John McCain talks a big game, but does he have the chops to be commander in chief?

More Please!  At the moment only airing in Georgia... CNN?  This is the first true Obama "Kidney Punch" of the season, lets see if the Media bites.  Clearly it indicates a foul quid-pro-quo... low blow yes... effective? YES  Finally some Chicago style bloodsport...

Script

"It was one of Washington’s biggest scandals. And the Republican power broker Ralph Reed was in the middle of it. In deep with convicted felon and lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"But when the Senate investigated, the senator in charge never even called Reed to testify....And that senator? John McCain. And who’s now raising money for McCain’s campaign? Ralph Reed. For 26 years in Washington, John McCain’s played the same old games. We just can’t afford more of the same."

So, a little poll from Zogby comes out and lots of people are in freakout mode, and Kos has front-paged about how silly that is.

Good.

Let me add one little bit o' info to the fire for each of you to chew on...

Anybody here remember 1992?

Andrew Sullivan makes an excellent point.

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

Crazy, huh?

You can find more posts on climate change science, policy, and news on Climate 411.
 

Have you ever spent time scrolling through NASA's image gallery? Some of the pictures are absolutely mesmerizing. I particularly like "Blue Marble" (below the fold), which was stitched together using satellite data.
 
Satellites provide more than pretty pictures, though. Our ability to understand and predict climate change depends on continuous high-quality satellite data.
 
Unfortunately, this critical data stream is threatened by budget cuts and lack of political support. In 2005, the National Academies assessed the situation and deemed it "alarming". Three years later, the outlook has not improved.
 
Follow me over the fold to learn more about why this is important, how this critical resource is threatened, and what the next administration needs to do about it.

CROSSPOSTED AT STRATEGY08.

I don't find much to quibble with on Slinkerwink's post critical of the Obama press machine (though I think the calls to fire Burton are premature). To my mind, the Obama Camp has been suffering though a number of missteps since returning from his overseas trip:

So over at the post announcing the launch of my book, I saw a couple of people freaking out -- freaking out!!!! -- that McCain has the lead in some national polls.

So I sauntered over to Pollster.com to see what all the hoopla was about, and clicked through to their national polls page.  Then I rolled my eyes when I saw that the poll causing such aneurysms was ....

A Zogby poll.

Some people are frackin' hopeless. Really. At the same time, a new Q-poll has Obama up five, Gallup has him up three (after being tied a couple of days ago), Ras has him up two, as does Bloomberg/Times.

Look, the race is tightening at the national level, but it's much less tight when you look at the state-by-state numbers that, you know, actually decide the presidency. So while it's not exactly a cakewalk, freaking out over single polls from shitty, discredited pollsters like Zogby is pretty pathetic.

We've got the veep announcements and the conventions to get through, and then the race will start in earnest. Be zen. Freaking out over crappy pollsters is just lame. Keep your eye on the composite -- Obama still leads that by 1.4 percent -- and maintain perspective -- McCain has never crossed the 45 percent threshold while Obama bobs between 45 and 50.

I'll be officially worried when McCain shows the ability to break that barrier of support. If he suddenly starts hovering in the upper 40s, then we might have trouble. But ultimately, this is a state-by-state battle. And in the electoral college fight, Obama still has a solid lead -- without even taking into account the ground machine Obama is building (pollsters aren't).

These days you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an article speculating about potential vice presidential running mates for Barack Obama or John McCain. But today's entry from the New York Times does include one line that's worth noting, when the concerns of social conservatives about the possibility of McCain choosing the pro-choice Tom Ridge is dismissed by other conservatives who said:

...that Mr. McCain’s recent public flirtation with Tom Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor who supports abortion rights, was as much to give the appearance that Mr. McCain had an open mind on the issue as it was an embrace of Mr. Ridge.

So, these anonymous conservatives cheerfully admit that McCain willingly misled people about a possible running mate to "give the appearance" of an open mind. There's some straight talk for you.

As readers know, Slinkerwink and I have been fed up with Obama’s milquetoast, undisciplined press strategy. For all the talk about how miserable a candidate McCain is, he says something, his advertising echoes it, his press releases repeat it, and his surrogates are disciplined and drill in the same talking points over and over. Obama’s camp wants to get something across, they put the candidate out there to say something once in a town hall and then they drop it. No surrogates. No repetition. No discipline.

Now, to get this out of the way, Obama is, in our opinion, one of the best candidates we’ve had in years and, more importantly, will make a great president. And on the ground, in terms of organization, his campaign is incredibly impressive. But a ground-game cannot make up the difference for lacking a coherent strategy for setting a macro-narrative, and it’s mind-boggling to think they’ve let McCain hit them with the “celebrity” tag over and over for a month now with no response.

So, in interests of DOING something instead of just complaining about it, Slinkerwink and I are launching a new project: putting out our own proposed press releases and talking points.  

I'm talking to all of you people who sit on your asses, bitching about how luke-warm the Obama campaign is, how it's not going negative enough, it's not refuting enough, it's not active enough. And then you just sit on your asses and keep bitching.

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DOOD. Whr R U?

wtf?

what u mean, wtf? we r takng off!

wtf?

oil rig. chopper. etc.

FAHK! that was 2day?

nvrmnd. Im going. u owe me.

tx.

On his blog, Michael Moore has posted a letter to Caroline Kennedy!  He urges her to "Pull a Cheney"!!

I'll let the inimitable Mr. Moore speak for himself...

BENEATH THE SPIN    • ERIC L. WATTREE

The Crabs Are On The Move

Well, they’re at it again, y’all.  A small minority of Black people are hard at work doing everything they can to undermine the Black community.  This time it’s in the guise of trying to drag down Barack Obama by promoting Cynthia McKinney’s dead-on-arrival candidacy with the Green Party.

Reuters is reporting that McCain now has a five point lead over Obama.  Like all polls, this one is just a data point, and people should not get too high or low over any one poll.

In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

McCain leads Obama among likely U.S. voters by 46 percent to 41 percent, wiping out Obama's solid 7-point advantage in July and taking his first lead in the monthly Reuters/Zogby poll.

Poll shows McCain in 5-point lead over Obama

More, after the fold.

One more round on the Church thing--but perhaps from another angle.  Pardon me if this thought has been posted before, but I haven't seen it.

As far as the Saddleback thing goes, couldn't Obama have pulled a Stephen Colbert/Press Club thing that night?

By that I mean, while McCain was speaking to the audience in front of him and ignoring the fact that the nation was watching, Obama was speaking to all of us.

"We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves, from ourselves."
-Fictional Maverick John McCain

Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.
-Fictional Character William Adama, Battlestar Galctica

I'm through with it.  I'm sick of listening to, as one diarist referred to it, The Legend of John McCain.  And because I am sick of it, because forcing myself to watch his zombie base mindlessly applaud his pandering, talking points performance at Rick Warren's bloated, ego driven Christianity for Happy and Bigoted Capitalists Forum unsettled me for the last three days, I am going to rant and attack.

It should be noted from the outset that this diary is not moralistic--it is not cut from a we're-above-this-type-of-ugly-campaigning cloth. But this diary also is not a case for a new, Democratic Swiftboating campaign to be waged against McCain.

Instead, what follows is a brief exploration of how, in both substance and form, the "McCain wasn't tortured" line mirrors almost perfectly the attacks waged against Kerry in 2004.

Whether it's an attack strategy that WE should use is up to the masses, or Obama, or both. (Or some rogue 527.)

McCain says because he survived 5½ years of brutal torture, while a prisoner of the communist Vietnamese, he is better qualified to be president of the United States than any other candidate. McCain claims his POW sufferings included three years in solitary confinement where he was tortured so badly that he "broke," causing him to attempt suicide.