a smart team but rejected their political counsel to back off from the "ending the mindset" messaging as being too politically dangerous.

I think his instincts on this are good and I'm almost believing that he's sincere about trying to do it after reading this piece.

McCain's Lobbyist Hypocrisy

By Cernig

McCain says he wants lobbyists out of politics while employing a whole bunch of them in key campaign positions. Whodathunkit?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.

Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.

McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.

It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised — unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise.

McCain is the top recipient of campaign donations from telecom companies in this election cycle with $165,000 and received another $400,000 from internet companies and $453,000 from lobbyists so far.

McCain's been a vocal supporter of telecoms and internet companies in his position as a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.

And there certainly seems to be a link between his support for the industry and his campaign team:

People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisersmore than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.

The McCain campaign, of course, denies that he does favors in return for campaign back-scratching. But given those facts that denial looks very slim. It appears to be a case of "do what I say, not what I do".

I know it won't get as much attention, but it could be argued that the revelation of these lobbyist connections should be even more damaging than the recent uproar over "Obama's pastor". After all, what can Obama do even if he secretly agrees with Wright ( a highly doubtful proposition to begin with) - pack his cabinet with white-hating zealots? But if McCain packs his cabinet and the White House with revolving-door lobbyists it actually could (and probably would) affect government policy. Closing the revolving door being lobbying and government, which has led to so much corruption and mutual back-scratching, is one of the things McCain is supposed to stand for - but his choice of campaign team says otherwise.

An ephipany on the primaries

By Libby

I realized what is really bothering me about progressive bloggers who have gone partisan in the primary battle. Obama supporters seem to spend more time talking about Clinton and vice versa for Clinton supporters, than their own preferred candidates. Meanwhile, it's like the disaster otherwise known as conservative politics and the GOP has ceased to exist.

Checking the buzz today I see my plea for unity has had a negligible effect. Skippy noticed it too and has this to say.

but to mark's question: yes, you did miss the memo, mark. the left side of blogtopia (and yes, we coined that phrase) did agree a few months ago to abandon principled debate in favor of duplicitiousness, invective and logical fallacies in lieu of actual points and structured argument.

we're sorry, we didn't keep the memo, so we can't really tell you exactly when this was decided, but we're pretty sure it was sometime early in the primary season.

that's when lefty's decided it was not only all right to utulize the same unprincipled screaming tactics to pollute public discourse as the righties, but it was also quite acceptable to use them against fellow progressives.

My unity plea engendered a private email exchange among a few bloggers and the critical response surprised me. So let me add to skippy's observation, an abbreviated summary of what I told that group in one last attempt to find some comity.

I don't love either Democratic candidate but despite my own protestations to the contrary from last year, I'm going to vote for the Democrat no matter who it is because another four years of Republican administration, especially under McCain, would destroy anything remaining that is good about this country.

Presuming we can prevent that, no matter who is elected, we are not going to get the progressive agenda we want. Politicians lie, all of them. They tell you what you want to hear, but they don't deliver much. Did we get what we thought we would out of 06? What makes anybody think that's going to be different in 08? Whoever gets in, we're still going to have to fight for our agenda every step of the way. With a Democrat, any Democrat, at least we have a better chance of succeeding. I would think that would be more important than which Democrat it ends up being.

I'm not suggesting self-censorship so much as I'm saying to choose our battles well, and deploy our ammunition wisely in furtherance of the long term goal. Nobody can blog about everything. We consciously choose our topics on any given day, so why not choose to spend our energy targeting the final opponent, the Republican, instead of sniping at the guys on our side, one of whom will ultimately carry our banner into the deciding contest?

Ask yourselves if any of these points of disagreement that we now have with each other are going to feel all that important if McCain ends up appointing the next Supreme Court justice and comes on teevee to announce he just had to bomb Iran because the AQ are there. As far as I can see, as long as we're sniping at our own candidates, we're doing the wingnuts' oppo work for them.

If you believe in your candidate so much that you want to vehemently support them, fine, but how hard is it to promote them by highlighting their superiority to the GOP candidate, instead of why they're superior to the other Democrat? The contest is so close either one could end up pulling this out. We have a named GOP opponent who is running to beat all of us, and whose transgressions are being ignored and excused by his free booze addled, barbecue bribed press corps.

As far as I can see, when someone makes their case by tearing down another Democrat instead of targeting the Republican, they're building a frame for the GOP, not advancing progressive values. For myself, I'm going to choose to let the primary play out as it will on our side and start building a narrative for the contest that really matters in November. I see the next three months as an opportunity to defeat McCain before he gets out of the gate. I'm going for it.

This isn't about Democratic loyalty. I have none and come mid-November I'm happy to bash the Democrats when they fail to advance progressive values. But it's clear to me that McCain has sold his soul to the same neo-cons who have propped up our present administration for the last seven years. We can fight against McCain, or we can fight with each other. I'm sure I don't need to point out which choice advances the progressive values I thought we all shared.

McSame-onomics: Like Bush, Only Crazier

By Cernig

McCain's tax plan would almost double the tax giveaway to the richest one per cent of society compared with simply extending Bush's tax policies.

Kevin Drum has the details.

I can just see the McCain "Straight Talk" campaign ad: "Because giving all those bankers and hedge-funders so much has worked out so well for common Americans already."

John McCain's Forgotten Helping Hand

By Cernig

The UK's ultra-conservative Mail On Sunday picks up on the strange ommission of the guy who saved McCain's life after he crashed in Vietnam from McCain's autobiography.

On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.

In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.

...Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.

From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.

...In his 1999 autobiography, Faith Of My Fathers, which laid the ground for his first, unsuccessful run for president in 2000, McCain wrote a Boy's Own-style narrative of his rescue: “When I came to, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles.

“A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly.”

What followed, according to McCain, was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war - an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero.

But the story is at odds with the version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund.

Searcy first became aware of Mai On when the Vietnamese hero wrote a letter to him. Searcy passed it to McCain's office and received a response from a McCain assistant saying, 'Mr McCain isn't interested in these fanciful stories.' It was only later that Searchy managed to convince McCain, who met On and gave him a souvenir copy of the Congressional Seal as thanks.

“It was the kind of thing you buy in the souvenir shop in the Senate basement.

“But Mr On, to the day he died, treated it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honour.”

But although McCain appeared to believe the story, it was one he would later seem to ignore in his autobiography and there was no more contact between the two men.

When Mr On died in 2006, an email was apparently sent to McCain's office requesting a message of condolence for the family. There was no response.

Whether or not McCain believed Mr On is unclear.

The punchline?

But [McCain's] refusal to acknowledge [On's] heroism is likely to fuel other, more damaging allegations that McCain exaggerated elements of his PoW ordeal in Hoa Lo prison.

Phung Van Chung, 70, who was a Communist Party official at the time, claims McCain was quickly singled out for softer treatment, adding: “I found out he was the son of an American admiral, so the top people wanted to keep him as a live witness so they could use him for negotiations.”

Nice.

Devil with a blue dress

By Libby

I didn't get around to blogging this earlier but I'm still fuming over this ABC story. It's not like we're lacking for examples of the failures of the major media, but this one is surely hits the gold standard of tabloid journalism. After agitating endlessly for Hillary Clinton to release her White House schedules, the most important story in the tiny depraved mind of Brian Ross is where Hillary was when Monica and Bill were fooling around? If this is material to her ability to be president, then I think Mr. Ross should be equally diligent in tracking down where John McCain's wife was while he was cheating on her. That actually would hold some relevancy, since John is the one running for president and it would speak to his lack of character.

Meanwhile, my anger about this has rendered me practically incoherent so I'm going to outsource my outrage to Susie Madrak who posted an articulate rant along with the information on how to contact Mr. Ross directly to let him know what you think of his journalistic skills and ethics.

Wingers unite while Democrats fight

By Libby

The GOP faithful have their man. They don't like him much, but they've figured out the best course of action to get what they want in November. Patrick Ruffini gives away their game plan.

I'm not going to argue that Soren was right in posting the link. But I do agree with Matt Lewis that there was some overreaction here. If they go further with this civility routine, they risk alienating conservatives in talk radio and the blogosphere who are doing the necessary work of defining Obama and rendering him just as radioactive with the base as Hillary.

A month ago, McCain-Obama looked like a bad matchup for us: a Republican nominee who didn't do much to galvanize the base against a Democrat who didn't either.

The New York Times kerfuffle and now the Wright story is slowly changing that. With an assist from Hillary Clinton's overtures to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, Obama is now a more polarizing figure in key swing states than she is. It is now clear that conservative media will do to Obama what they did to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. This can be an unalloyed boon to the McCain campaign, as it pretty much takes care of his conservative problem and frees him to go after swing voters.

This is not about "Barack Hussein Obama" or Muslim smear emails, which need to be repudiated. It is about a Presidential candidate's literary muse going all Susan Sontag on us on the Sunday after 9/11. It is connecting the dots on the post-patriotic milieu that surrounds Obama seemingly everywhere he goes. These are legitimate issues for public discussion, if not by McCain himself, then certainly by talk radio and the blogs. If McCain doesn't want to be part of that, that's understandable. But he should get out of the way and let talk radio do its thing.

Of course, this is not at legitimate issue for public discussion. It's typical GOP hatemongering. The right wing slime machine is hoping to hoping to pull the same trick they used so successfully in the past. Ruffini helpfully describes the preferred tactics for us.

The challenge in modern Presidential campaign is not simply to paint your opponent as wrong on the issues, and to prevail in a civil debate. It is to render the opponent unacceptable to 48% of the electorate, and merely less preferable to 3%. Despite McCain's troubles with the base, conservative media (and Hillary) are doing the heavy lifting on the unacceptable part. McCain should get out of the way, and jump in ONLY when someone crosses an overtly racial and/or religious line.

I think Ruffini is being too clever by half in chiding McCain. Firing the staffer allows McCain to disown the clumsily rendered hatemongering, while effectively giving the video more exposure. I think the best way to counter that is to make more and better videos targeting McCain. I don't have the skills or the equipment to do it myself, but I hope some of the infinitely more creative liberals on our side will do so, quickly and repeatedly.

Surely we can beat them at this game. All they have is hate. We have facts on our side. The trick is to render them visually into easily digested soundbites that can morph into viral emails that help our candidate.

Searching for unity in Leftopia

By Libby

Leftopia is making me crazy. I don't recognize this place anymore. The bickering over the Democratic nomination has created a murderous din that is going to kill us in November and spare me the bromides about how this is politics as usual and it's no nastier than it ever was. It is nastier than I have ever seen it in Leftopia and it's destructive. There's well over a dozen bloggers who I used to love that I can't read anymore. There is something very wrong when I see their posts on Memeorandum and it's mostly right wing bloggers that are linking to them -- approvingly.

If we wait until August to mend our fences, it will be too late. Am I the only one that foresees these blogs and YouTubes being traded by the Hillary-Obama partisans now, being used by the wingers against us once the nomination is settled? I see a lot of speculation about who the rightwing smear machine really wants to run against. I don't think they give a flying leap. We've given them plenty of ammo to use against either candidate and they're united in their hatred against us.

I say we, because I've been guilty of the same thing and I'll admit I mostly targeted the Clinton campaign but I've become really uncomfortable about Hillary bashing. If she wins the nod, I don't want to feel stupid for helping McCain get in because I spent too much time trashing her tactics. Those who spent more energy trashing Obama might consider the same.

It doesn't matter if the campaigns themselves use our words or not, internet archives are forever and the greater noise machine will use them against us. I can see the blog posts and viral emails and hear the radio spots now, quoting whoever and saying, "see, even their own party faithful agree." We won't win the White House by harping on the shortcomings of our own candidates.

While it's true the the vast majority of the electorate is not going to be swayed by bloggers, to some extent the candidates are adopting blogger talking points. We have an opportunity here to show them how to wage this battle for the nomination constructively. If you're excited by one or the other, that's great and pump up your man or woman to the max, but do it by telling the people why they're better than McCain, not by tearing down the other Democrat.

For myself, I don't care who wins the damn nomination. I only care that a Democrat gives the next State of the Union address. I've made a personal pledge to spend the time between now and the convention bashing McCain and the GOP agenda. I'm not going to say another negative word about either Democratic candidate. I hope my fellow Leftopians will join me.

Update By Cernig
Skippy says he's said pretty much the same and Dan Collins' prodigious intellect provides the requisite incentive.

McCain As Ignorant As Dubya

By Cernig

George Bush declared today that he has not a single regret over the invasion and occupation of Iraq despite there being, by any objective tally, plenty of mistakes made and plenty of regret to go around. But John McCain seems to be competing to show that he's just the McSame when it comes to willful ignorance and pig-headed intransigence about the facts surrounding the War on (Some) terror. Josh Marshall nails him down today and speaks for me when he says that McCain is "Unfit for Duty":

Let me follow up on this McCain gaffe in which he got confused and claimed that al Qaeda was getting trained and equipped by Iran before doing mischief in Iraq, before being corrected by his senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Let's start by stipulating that if Barack Obama had had this slip up it would be everywhere on the news for the next week. Pretty much the same if it had been Hillary Clinton.

But this is really just the tip of the iceberg with McCain. In almost every discussion of foreign policy, not just today but in previous years, what stands out is McCain's inability to see beyond the immediate issues of military tactics to any firm grasp of strategy or America's real vital interests. His free willingness to commit to a decades long occupation of Iraq is an example, his push for ground troops to be introduced during the Kosovo War is another. His refusal, almost inability, to grapple with the political failure of the surge is the most telling one if people will sift through its deeper implications.

The idea that fighting jihadists in Iraq or policing the country's sectarian and ethnic disputes is the calling of this century is one that is belied in virtually everything we see in flux in today's world and which seems certain to affect us through the rest of our lifetimes and our children's.

Josh notes McCain's willingness to continue Dubya's failed policies of spending money like a drunken sailor, fuelling the deficit at a time of recession, and his myopic concentration on short-term military solutions to long-term complex problems. Let's call it the Bigger Hammer Doctrine. He ends with:

[McCain] record actually shows he's one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years -- not just because he's a hothead in using the military, but more because he seems genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing. He's too busy living in the fantasy world where our future as a great power and our very safety are all bound up in Iraq.

I wholeheartedly agree with Josh here - what America and a world in which America is the biggest kid on the block needs most is definitely NOT more short-termist paranoic banging of the military hammer.

Minding Murtha

By Libby

Cernig and I are on the same wavelength today. I had the same immediate reaction when reading the about Murtha's endorsement of Hillary. It dredged up vague recollections of being burned by actions that belied his rhetoric. A quick check at sourcewatch.org refreshes the memory.

Murtha has delivered votes to help Republicans block a number of Democratic initiatives: "to investigate federal contracting fraud in Iraq, to reform lobbying laws, to increase financing for flood control, to add $150 million for veterans' health care and job training, and to exempt middle-class families from the alternative minimum tax." Those who vote with Murtha have been rewarded with a large supply of earmarks for their districts.[8]

In 1989 Murtha became chairman of the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee. There he imposed new rules and procedure that forced Defense appropriations bills to be decided behind closed doors. The practice has continued since Republicans took the majority in 1995.[9]

In 2006, When the Republican majority brought their ethics package, the Lobbying Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, to the floor, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) offered a motion to recommit with instructions to strike the text of the bill and replace it with the text of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the Democrat's ethics bill. The motion to recommit failed by three votes, after Rep. Murtha led a group of four Democrats, himself and Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Martin Sabo (D-Minn.), and Michael Capuanoto (D-Mass.), to vote with the Republicans.

Before it's lost in the stampede to canonize the man, it might be good to remember that in the end he's just another professional politician who has built his career on earmarks.

Dear progressives, I have bad news

By Libby

Your candidate sucks. Yeah, both of them. Forget about the historic nature of their phyisical attributes for a moment and try to remember that they are both professional politicians and no matter who wins, it's unlikely either will deliver policies that truly satisfy a progressive agenda. Changing the players won't change the system in one cycle. It just won't.

The most sage perspective I've seen in weeks comes from my chief foreign correspondent, Bob, of the Planet Vleeptron.

This now brings us to Hillary vs. Obama. Well -- as long as politicians rarely ever DO anything of positive significance, I've always believed they're at least obligated to entertain us, and the fight for the Democratic nomination promises to be the most entertaining authentically nasty mud-wrestle bout in decades.

Good attitude. Campaigns are pure theater. They're WWF dressed up in business suits instead of three foot wide belts with hubcab size buckles. One must wager carefully to avoid going home with empty pockets. Bob casts his celestial eye earthward and offers this sensible take on the odds.

Hmmm now you want to know how to bet your life savings on our presidential race. Speaking strictly as your professional turf accountant, I think you should skip this one and wait for the Kentucky Derby or the Grand National.

To a degree I can't honestly get a lock on -- it involves Looking Into Peoples' Hearts, still in its infancy as an exact science -- this is going to be a battle of deep and historic voter prejudices. McCain could end up doing surprisingly well in November for the ugliest of reasons: Voters looking at the ballot and thinking, "Well, at least he's a White Man."

It's a distinct and disturbing possibility, particularly if Democrats continue to frame this contest on race and gender all the way to Denver.

I promise you no matter who is elected, a year from now we will all be disappointed by our newly inaugurated president's latest presser. But worse, I can guarantee we will be horrified if McCain ends up being the one that's standing behind the podium. I might think avoiding that possibility would be our first priority as progressives but I'm seeing far too little evidence of it at this point. I really hope that changes soon.