but I love McCain’s Bazooka Joe imitation.  Or Popeye, or whatever.  I wish he’d get an eyepatch.

The Washington Post reports on the incoherency of John McCain’s positions on environmental issues.  For example, when it comes to drilling for oil off the shores of California or Florida, he is a federalist.  When it comes to drilling in Alaska, he opposes it as though it was drilling in the Grand Canyon or the Everglades (though the latter is in Florida, last I checked).  Except if it is attached to a must-pass defense spending bill, in which case he reluctantly votes for drilling in the ANWR.

The WaPo also reports that McCain has made the environment one of the key elements of his presidential bid, but “follows a fairly instinctive approach to deciding environmental questions,” and does not boast an extensive staff of experts on these issues.  Given that the environment ranks low in every poll of issues important to Americans, one might wonder whay McCain has spent so much political capital annoying conservatives and green groups alike, with no clear payoff among the electorate and no overarching principles motivating him.  It is probably best seen as an example of what our host Jeff Goldstein has called “essentially a progressive mindset that lurches toward conservatism whenever the mood strikes.”  In this case, he probably thinks he looks like Teddy Roosevelt, but it’s more Bull than Moose.

The latest campaign dispatch from Newsweek fawns over Barack Obama and smears Republicans enough to provoke a response from John McCain canpaign adviser Mark Salter (an e-mail which the mag chose to reproduce as an Adobe Acrobat document; no bias there):

…The characterization of Republican presidential campaigns as nothing more than attack machines that use 527s and other means to smear opponents strikes us as pretty offensive. Is that how Ronald Reagan won two terms? Do they really think other Republican presidential candidates were elected because they ran dirtier campaigns than their opponents? Or could it be that they were better candidates or ran better campaigns or maybe more voters agreed with their position on important issues? From the beginning of their article, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe offered a biased implication that Republicans have won elections and will try to win this one simply by tearing down through disreputable means their opponents. You can see why many Republicans and voters and our campaign might take issue with that.

Suggesting that that we can expect a whispering campaign from the McCain campaign or the Republican Party about Senator Obama’s race and the false charge that he is a Muslim is scurrilous. Has John McCain ever campaigned that way? On the contrary, he has on numerous occasions denounced tactics offensive tactics from campaigns, 527s and others, both Democratic and Republican. By the way, which party had more 527 and other independent expenditure ads made on its behalf in 2004? It wasn’t us.

By accepting the Obama campaign construct as if it were objective, Evan and Richard framed this race exactly as Senator Obama wants it to be framed – every issue that raises doubts about his policy views and judgment is part of a smear campaign intended to distract voters from the real issues at stake in the election, and, thus, illegitimate…

Of course they did.  Four years ago, Evan Thomas famously commented:

Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win… They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them… that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

Perhaps Team McCain has somehow deluded itself into thinking that the good coverage McCain got as the alternative to George W. Bush in 2000 will be repeated this year, all evidence to the contrary.

For example, Salter is peeved at Newsweek’s coverage of recent dust-up between Obama and John McCain over Hamas, but the New York Times gave even more distorted coverage of the dispute yesterday, in a story which included this passage about Obama’s Illinois campaigns:

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama hewed closely to liberal orthodoxy, positions that have become controversial in the presidential race. A candidate questionnaire from one liberal group, for instance, detailed his views on hot-button issues like the death penalty (opposed) and a ban on handguns (in favor).

Today, Mr. Obama espouses more centrist views and says a campaign aide had incorrectly characterized his views on those issues — a shift that does not sit well with some in the group, the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization [IVI-IPO].

“We certainly thought those were his positions,” said David Igasaki, the group’s chairman, who noted Mr. Obama had also interviewed with the group. “We understand that people change their views. But it sort of bothers me that he doesn’t acknowledge that. He tries to say that was never his view.”

In any event, the group endorsed Mr. Obama, and he was easily elected to the State Senate in 1996.

The NYT could not be bothered to report that Obama’s handwriting appears on an amended version of the questionnaire, making his account of the dispute transparently laughable.  The NYT is also allowing Obama’s campaign to claim that Obama never said he would meet “unconditionally” with Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad, when he said he would on national television, on his own website and in the pages of the NYT.  Contrast this with the paper’s series of lame attacks on McCain (as though there was not ample legit criticism to be raised against Maverick) to get a picture of what the general election holds for McCain’s media coverage.

More generally, McCain has not gotten net positive coverage from the broadcast nets and newsweeklies since the final week of March.  He has received net positive coverage in only four weeks since February 11th.  In contrast, during the same period, Obama received net negative coverage in only four weeks.  The establishment media remains silent when Obama distorts McCain’s comments on Iraq and the economy, or talks about visiting 57 states, choosing instead to lob softball after softball to Obama.  Most telling, most of the establishment media adopts whatever spin Obama chooses to put on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, even though Obama’s claims that he was ignorant of Wright’s controversial sermons are also transparently laughable.

As a candidate seemingly headed toward public welfare financing and a greater reliance on free or “earned” media, McCain had better shake off the highway hypnosis of the campaign trail long enough to realize that, having helped the liberals’ favorite Republican the nomination, the establishment media will now focus on getting liberals’ favorite Democrat the presidency.  Instead, the McCain campaign seems shocked to discover that they will get no credit for denouncing groups running ads about the Rev. Wright.  The straight-talk express will likely be run off the road by the double-talk express, but the press will report it as an accident at best.

(h/t Memeorandum.)

Evah!

Overheard in Athens:

• Protester: What do you think of abortion?
• Guy: I’m a guy, I don’t have an opinion.
• Protester: If you were forced to pick sides?
• Guy: I’d say late term ones are OK.
• Protester: How late?
• Guy: I’d say no later than after they are 20 years old.
• (Protester’s jaw drop)
• Guy: You don’t know if they are worth a shit till they are like 18, then ya figure a year or 2 to decide if you want to keep em.

I blame Gore.

Spell Checker Blues

Why? Because we love you.

Virtual strippers on your desktop!

“‘Raw Politics’: Religious right leaning toward Democrats?” is the headline; the reader is then informed:

“Raw Politics” on “Anderson Cooper 360″ delivers the latest political news with a wry sense of a humor and without spin.

The humor part may be true, as the “without spin” part is so laughably false.  The top graphs of the article:

For decades, evangelicals have been seen as solid supporters of the Republican Party. That could be changing.

The religious right, a cornerstone of the so-called Reagan revolution — the battle over abortion law, and gay marriage — wants a change.

At least some evangelicals do.

Backpedal much?  There are two quoted sources for this story.  The first is Os Guinness, who is angered by leaders of the Religious Right and recently signed a manifesto condemning Christians on the right and left for using faith to express political views without regard to the truth of the Bible.  The second source is Mara Vanderslice of Common Good Strategies, a group that works with the Democratic party.  So we have a story supposedly about the Religious right that ends up being about “some evangelicals” and containing no quotes from anyone with the Religious right.

There is also the suggestion that the Reagan revolution was about the battle over abortion law and gay marriage, when the latter was not an issue and the former was part of a much broader coalition concerned about judicial activism, as well as progressive economic and foreign policies.

While not mentioned in the text of the article, there is an accompanying photo of Barack Obama, with a caption stating that he “has discussed faith and religion on the campaign trail.”  And it is true that Obama made extensive faith-based appeals at the outset of his campaign.  Indeed, earlier in this cycle, Obama was seen by voters as a more strongly religious person than every other major presidential hopeful.  Insofar as this year seems to be shaping up as part of a post-WWII, 16-year cycle of “change” elections, Obama was nicely positioning himself as a Northern version of Jimmy Carter — a religious man seeking to clean up Washington.  Such would appeal to the bloc of Mike Huckabee voters who are socially conservative, but have no problem in principle with government intervention to help the poor and so on.

However, as the campaign has worn on, Obama has been losing support among the religiously observant.  After the Pennsylvania primary, John B. Judis wrote:

In Maryland, he defeated Clinton among those who attended religious services weekly by 61 to 31 percent. By contrast, in Pennsylvania, he lost to Clinton among these voters by 58 to 42 percent and did best among voters who never attend religious services, winning them by 56 to 44 percent.

After North Carolina and Indiana, Judis noted the continuing trend:

Obama initially held his own among voters who attend church regularly. In New Hampshire, he bested Clinton by 37 to 32 percent among weekly churchgoers–and he didn’t have to include religious African Americans in the total. But Obama has increasingly lost this vote and gained adherents among the non-religious. In Indiana, he lost to Clinton among weekly and occasional churchgoers but defeated her among those who never attend church. That can hurt him in the fall in states Obama wants to win. In Virginia, for instance, weekly and occasional churchgoers made up 83 percent of the general electorate in 2004. The challenge for Obama will be to reach out to religious voters without reminding voters of his ties to Reverend Wright.

Wright was (and likely is) particularly a problem with the observant:

In both states, frequent churchgoers were more apt to say they were influenced by Wright than were less actively religious voters. In North Carolina, among those who said they attend religious services weekly, nearly six in 10 called Wright important to their vote, almost double the figure among those who never attend services. Even among Obama’s own supporters in the Tarheel state, 45 percent who attend services weekly called the controversy important to their vote; among those, a third who rated it “very important.”

In Indiana, the issue also split voters: About half of those who attend services weekly or occasionally rated the Wright issue important, while only a third of those who never attend services said the same.

Wright even dented Obama’s support among roughly half of black weekly churchgoers.

Obama started this campaign with an image that could have drawn the religiously observant into his camp in large numbers.  The Wright controversy, along with Obama’s own comments about small town Americans clinging to God and guns, seems to be losing him this advantage.  And with Obama the likely Democratic nominee, CNN’s reportage seems even more like wishful thinking than insightful analysis.

(h/t Memeorandum.)

Sunday’s New York Times has a lengthy piece on Barack Obama’s rise in Chicago’s political milieu, filled with hits and misses.  For example, even the caption of the lead photo shows Obama “campaigning for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, a race he easily won,” yet the piece never mentions that he won because he used legal challenges to disqualify all four of his Democratic primary rivals.  The NYT also makes no mention of the fact that Obama won his US Senate race largely because Democrat Blair Hull and Jack Ryan turned out to have scandal in divorce records unsealed due in no small part to the efforts of the Chicago Tribune, where — coincidentally enough — top Obama adviser David Axelrod used to work.  The Tribune itself reported that Obama’s campaign worked aggressively behind the scenes to fuel controversy about Hull’s filings.

The NYT discloses that after graduating from Harvard Law School, Obama was not recruited by the law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland so much as he recruited the firm. This is not the portrait of a man who chooses his associates casually.  (Indeed, Obama has written that he chose his friends carefully in college also, choosing many alienated Leftists.)

He used to the firm cultivate a network of influential supporters.  We already know a bit about his now-indicted political benefactor Tony Rezko.  But the NYT adds Marilyn Katz — a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society  – who introduced Obama to the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s. 

Given that the Weather Underground traces its roots to the SDS, this tidbit again begs the question of how far back Obama’s relationship with Weathercouple William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn really goes.  Not only does the NYT not explore that topic, the piece relays from Obama’s aides that he “was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home,” when it was actually Obama’s political coming out party to Hyde Park.  Moreover, the NYT never asks how Obama ended up as the director of the  Chicago Annenberg Challenge (a school reform organization co-founded by Ayers in late 1994 or early 1995), if the two had just met.  The paper does not ask because the paper reports that connection in terms so oblique that it is impossible to know whether the paper knows its full extent. 

Indeed, the NYT reports that Obama joined the board of the Woods Fund without mentioning that Ayers was also on the board, let alone that Ken Rolling, first Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, had been a program officer of the Woods Fund, let alone that Obama and Ayers funneled Woods grants to people like former PLO flack Rashid Khalidi.   That last is notable, given that the NYT does report on Obama’s social and relationship with Khalidi:

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

Still, Mr. Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

A.J. Wolf, a Hyde Park rabbi who is a friend of Mr. Obama’s and has often invited Mr. Khalidi to speak at his synagogue, said Mr. Obama had disappointed him by not being more assertive about the need for both Israel and the Palestinians to move toward peace. “He’s played all those notes right for the Israel lobby,” said Mr. Wolf, who is sometimes critical of Israel.

The paper softpedals that Khalidi was a director of the official PLO press agency when the US State Department considered the PLO a terrorist organization and the PLO was involved with terrorist attacks.  The NYT also reports that the American Israel Political Action Committee helped Obama out of a jam in 2004, without asking anyone there whether they knew of Obama’s longstanding relationship with Khalidi at the time.

The NYT also gets into some selective reporting with regard to the recent dust-up between Obama and John McCain over Hamas:

Though Mr. Obama has condemned Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, as a terrorist organization, just last week Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested that the group wanted to see Mr. Obama in the White House. Mr. Obama denounced that suggestion as a “smear.”

Apparently, the NYT thinks its readers do not need to know that Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef publicly said the terrorist group supports Obama’s foreign policy vision.

The NYT notes that while on the Woods board, Obama helped funnel money to groups with ties to organized labor “like Chicago Acorn, whose endorsement Mr. Obama sought and won in his State Senate race.”  The paper misses that Acorn was also a former client of Obama and that Obama helped train Acorn staffers.  And while the paper identifies Acorn as an “antipoverty” group, it is also frequently involved in scandal-ridden voter registration drives.  Both Obama and Acorn joined briefs urging the Supreme Court to overturn Indiana’s voter ID law.  Acorn’s national political arm has endorsed Obama, even as its ”non-partisan” wing gears up for another round of regstration drives.

The final segment of the NYT piece focuses on Obama’s embrace of Chicago’s machine politics  — a move antithetical to his roots in the “reform” movement and his current pledge to change the Old Politics of Washington.  Then again, his longstanding relationship with Acorn suggests that his interest in strict election law enforcement ended shortly after he got his opponents kicked off the ballot in 1996.

The article, for all of its flaws, reveals Obama as someone who purposefully sought to associate himself with with Leftists and radicals.  The paper allows Obama to obscure the depth of those relationships, while suggesting that Obama has been willing to ditch his Leftist allies as he relentlessly climbs the political ladder.  Whether Obama would leave his Leftist buddies in the lurch if he became President cannot be known.  But the NYT profile gives little reason for anyone to believe he would be a great unifier or reformer in that office.

Mom reading the Geneva Conventions.

Love you, Mom. I’ll think about you.

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother’s love is not.”

Thanks, Glenn. (h/t Karl)

Here’s Sarah W’s beautiful mother, as she’ll always remember her:

Thanks for the heads up to happyfeet. Pictures of other moms, present or departed, gladly posted.

Darleen’s mom (circa 1954) with Baby Darleen:

I think “completely fucked up” is more appropriate:

Planned Parenthood, a major abortion provider, is soliciting Mother’s Day gifts for itself.

In a May 3 e-mail blast, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s president, Cecile Richards, asked recipients to “Make a Mother’s Day Gift” by donating to the organization - a solicitation that some critics say is ironic given that many Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions. [emphasis mine]

(more…)

I have plans to don the old CITIZEN JOURNALIST garb and mingle with those who’ll be flocking to Denver for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. If you’d like to help support the site in general, or help with any of the expenses I’ll accrue while attending these events or infiltrating these groups, please go ahead and hit the Tip Jar (Amazon) or Donate button (PayPal). For Freedom! And Capitalism!

Thanks. Speak Truth to Power. Take it to the Man. Viva La Revolución!

Etc.

****
Saturday update: This is the home stretch, folks.

Help me pay for that Obama bobble head doll that I plan to wear on my shoulder like a glorious Hopey Changey epaulet. Unless you want to pitch in for an eye patch and a puffy shirt, as well. In which case I’ll wear it like a parrot.

Imagine my rapture as Obama whispers in my ear, instructing me to go forth and preach to the masses! Why, it is to swoon! Hell, I don’t doubt that I might even be called to talk in tongues…

In this case, “flat” is short for “flatulence” in Estonia:

Farmers this week received their first ‘fart tax’ demands asking them to pay for the greenhouse gases their cattle produce. A single cow is thought to produce on average 350 litres of methane and 1,500 litres of carbon dioxide per day from flatulence and burping. It is thought that cattle are responsible for up to 25 per cent of methane gas emissions in Estonia.

How long until progressives in the US propose this “flat” tax as a solution to the world’s problems?  They have already been laying the groundwork in California.