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ER doctors say Goodman’s ‘uninsured’ claims are ‘reckless.’On Wednesday, John Goodman, who was an architect of Sen. John McCain’s health care plan, made the audacious claim there are no “uninsured” people in America because Americans have access to emergency rooms. The American College of Emergency Physicians has issued a statement calling Goodman’s statement “reckless“:
“We urge the McCain campaign to rethink the reckless suggestion by Mr. Goodman that the tragedy of uninsured patients can be erased by the magic of emergency departments,” said Dr. Lawrence. “Emergency physicians can and do perform miracles every day, but taking on the full-time, medical care for 46 million uninsured Americans is one miracle even we cannot perform. Access to care in the emergency department is no substitute for the comprehensive health care reform policy that should be at the heart of the platform of any presidential campaign.”
The McCain campaign has claimed that Goodman’s “philosophy on health care” is “clearly out of step with John McCain.” But as The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has noted, McCain’s health care plan “is perfectly consistent with Goodman’s statements, which have represented mainstream conservative thinking on health care these days.”
Fascist Front Group American Issues Project Attacks Senator ObamaSen. Barack Obama's campaign and its allies, mindful of the lessons of the Swift boat attacks of 2004, have begun an aggressive, multi-pronged attack on an advertisement running in swing states that seeks to link the Democratic presidential candidate to former domestic terrorist William Ayers.
With threats of legal action, boycotts and a response ad launched quietly to avoid publicity, the Obama campaign has put conservative donors and television stations on notice that 2008 will not be 2004, when Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, waited weeks to respond to attacks on his Vietnam War record and ultimately did so ineffectively. Christian Pinkston, a spokesman for the American Issues Project, which is airing the anti-Obama ad, called the response intimidation and harassment.
Obama campaign lawyer Robert F. Bauer replied: "If someone rides up to a convenience store with a sawed-off shotgun and a prior record, I'm not intimidating anybody by calling the cops. . . . If this [Republican] campaign is going to be run in McCarthyite fashion by lawbreakers in an illegal way, they are going to pay a price."
Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical organization that claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974. He is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an expert on public school reform.
The ad, financed with a $2.9 million donation from Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, a fundraising bundler for Sen. John McCain's Republican campaign, says that Obama has defended Ayers as "respectable" and "mainstream" and that he launched his political career from Ayers's home. The Obama campaign says the assertions are demonstrably false.
"Why would Barack Obama be friends with somebody who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it?" intones a voice on the ad, which is running in conservative areas of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. "Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?"
The ad is no video stunt, said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising. It began running last Thursday, and as of Tuesday, $360,000 had been spent on 264 showings, 52 of them in the Grand Rapids, Mich., media market, just under 40 around Cincinnati, 18 in Norfolk, and half a dozen around Pittsburgh, a corner of Pennsylvania that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton dominated in the spring Democratic primary battle.
"Certainly it connects with base voters," Tracey said. "If you can't get excited about voting for McCain, these are the kinds of ads that get them excited about voting against Obama."
The television spot has left Obama with the same dilemma that Kerry faced four years ago: Respond and risk pushing the issue onto the political talk shows and front pages of newspapers, or ignore it and hope the attack will not sink in. Kerry, convinced that few would believe that a decorated Vietnam combat veteran would fabricate his war record, chose to ignore the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. When he finally responded, his national advertisement stoked the issue all over again.
Obama campaign officials are taking a different tack. They are running an ad to counter the Ayers spot in the same media markets, but they did so with no national media announcement or news conference. The ad itself blames McCain for the independent Ayers campaign, accusing him of "talking about the '60s" and crimes Ayers committed when Obama was 8 years old, instead of war spending, economic crisis and tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas.
Simmons, who helped finance the 2004 Swift boat campaign, has raised $50,000 to $100,000 for McCain's bid, according to the campaign's Web site. Ed Failor Jr., who sits on the American Issues Project board, was an adviser and paid consultant for the McCain campaign. A news release announcing Failor's joining of the McCain presidential exploratory committee was recently removed from the candidate's Web site.
The counter ad is only part of the Obama team's response. Bauer has written legal letters to television stations, asserting that the Ayers ad is illegal and false, and that its airing is subject to a Federal Election Commission penalty. Obama did not call Ayers "respectable" and "mainstream," Bauer said. Those words were used by a journalist in an article that was posted along with many others on the Obama campaign Web site.
McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers called it "100 percent misleading" to blame the Republican for an ad he had nothing to do with. He said the campaign has had no discussions with Simmons about the ad, the issue or the organization. Failor has not been involved in the McCain campaign for more than a year, Rogers said.
But Rogers made no effort to distance McCain from the Ayers issue. "If he thinks his long association with an unrepentant domestic terrorist is nothing the American people should be concerned about, he's delusional or naive," Rogers said of Obama. "The guy's running for president. It's an issue."
Ayers did hold a gathering for him in 1995 when Obama first ran for the Illinois Senate, and he later contributed $200 to his reelection campaign. But Bauer said that hardly constitutes launching the political career of a University of Chicago Law School lecturer and the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, who had just published his first memoir, "Dreams From My Father."
A Bauer letter to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Keeney challenges him to make good on a promise to vigorously act in the face of "a knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law."
More than 93,000 pro-Obama e-mails have flooded Sinclair Broadcasting Group stations that are running the ad, many of them threatening to boycott the stations and their advertisers. Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor warned that other stations that accept the ad can expect the same response.
Efforts to stop the Ayers ad have not come only from the Obama campaign. A film company in Berkeley, Calif., that made an Oscar-nominated documentary in 2004 on the Weather Underground group has issued a cease-and-desist letter to the American Issues Project, saying that it illegally appropriated copyright images from the film for the ad. Brook Dooley, an attorney for the Free History Project, said shots of Ayers speaking into a camera in an interview and the aftermath of a Weather Underground bombing were copyrighted. The group has informed about 150 stations in Ohio and Michigan of its objection, but Dooley said no decisions have been made about legal action.
Separately, a new effort by Democratic strategist Tom Matzzie, called Accountable America, is aimed at warning conservative donors of the legal thicket they may be entering by financing independent attack ads like the Ayers spot. He said his group's first target is Simmons.
Pinkston said his group and his donors are undaunted.
"The Obama campaign has raised this to front-page news, frankly, with this response ad, with these legal attacks, with their outreach to reporters," he said.
Biden's long career filled with triumphs and tragedies"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate," he wrote in his memoirs.
Jerry Kremer, a former state assemblyman from Long Beach and Biden fundraiser, recalled how stoic Biden was after the plagiarism scandal. "He'd already had a lot of bad things in life happen to him. He didn't say, 'I'm going to quit politics.' His attitude was, 'I may not be viable now, but someday, I will be,'" Kremer said.
And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes - not even close. On Dec. 18, 1972, five weeks after Biden was elected to the Senate, his wife Neilia, infant daughter Naomi and sons Beau and Hunt were out in the family station wagon getting a Christmas tree when a tractor-trailer broadsided them.
Neilia and Naomi died in the crash. The boys were critically injured.
Biden devoted himself to the care of his sons and was sworn in at the bedside of one of them before they both recovered fully, growing up to become lawyers. In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have a daughter, Ashley. He still will not work on Dec. 18, the date of the accident, and afterward began the practice, kept to this day, of commuting from his home near Wilmington, on Amtrak, 80 minutes to and from Washington.
A NOUN, A VERB, AND P.O.WAfter the McCain campaign responded to yesterday's flap over the senator's untold number of homes by emphasizing his background as a former prisoner of war, I started wondering just how often Team McCain plays this card.
Perusing the last couple of weeks, I found four examples: 1) in response to questions about McCain's marital infidelities; 2) in response to criticism of McCain's healthcare plan; 3) in response to a question about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh; and 4) in response to allegations he may have heard the questions in advance of Rick Warren's recent candidate forum.
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein went a little further, noting that McCain also emphasized his background as a prisoner of war while railing against earmarks and again when talking about his taste in music.
So Much For McCain's Integrity - Exploits Religion and POW HistoryThen this: I've also been unable to locate the actual alleged passage in the Gulag Archipelago that is referred to in Luke Veronis' "The Sign Of The Cross." (If anyone does, please let me know.) But a reader notes that the story of Solzhenitsen and the cross in the dirt was popularized by evangelical leader and former Watergate crook, Chuck Colson. The anecdote appears in Colson's 1983 book, "Loving God." Here's the relevant passage:
Like other prisoners, Solzhenitsen worked in the fields, his days a pattern of backbreaking labor and slow starvation. One day the hopelessness became too much to bear. Solzhenitsen felt no purpose in fighting on, his life would make no ultimate difference. Laying his shovel down, he walked slowly to a crude work-site bench. He knew at any moment a guard would order him up and, when he failed tro respond, bludgeon him to death, probably with his own shovel. He'd seen it happen many times.
As he sat waiting, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he lifted his eyes. Next to him sat an old man with a wrinkled, utterly expressionless face. Hunched over, the man drew a stick through the sand and Solzhenitsen's feet, deliberately tracing out the sign of the cross.
As Solzhenitsen started at that rough outline, his entire perspective shifted. He knew he was merely one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in that moment, he also knew that the hope of all mankind was represented by that simple cross - and through its power, anything was possible. Solzhenitsen slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work - not know that his writings on truth and freedom would one day enflame the whole world.
This passage became popularized inn the 1970s by, among others, Jesse Helms, as the notes in "Loving God" explain:
"The story about Alexander Solzhenitsen and the old man who made the sign of the cross was first told by Solzhenitsyn to a group of Christian leaders and later recounted by Billy Graham in his New Year's telecast, 1977. It has been retold subsequently, most publicly by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)."
Now here's the 1999 Mark Salter version of the McCain story:
After one difficult interrogation, I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift, 10:00 p.m. to 4 a.m. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes...
One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn't smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged my humanity.
One detail has changed: McCain's first version has the guard making the sign with his feet, while the latest ad shows the sign being made with Solzhenitsen's stick. So the ad itself is closer in imagery to the Colson account than to Salter's. But the trope is exactly the same: the silent communication, the total stranger, the desolation, and the cross. And, of course, this has profound Christian symbolic reference. Every Christian will immediately associate the drawing in the dirt with a stick with Jesus and the woman caught in adultery: another moment of unexpected mercy.
One more thing: McCain's various stories only talk of one guard - "the only real human being that I ever met over there". And yet the guard who loosened his ropes in May 1969 could not have been present the following Christmas, as McCain had been transferred to another location (unless the transfer occurred between Christmas and New Year of 1969 and unless the guard was transferred to exactly the same camp at the same time). * full article at link
McCain Broke Pledge To Stay in 'Cone of Silence'Buckle up, because this one is pretty incredible -- and if my hunch is right, it's all an attempt to distract attention from McCain's apparent theft of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the Dirt" story.
It starts with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who has now sent an angry letter to NBC News chief Steve Capus whining about Andrea Mitchell's performance on Meet The Press earlier today. Here's the Mitchell quote that Davis cites in his letter:
ANDREA MITCHELL: The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared.
But earlier in the day, McCain Deputy Communications Director Michael Goldfarb used those exact same words as evidence for this point:
The Obama campaign, shocked that John McCain would have the temerity to upstage their celebrity candidate on national television, is now struggling to find an explanation. According to Andrea Mitchell's reporting earlier today on Meet the Press, the only explanation the Obama campaign could come up with was foul play.
Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, Goldfarb's own post confirmed the suspicions of Mitchell's sources. And as Nate Silver points out, the Rick Davis letter provides even more evidence confirming the basic allegation -- that McCain wasn't in the cone of silence and therefore had the capacity to gain advanced warning.
(Update: The New York Times also confirms it -- McCain was not in the cone of silence. As debrazza noted, the McCain campaign's stunning defense is that McCain is a POW.)
McCain Needs to Be Asked If He'll "Repudiate and Denounce" Jerome CorsiEnter Jerome Corsi. He, not unlike Farrakhan, exists on the political fringe. Corsi has a history of making highly bigoted and offensive comments. He's the professional liar who co-wrote the "Swift Boat Veterans" book Unfit For Command (although he's not a veteran himself). He has spread 9/11 conspiracy theories, and he believes that George W. Bush has a "secret plan" to "erase the USA." Exactly how will Mr. Bush dismantle our nation? According to Corsi, he plans to lure us into a "North American Union" which will "erase our borders with Mexico and Canada." (Blame Canada!)
Corsi's inflammatory hatchet job on Obama has just been being published by Mary Matalin - who, in an ongoing arc of moral decline, has now apparently added "smear merchant" to her resumé. But, despite the fact that he says he's retracted his most inflammatory statements, Corsi's scheduled to appear on an avowedly "pro-White" radio show whose host has stated that "interracial sex is white genocide."
What was McCain's reaction when a journalist asked him today about Corsi's book? As CNN reports:
"Gotta keep your sense of humor," McCain responded, before his aides shuttled reporters away.
Unfit for Publication Corsi's The Obama Nation filled with falsehoods Summary: In its preface, Jerome Corsi compares his new book, The Obama Nation, to his 2004 book Unfit for Command. The comparison seems apt: Just as Unfit for Command contains false attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service, a Media Matters review finds that The Obama Nation similarly contains numerous falsehoods about Sen. Barack Obama.
The McCain and the Veterans VoteA couple of months ago, Time magazine posed the question: “Does McCain Have a Vets Problem?” The question hardly fits into the existing media narrative — John McCain is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. He shouldn’t, the argument goes, have any trouble winning over the support of other veterans.
But the narrative is incomplete, to put it mildly. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave McCain a grade of D for his record of voting against veterans (Obama got a B+), while the Disabled Veterans of America gave McCain a 20% vote rating. The Vietnam Veterans of America compiled a list of key votes, and found McCain voted against the group’s position 15 times and with the group eight times. (Obama, in contrast, voted with the VVA 12 times, and against it only once.)
With that in mind, when McCain went to Las Vegas over the weekend to speak to the Disabled American Veterans, perhaps it shouldn’t have been too big a surprise that the presumptive Republican nominee received lukewarm support.
Sen. John McCain, speaking to disabled veterans Saturday in Las Vegas, attacked his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, for his foreign policy record, while also proposing a program that would allow veterans to acquire health care at private hospitals and not just through the Veterans Affairs Department.
The veterans, at Bally’s for their national convention, gave him a tepid reception, especially considering McCain’s life story.
McCain the Antichrist?Biblical scholars in Colorado Springs have uncovered startling evidence that Senator John McCain may be the Antichrist. Their conclusions, while highly controversial, may have a dramatic impact on the 2008 elections, since many Bible-believing Christians have already expressed doubts about McCain’s fealty to Christianity.
The analysis was conducted by the respected True Bible Society, and it will be published next month in the End Times Journal.
The analysis was especially ironic, given that it came out just one day after McCain was accused of subtly hinting that Barack Obama could be the Antichrist. McCain ran a commercial depicting Obama as “The One,” giving rise to charges that he was sending a subliminal messages to anti-Obama Christians.
“What started us looking at this issue is the fact that Senator McCain has declared his intention to maintain US forces in Iraq for a hundred years,” said David Jenkins, a leading Biblical scholar. “That means that McCain wants to control Babylon for at least a century.” According to many scholars of the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist will try to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon in order to use it as a springboard for an international effort at world domination. Ultimately, the Antichrist will marshal forces from Babylon to spark a showdown with Christian and Jewish-led forces in the battle of Armageddon.
“We believe that the End Times is near, based on the pattern of wars, earthquakes. and other strange phenomena we’ve been witnessing since the start of the New Millennium,” said Jenkins. “Given that it may be imminent, the person who controls Babylon must be the Antichrist.” Until 2003, many Christians believed that Saddam Hussein might be the Antichrist, since he started excavations to restore Babylon in the mid 1970s. But Hussein’s death meant that the Antichrist is someone else. Since Obama wants to get out of Iraq, he can’t be the Antichrist either, concluded Jenkins.
Jenkins said his teams suspicions were further heightened when genealogical research showed that McCain’s great-grandfather was actually not John McCain, but John Mihai. Mihai is an ancient Romanian name, and according to Bible-believing Christians, the Antichrist is likely to be a Romanian. “What clinched it for us was that the name Mihai means ‘who is like the Lord,’” said Jenkins. “As far as we’re concerned, that was enough. It means that McCain might easily pretend to be the Redeemer.”
McCain’s geniality and folksiness are consistent with his being the Antichrist, Jenkins said. “Many people think that the Antichrist will be a evil-seeming leader, but in fact the Bible tells us that he will be charming.”
Confronted by Brewer over falsehood, Corsi responds with two moreWhen MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer pointed out that Jerome Corsi falsely claimed in his new book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions, August 2008), that Sen. Barack Obama did not dedicate his memoir, Dreams From My Father, to his mother and grandparents, Corsi responded with two more falsehoods. Media Matters for America has previously identified one of the two falsehoods, but there's another. In responding to Brewer -- in addition to misrepresenting the falsehood that Media Matters for America identified -- Corsi also falsely suggested that it is only in the 2004 edition that Obama dedicates Dreams from My Father to his family. In fact, both the 1995 and 2004 editions of Dreams contain an introduction in which Obama dedicates the book to his family.
During an interview with Corsi on the August 5 edition of MSNBC Live, Brewer, citing a report by Media Matters on The Obama Nation's numerous falsehoods, pointed out that contrary to Corsi's assertion that Obama did not dedicate the book to his mother or his grandparents, "it says right in the introduction that it's dedicated to his family." Corsi responded, in part, "In the introduction that he wrote after, this was going with the second book." In fact, Obama's statement, "[i]t is to my family, though, my mother, my grandparents, my siblings, stretched across oceans and continents that I owe the deepest gratitude and to whom I dedicated this book," is included in the introduction to both the 1995 edition (page xi) and 2004 edition (page xvii) of Dreams.
Tire Gauges and Senator ObamaWho knew that telling people to properly maintain their vehicles for maximum gas efficiency was some sort of craaaazy gaffe?
Let’s review. The other day, Barack Obama mentioned to voters in Missouri that there are things individuals can do to help conserve energy, including bringing their cars in for regular tune ups, and keeping their tires properly inflated. It seemed like a rather unremarkable thing to say.
But at this point, Republicans can’t seem to stop commenting on just how remarkable they think this is.
That Obama is so crazy! But Republicans Arnold Schwartzenneger and Charlie Crist said the same thing:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., and Charlie Crist, R-Florida, according to the Los Angeles Times "appealed to those with the real power to make change -- average citizens -- to drive slower, keep engines tuned and tires properly inflated, to buy hybrids and lower overall consumption."
Remember, Crist is on McCain's shortlist, and Schwarzenegger would be a shoo-in for the veep nomination if he wasn't foreign-born. Of course, they didn't realize at the time that speaking of common sense, practical ways to increase one's gas mileage and save money would get in the way of the last GOP anti-Obama smear.
Oh, and those liberals at NASCAR are also talking crazy.
Tires are the Rodney Dangerfield of the automotive world. Even though they're the only component of the car that actually touches the pavement, tires "get no respect."
Tires influence the braking, steering, comfort, handling, fuel efficiency and driving safety of every vehicle, but are often ignored or misunderstood by many consumers. Tires pound over potholes, careen off curbs and screech to a halt, but the prevailing public sentiment is, "They're round, black and have tread. Beyond that, who cares?"
With gas prices now hovering around $3, smart drivers care. Savvy consumers are seeking to increase fuel economy and the life of their tires by paying more attention to those rubber objects that are attached to their vehicle [...]
Tires that are underinflated by 6 to 7 pounds per square inch increase tire rolling resistance 10 percent or more, increase tread wear rates and tire fatigue. When a tire is underinflated, the tire's road contact zone and cyclic stress level changes resulting in undesirable loss in tire and vehicle performance [...]
With escalating fuel prices, the time is now for drivers to focus on simple things like proper tire pressure to maximize tire performance and increase fuel economy.
Someone wave a tire gauge at Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnhardt Jr! Craaaaaazy!
Is this the 2008 version of the purple bandaid?
Content courtesy DailyKos
Running While BlackGee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office - say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford - the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.
Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us - the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an extraordinary front-page article that began:
“For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.”
Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he - Senator Obama - would not have to lose an election.
Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.
The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”
Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.
The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches - a man who obviously does not know his place.
Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this - the sole reason - is that he is black.
So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his listeners, to let them know he’s not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.
Mr. Obama told them: “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”
The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.
But John McCain didn’t appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain camp started bellowing, and it hasn’t stopped since. With great glee bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign’s operatives and the candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the campaign - playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of the deck.
Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain’s motivation.
Did McCain's foreign-policy advisor profit from the Iraq warAs recently as last year, John McCain's senior foreign-policy and national security advisor, a neoconservative who played a leading role in pushing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was trying to use his role in promoting the Iraq war to make money off Iraqi oil. In a confidential memo, a company called World Strategic Energy, for which top McCain aide Randy Scheunemann was an executive consultant, told prospective investors that Scheunemann could help World Strategic Energy win oil contracts in Iraq because he was well-connected in the Iraqi exile community and had been a "key player" in getting the U.S. involved in Iraq. The memo was first published by blogger and Salon contributor Lindsay Beyerstein, who wrote that the 44-page brochure-style "placement memorandum" was being circulated to potential investors as late as 2007.
