McCain talks to the editorial board at the Des Moines Regster

. . . and gets pretty testy when someone suggests that Gov. Palin doesn't have much experience. He gets even testier when it's suggested that the American people, regardless of party, have some serious doubts about her.

Protesting pastors back candidates from the pulpit

Here's a story that will have far-reaching consequences, beyond the current presidential race. At stake is not only whether religious non-profits can endorse candidates without losing tax-exempt status, but whether any tax-exempt status can be linked to a ban on such endorsements. The pastors are looking for a test case, planning to argue that this is a limit on their First Amendment rights.

Protesting pastors back candidates from the pulpit: "Pastor Luke Emrich prepared his sermon this week knowing his remarks could invite an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. But that was the whole point, so Emrich forged ahead with his message: Thou shalt vote according to the Scriptures.

'I'm telling you straight up, I would choose life,' Emrich told about 100 worshippers Sunday at New Life Church, a nondenominational evangelical congregation about 40 miles from Milwaukee.

'I would cast a vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin,' he said. 'But friends, it's your choice to make, it's not my choice. I won't be in the voting booth with you.'

All told, 33 pastors in 22 states were to make pointed recommendations about political candidates Sunday, an effort orchestrated by the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.

The conservative legal group plans to send copies of the pastors' sermons to the IRS with hope of setting off a legal fight and abolishing restrictions on church involvement in politics. Critics call it unnecessary, divisive and unlikely to succeed."

Playing the ref, VP debate style

This is something I don't recall ever seeing before: an advance effort by one campaign to steer the questions in a debate and to prepare the ground for charges that the moderator was biased against one candidate, Sarah Palin. Is this rope-a-dope, or is she really that unprepared to debate foreign policy?

McCain vindicated? Not so fast

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds reads the admission that 'voluntary' regulation was flawed from conception as evidence that John McCain was right to call for the resignation of the SEC chairman, Chris Cox. As I've noted, George Will and others attacked McCain for this, calling it scapegoating and a sign of a troubling temperament. So, does Cox's admission, and the inspector general's report, prove his culpability and vindicate McCain's judgment?

While I can see why the McCain campaign would like that reading, I don't find it well supported by the specifics of the story. The program was created prior to Cox's arrival at the SEC, so it wasn't his idea. No sign that he didn't like the idea, but then the idea of making compliance voluntary was congenial to many in the GOP and on Wall Street. Links to news reports of John McCain criticizing the program would be a lot more convincing in establishing his bona fides on the issue. Meanwhile, it's hard to single out Cox for a program started by his predecessor and supported, either actively or tacitly, by most of the GOP, which controlled both the executive and the legislative branch in 2004.

To me, the most telling part of the Times story is its explanation of why the SEC would be inclined to implement a program of voluntary regulation in the first place:

Because it is a relatively small agency, the S.E.C. tries to extend its reach over the vast financial services industry by relying heavily on self-regulation by stock exchanges, mutual funds, brokerage firms and publicly traded corporations.

The program Mr. Cox abolished was unanimously approved in 2004 by the commission under his predecessor, William H. Donaldson. Known by the clumsy title of “consolidated supervised entities,” the program allowed the S.E.C. to monitor the parent companies of major Wall Street firms, even though technically the agency had authority over only the firms’ brokerage firm components.

The commission created the program after heavy lobbying for the plan from all five big investment banks. At the time, Mr. Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs. He left two years later to become the Treasury secretary and has been the architect of the administration’s bailout plan.

The most obvious point to be made is that the man who is supposed to lead us out of this mess was one of the prime architects of the mess in the first place, prior to his moving through the revolving door from Goldman Sachs to Treasury. But the less obvious point is that the SEC lacks sufficient budget and staff to do its job without relying on self-regulation. This isn't an accident, but yet another instance of the Republican effort to incapacitate the regulatory agencies of the federal government. Beginning with the Reagan Administration, which came into office declaring that government isn't the solution, it's the problem, Republicans have systematically worked to reduce enforcement budgets for federal regulatory agencies and to place at their heads individuals who are hostile to those agencies' purposes (e.g., Clarence Thomas as head of the EEOC). So, while Cox surely has some responsibility for the debacle, he has to share the burden with all of those who advocated for getting government "off the backs" of the people (and the corporations) by eliminating regulation where possible, and knee-capping enforcement everywhere else. That group, IMHO, also would include Clintonite/DLC Democrats who helped to triangulate us into this mess.

Palin strikes out?

Kahtleen Parker, a conservative columnist who had been a supporter of Palin, today declared that that she had seen enough (little though it has been):

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Even in her interview with Hannity, Palin made Parker cringe and squirm. The VP debate could be ugly.

Really?

I just came across this passage in the front page story in today's Washington Post about the efforts to reach a bailout deal:

Boehner and McCain discussed the bailout plan, but Republican leadership aides described the conversation as somewhat surreal. Neither man was familiar with the details of the proposal being pressed by House conservatives, and up to the moment they departed for the White House yesterday afternoon, neither had seen any description beyond news reports.

At 1:25 p.m., McCain left Boehner's office through a back door, walking across the Capitol's rotunda to the applause of tourists. Graham conceded the group knew little about the plan the nominee had come to Washington to try to shape.

Hard to see how he can claim that he was showing leadership when he was having conversations based on nothing -- what was there to talk about, then, other than the politics of the situation?

John (Nostradamus) McCain

Chris Cizilla's blog at the Washington Post notes that an ad declaring McCain the victor in the first presidential debate was up on the Wall Street Journal site this morning, next to a column by the Treasury Secretary. Nobody should need to be told that they should disregard most anything said by a campaign and its surrogates after a debate, but this is pretty stark evidence that they'd say they won even if their candidate were reduced to reciting nursery rhymes.

High stakes poker

That's John Harwood's take on what McCain has been playing with the 'suspension' of his campaign --which didn't keep his surrogates from going from network to network attacking Obama, or his running mate, for that matter. Since McCain has now announced he'll debate tonight -- without an agreement having been reached, so far -- that could blow up in his face. Here's Harwood's more detailed assessment:



Also, Matt Welch, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, has an op-ed here in the LA Times that notes that McCain's first run for president got a huge boost from a similar campaign suspension, that time about Kosovo.

One Republican's take on the resistance to the bailout

Ed Rollins, who made his name working for Ronald Reagan on media & political strategy, offered his take on why House Republicans dug in after earlier announcements that a bailout deal had been reached:



Among other things, this points to the continuing problems that McCain has with his own party.

Barack Obama, Machine Politician?

That's the question the McCain campaign is hoping will be on the minds of some voters after watching this new ad:



Not sure why they use an image of Bill Daley while talking about his brother, Da Mare.

The ads are coming fast and furious

Friday night, Paul Krugman's blog linked to a new article by John McCain on health policy in which McCain drew a favorable analogy between banking deregulation and a call for reducing regulatory restrictions on health insurance products. The Obama campaign already has jumped on it in this ad:

?Quien Es Mas Macho?"

For some reason, the old SNL game show skit came to mind watching this new ad from the McCain campaign. It'll be interesting to see how effective McCain's turn towards economic populism will be, and how that plays with the corporate wing of the GOP base.

A relative rarity

30 second ads have been the norm in political campaigns for quite a while now. The Obama campaign has released a two minute ad that will be airing in battleground states that consists of Obama discussing his economic plan in more detail than you typically get in an ad, and without mentioning McCain directly. He does, however, obliquely suggest that the tone and lack of substance of the campaign isn't his fault -- he probably isn't looking for viewers to think it's all Bob Barr or Ralph Nader's fault.

An odd decision by McCain . . .

was quickly seized upon by the Obama campaign. On the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America for 50 cents on the dollar to avert bankruptcy, John McCain decided to repeat taht the fundamentals of the economy are strong. To be fair, he did mention Lehman Brothers and that there were some tough times for some aspects of the financial sector.

Here's what the Obama campaign did with it:

Try finding out who's behind this

I was minding my own business, reading my Gmail, when I noticed a sponsored link at the top of the email I was reading. Intrigued, I clicked and was taken to a site whose address says it all: http://obamaisacommie.com/?gclid=CPfLoKyA4pUCFQOcFQodFgRaeg. It's a pretty amazing site, and I have to wonder whether it is: (1) the work of a lone wingnut; (2) the work of someone with ties to the McCain campaign or to a 527 sympathetic to that campaign; or (3) the work of a scam artist, trying to find something more effective than one of those emails from Nigeria [possible evidence for the last option can be found at the bottom of the website]. Thinking about the possible audience for this, and trying to imagine someone with whom this would be an effective tactic, is kind of scary.

Push polling?

At least one website argues that this isn't a push poll, but is polling that likely will be used to craft negative ads aimed at alarming Jewish voters about Obama. Could be a distinction without a difference.

clipped from www.time-blog.com There are at least two reports, one today and one yesterday, of push polling, that despicable, below-the-radar campaign tactic that is more about spreading misinformation than collecting data. This effort seems to be aimed at Jewish voters.

New Obama ad attacks McCain as sleaze merchant

Spinning the Bush Doctrine

Read this article and you'll discover that the only experts who support this view -- that Palin's confusion was to be expected because there are so many versions of the Bush Doctrine -- are people who presently or in the past worked for the Bush Administration and/or McCain-Palin. Charles Krauthammer has a column making a similar argument to this story -- odd coincidence -- suggesting this is the new spin to show that Gibson is a liberal elitist who sandbagged Palin, and that he was wrong on top of it. But Gibson is the same man who twice defended GOP positions on tax breaks while moderating Democratic debates, who believed that your typical college professor, firefighter, or cop would be affected by increasing taxes on incomes over $200,000 (I wish), and who tag-teamed Obama in that last Obama-Clinton debate with questions about Rev. Wright and assorted other gotchas.

As for the claim that there are many Bush Doctrines, well, not in the literature on the Bush Administration's conduct of the war on terror. There you'll find pretty consistent usage of the term to refer to the two significant breaks made by Bush from previous doctrine: (1) rejecting deterrence and containment; and (2) arguing for a right to anticipatory wars of defense -- that is, preventative war in which we don't need evidence of an imminent attack, but only a belief that someone will attack us at some point in the future. The emphasis on democratization, that began to be emphasized shortly before the invasion of Iraq, is something that goes back at least as far as Wilson (as Krauthammer notes). Claiming it the Bush Doctrine would be sort of like renaming the Monroe Doctrine the Kennedy Doctrine (since JFK also articulated a view like Monroe's).

While the Obama-Biden campaign needs to worry about the way that McCain-Palin successfully spin media coverage (and about the fact that Palin continues to be the focus rather than McCain, since their convention sought to focus voters' attention on McCain's flip-flops and on how his policies ran against popular sentiment), I think that there's also reason for anyone who believes we face serious foreign policy challenges to be concerned that the "reality-based" community remains on the defensive even several years after public disaffection with Bush and his administration became widespread. Ronald Reagan once famously misspoke, saying "Facts are stupid things." Apparently, his slip was prescient.

Obama talks about "Real change"

Another new ad from Obama-Biden features Obama addressing the camera, talking about what he means by change. While there are implied attacks on McCain as insincere in his talk of change, he doesn't ever mention McCain and the tone is less negative than the other ad (and than anything McCain-Palin has put out recently).

Obama ad mocks McCain

Using unflattering images from the early 1980s, this Obama ad mocks McCain and attacks him on issues (though without much in the way of support). No fact checking available on this one yet. I'll update as it becomes available.

Disrespectful? Yes, of facts

Below is the new McCain-Palin ad. Each of it's claims already has been debunked at the nonpartisan site, FactCheck.org

Mixed message?

The NY Times has a piece on McCain's position on education (there's also one on Obama's plan) that has me puzzled. Remember when McCain told the GOP Convention that education was the civil rights issue of the 21st century? Here's what puzzles me:

The brevity of Mr. McCain’s plan reflects his view that the federal government should play a limited role in public education, and his commitment to holding the line on education spending, said Lisa Graham Keegan, a McCain adviser and former Arizona education commissioner.

“Education is obviously not the issue Senator McCain spends the most time on,” Ms. Keegan said, adding that his plan’s limited scope should not be interpreted as a lack of commitment to education and school reform. “He’s been a quiet and consistent supporter of parents and educators who he thinks are making a difference.”

That seems at odds with what McCain said during his acceptance address. Then again, McCain's record shows he wasn't sure the federal government should have much involvement in the civil rights issue of the 20th century, so maybe he's being consistent.

Making something out of a pig in lipstick

The inanity of the campaign is getting hard to believe, perhaps rivaling the 1988 campaign's obsession with flags and whether Michael Dukakis looked goofy in a tank (he did). The big story on CNN yesterday and today (and they are not alone, but it's all I could bear to watch for more than a minute), as you no doubt know, is that the McCain campaign is demanding that Obama apologize for calling Sarah Palin a pig. They've gotten a web ad up, that also manages to take Katie Couric out of context to make it seem as if she is saying the Obama campaign has been sexist. Here's the video of the web ad (it was on YouTube but then removed and is now only on a donation page of the McCain-Palin website. I've downloaded it, because I would like to avoid steering traffic to fundraising pages (especially using manufactured issues):

Here it is

He started it

The sex ed apparently was a response to this ad from Obama that criticized McCain's record on education (which he referred to as the civil rights issue of the 21 st century in his acceptance address):



We'll have to see what the fact checkers say about this one.

Obama wants to teach kids about sex before they learn to read

Yep, that's the claim in this new ad from the McCain campaign. Somehow, one has the feeling that there's a little bit of spin involved here, but hey, at least it's an issue ad, right?



For a fact check on this, check here. And the source of one of the negative quotations weighs in here.

Obama sends wolves after Palin

Well, not literally . . . and possibly not even figuratively. Seizing on a story in Wall Street Journal that claimed the Democrats had sent 30 lawyers to Alaska to do oppo research, the McCain released this ad. The DNC has denied that either they or the Obama campaign has sent anyone to Alaska to do anything, but that hasn't led to the ad being pulled. The imagery is striking, seeming to play on Palin's gender and possibly on Obama's race -- images of predators, an angry looking black man, and a voiceover that claims the angry black man has sent those predators after Palin. (Also, the quotation about spreading false stories is not referring to Obama in its original context, but it is presented here as if it were.)

7 Days in September

Perhaps The Daily Show should be making Obama's commercials

Yes, it's too long for 30 second ad buys, but might this be more effective than what we've seen from Obama's campaign?

A bridge too far?

This new ad from the Obama-Biden campaign goes after the McCain-Palin claims that they are mavericks and reformers on several counts. Most notable is that they use the "L" word, a rarity in presidential campaign ads.

They probably are the best f%#@&% news team in the universe

Is it too soon? Nah

It's easy to forget sometimes that the bread and butter of The Daily Show is skewering the news media . . . skewering elected officials is secondary. Three years after Katrina, they managed to do both at once:

Country first? More like, Me first

I time shifted the GOP Convention tonight, and just finished watching the film about Michael Monsoor, a Navy Seal Medal of Honor winner who died in Iraq two years ago.  As I watched it, I wondered why this was being shown at a political convention (as part of a series of speeches and appearances designed to emphasize John McCain's military srevice and time as a POW) -- had he been an active Republican? Did he have some direct connection to John McCain?  No answers were forthcoming on that front.  I was thinking it was sort of shameless using this young man's service for partisan purposes when he wasn't in a position to say it was okay.  Then they showed film from ihs funeral.  For over five years, young men and women have died in Iraq, and the White House and the Department of Defense have done everything in their power to prevent us seeing images of  coffins being unloaded from transport planes or of soldiers' funerals --even in instances in whcich the family wanted to allow those images.  Yet here we have film shot at a moving funeral for a brave young soldier that does see the light of day, but to serve as an ad for a presidential candidate.

I sometimes think I've gotten pretty jaded, but this just disgusts me.  It's rank exploitation, and it doesn't matter to me if his sister is there or not.  John McCain and the GOP are using this man's death for political gain, pure and simple.  Have they, at long last, no sense of shame?
 
Update: Here's the video so you can judge for yourself whether it was appropriate to sandwich this between tributes to McCain's  POW experience and attacks on Obama.