Nation of Whiners!

I guess John McCain can't go more than a month without his "economic brain" Phil Gramm.

This is scary

I see via Mark Halperin that the FAA covered up the full-extent of Sen. Obama's emergency plane landing. Thank you God for allowing Sen. Obama's plane to land safely.

Awesome

A 41-page denunciation of all the falsehoods in the Corsi book. I love our nominee! We will not be Swift Boated is reality!

Wingnuts are not society

Even liberals fall into the trap of labeling extreme right-wing views as mainstream. Case in point is Harold Pollack blogging at Ezra Klein's blog:

I won’t bother with the fine points here. Nobody is really arguing about military readiness, any more than the battle about women soldiers concerned cost-benefit analysis of building extra latrines. Kicking out gay Arabic interpreters and the like makes no sense. Almost everyone knows it. This really is about two things: Do we believe that our LBGT brethren are entitled to the rights and obligations of American citizenship? Will we allow a particular socially conservative subculture to repel civilian control over our military?

I don’t see much reason to give ground on either front. And I don't know why our society is so crazy about this subject. [emphasis mine]

Our society isn't crazy. That's why 75% of the country supports openly gay people serving in our military. Wingnuts are crazy.

WTF!

Ahhhhhh! It's killing me! Who's going to be Sen. Obama's VP? Mark Halperin is reporting that Senators Bayh and Biden are speaking on Wednesday (VP day) along with Gov. Richardson. I need more details!

More willfull ignorance

The GOP finds oil in trees. Too bad there isn't any wildlife in ANWR. To quote Sen. Obama: "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant."

Thank you Sen. Clinton

For engaging in character attacks when you knew you couldn't win. Thank you for enraging your supporters and making them think that John McCain had passed the "Commander-in-Chief threshold" and Sen. Obama hadn't.

From Slate:

When I ask what Obama would have to do to win her over, what she says first is that he'd have to adopt Hillary's health care plan. But by the end of the conversation, we get to the real bottom line, which is that she just doesn't like Obama, sees him as a total poser and nothing-burger who swooped in from nowhere and stole the thing, and all the health care reform in the world is not going to change that. At this point, she's thinking seriously about staying home on Election Day. She is not going to wake up the morning after Hillary's name is placed in nomination and have a whole new lease on Obama. And my guess is, Hillary knows that.

It's just a reminder of all we have to thank Sen. Clinton for when we are discussing the roll call vote.

Fairness Doctrine

This datum from the new Rasmussen poll stuck out to me:

Only 45% of Americans say they are following recent news stories about the Fairness Doctrine even somewhat closely, while 15% say they are not following the story at all.

Um, that's a fairly high percentage for a random legal issue. I guess it's because the conservative talk radio market is screaming to high hell about it.

More on the roll call vote

According to the NY Times, Sen. Clinton will use her superdelegate vote to vote for Sen. Obama. If I were him, I would return the favor. Nothing says unity like that.

Further prediction: I think this will be an incredibly well choreographed event and will end up being a saccharine sweet unity love fest.

Anti-Swift-Boating

TPM is reporting that Sen. Obama is going actually discredit the lying Swift-Boater crowd:

Obama advisers say that whenever they hear that Corsi has been booked for an appearance on a network program, they are quickly contacting the program's producers to rebut the book's charges in phone conversations and giving them a whole run-down of past Corsi quotes that are controversial.

Obama aides also vow to insist that the producers allow them to have on a campaign surrogate to attack the charges, and are expecting to recruit more campaign surrogates, well plied with talking points, to push back against the book.

The question is, why didn't Sen. Kerry do this same thing last election cycle? I mean, it just doesn't make sense to allow scurrilous accusations by deranged liars to go unanswered. The traditional media will repeat anything even bald-faced lies, so you have to get to them early before the lies become "common knowledge."

Word

From One Drop at Too Sense:

You want to know the real reason I get so pissed off about gangsta rap?

Suburban white kids.

They're the largest segment of the commercial audience for Hip Hop. As much as people talk about Hip Hop being of, for, and by the black community, you wouldn't see multi-platinum albums without those suburban white kids flocking to the music. Like any other business, the music industry responds to the tastes of its customers. And those suburban white kids, they love the image of the black gangsta. So the industry gives them more gangstas, takes artists that really come from middle-class upbringings and portrays them as the hardest ghetto rats in the world. And white suburbanites gobble that shit up and ask for more.

The whole thing reminds me of Bamboozled, which was fiction right?

A thinking President

This sums up my thoughts on Sen. Obama:

Peggy Noonan compared this approach to that of the Kennedy administration. “JFK and his people came into the White House,” she said in an e-mail, “with a faith they could be practical, pragmatic, worldly, that with these attributes they could manage what came over history’s transom. I see Obama as like this: things will come over the transom and he’ll approach them as a thoughtful sophisticate. He’ll think.”

For better and worse, if Obama wins, a thinking president is what we’ll have.

I am unsure if Sen. Obama will be able to live up to the enormous expectations an Obama Presidency would entail, but I am also sure that we have no other choice but to put our faith in him.

Obama and debates

Via Jake Tapper, James Fallow asks a good question why was Sen. Obama so much weaker in the debates against Sen. Clinton than against Alan Keyes?

I honestly think the problem was that he felt constrained by the Democrat on Democrat action and truly did not want to attack someone whose positions were so close to his. Also, Hillary Clinton was so sharp, that he couldn't let his guard down. I think Sen. Obama has a history of being deferential to smart, strong women. Plus, Alan Keyes is so comically stupid...

Also, he manages to bring up what's wrong with the traditional media

We don’t watch debates to learn what someone thinks about Social Security. We watch to see how the contenders look next to their opponents, how they react when challenged, how well or poorly they come up with the words we later see in print.

"We" here meaning elite beltway types, who already "know" what the candidates think and are more concerned with "looks," "image," and "expectations."

Why I stopped reading The Note

When I first starting getting serious about politics, I used to read ABC's The Note religiously. I stopped reading it a while ago, and started wondering why. It quickly became clear.

Here is the third paragraph:

(And the poll we've all been waiting for has arrived -- the one that declares the race just about even.)

It links to the Pew Poll showing Barack Obama winning 46%-43%, with a 2% margin of error. Is that even to you? No, it means that Barack is leading... by 3 points. But, like I've said previously, everything is Good News For John McCain!

Not worth the effort

If someone wants to spend $1,000 to see Sen. Obama accept the nomination, I think the Obama campaign should let them. Although, I understand that they want to control who gets in (security, security, security), I'm sure that the metal detectors will work perfectly.

Troops like Obama?

I thought they realized that Obama hates the troops! Why are they giving him so much money?

More dispatches

From the futile "War on Drugs." Read the whole thing.

At my university, if you brought a friend to the Student Health Center, you were guaranteed not to be arrested (no matter what). I think that's a good policy. What's more important - saving someone's life, or convicting a drug dealer? America currently thinks the later is a higher priority.

Song of the Day

Here's Walt Disney's favorite song:

Duh!

Of course Sen. Clinton's name is going to be placed in nomination. I could have told you this months ago. Marc Ambinder reports:

In negotiations this summer with Obama's campaign, Clinton's team did not ask for Clinton's name to be submitted.

But within the past week, Clinton advisers informed the Obama team that many of Clinton's staunchest supporters felt strongly that something had to be done, and that Clinton had concluded that, in part for the sake of unity, their wishes ought to be respected. They heard back immediately: the Obama campaign had always been open to having her name placed in nomination alongside his.

DUH! Seriously, I always knew that the deadenders were not truly representative of Sen. Clinton's feeling. I mean, she already lost, why do you want to take a vote that commemorates your lose? However, certain people are under the illusion that she can win, so they are forcing this. Whatever. I knew the Obama campaign would be okay with this. Why not? They get to win all over again.

Sen. Clinton has shown a lot more class in losing that I would have expected. Marc goes on:

Clinton aides also confirmed, and Obama aides did not dispute, that it was Clinton who informed the Obama campaign that she did not [want] to give the keynote address to the convention. It is not clear whether the Obama camp would have offered the honorific, but they did not, sources said, deliberately deny it to Clinton.

It's nice that she's getting this out there. Not that the deadenders will believe her.

But he's white, Jesse!

Jesse Taylor of Pandagon writes:

Could it be any more obvious that McCain would have leapt on any conflict anywhere in the world to play make-believe George W. Bush circa September 2001? Shadow ambassadors, asinine and utterly contradictory assertions - John McCain is so hungry to appear presidential that he’s willing to give himself a blank slate on which to project his vision of foreign policy, reality and history be damned.

One might almost call it...presumptuous. If one were into using words to describe things.

Sadly, Jesse forgets that when you get where you are based on who your parents are, that's fair, but when you get where you are based on your own merits, that's affirmative action.

Ben Smith: hack

On his blog about Sen. Obama and the Democrats, Ben Smith finds time to write about Cindy McCain's sprained wrist, but not the fact that Sen. Obama reached 2,000,000 donors.