If we don’t want to see John McCain elected president, we need to chip away at his “maverick” image and demonstrate how he has marched in lockstep with the Bush White House.

This web video produced by the Democratic National Committee is a step in the right direction:

Help this video go viral by sending the link to friends, or putting it up on your blog if you have one. Alternatively, reward good behavior by making a donation to the DNC.

Tom Harkin has right-wing bloggers in a tizzy because he recently suggested that the military tradition in McCain’s family has given him a dangerously imbalanced worldview:

“I think one of the problems that John McCain has is that his grandfather was an admiral, his father was an admiral,” Harkin said on a conference call with Iowa Independent and other media. “He comes from a long line of just military people. I think his whole world view, his life view, has been shaped from a military viewpoint and he has a hard time of thinking beyond that. And I think he’s trapped in that, so everything is looked at sort of from his life experiences as always having been in the military and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”

I see what Harkin is getting at–McCain’s background makes him unlikely to get us out of Iraq and perhaps more likely to get us involved in other wars. Still, I don’t think this is good messaging against McCain. Americans are not going to reject his candidacy because he comes from too military of a family.

Harkin was on more solid ground when he talked about McCain’s “scary” temper. McCain has a long history of losing it that suggests he lacks the temperament to be president. This is a huge mark in Barack Obama’s favor, because Obama is much more even-tempered.

But for those who are tired of talking about McCain’s anger management problem, I offer ten more reasons not to support the GOP nominee:

1. Mr. Straight Talk can’t keep his story straight when it comes to Iraq, the economy, tax cuts or other issues. Brave New Films shows you the evidence in “The Real McCain 2”:

2. McCain has employed senior campaign workers with a history of lobbying for foreign corporations or brutal foreign regimes. In fact, the man McCain chose to run this summer’s Republican National Convention is a lobbyist whose firm represented the Burmese junta.

McCain’s campaign has fired at least six employees this month because of their lobbying ties, including his national finance co-chairman Tom Loeffler, whose firm collected millions from Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Even so, McCain is still employing Senior Political Adviser Charlie Black, who has lobbied for:

   * Ahmed Chalabi, the smooth talking Iraqi exile who helped manufacture the WMD charges against Saddam Hussien that led the U.S. to invade.

   * Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, found guilty of torture, executions, disappearances, and human rights violations, who hired Black to “improve” his image in the U.S.

   * Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who’s army massacred between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians in two years.

   * Dictator Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), who amassed a vast personal fortune and repressed rival political parties while his country’s children starved.

   * Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi of UNITA, an ally of apartheid-era South Africa, who started a civil war which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and ordered the torture and murder of countless opponents.

   * Nigerian Dictator Ibrahim Babangida ran a one-party regime, who arrested his opponents, and murdered journalists.

3. McCain has only released two years of his own tax returns and none of his wife Cindy’s tax returns, despite a growing consensus that the public has a right to know about McCain’s personal finances.

Why should you care? Because in the past Cindy McCain had business dealings with a crook whom Senator McCain helped bail out. We need to know if similar conflicts of interest exist today.

4. McCain’s campaign has underpaid for the use of his wife’s corporate jet, even though the self-styled campaign finance reformer has backed legislation that would require candidates to pay the real costs of using corporate jets.

Even after his hypocrisy on this issue was exposed, McCain continues to use his wife’s corporate jet for campaign purposes.

5. McCain’s foreign policy in in all meaningful ways the same as George Bush’s.

6. McCain is running for president on his “vast experience,” but he keeps confusing Sunnis with Shiites, even after being corrected by his buddy Joe Lieberman.

7. McCain says a lot of the problems in the U.S. economy are just “psychological.”

8. McCain’s judicial appointments would likely be the same kind of extreme conservatives George Bush has favored:

The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement.

9. McCain’s campaign has been bashing Obama for supposedly being willing to negotiate with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, but McCain said two years ago that the U.S. would have to engage Hamas if that group were running the Palestinian government.

10. McCain’s campaign blog misleadingly portrays the GOP candidate as a progressive, even though his voting record and stands on the issues are hard-line conservative.

For more on McCain’s record, see the Democratic National Committee’s new clearinghouse for research about him and MoveOn.org’s list of Ten Things You Should Know about John McCain.

By the way, McCain’s continuing problem with fundraising suggests that a lot of Republicans have their own reasons for not supporting the GOP nominee.

It’s incredible to think that even after a campaign that dragged on for months longer than the Republican nominating battle, the Democratic nominee is likely to have a financial edge over McCain this fall.

Feel free to post comments about other reasons not to support McCain that I’ve left out.

Someone has urged me not to pay much attention to the electoral vote trackers

on the front page of MyDD, because in some respects they differ from state polling averages you will find at pollster.com or at Real Clear Politics.

Jerome Armstrong, the founder of MyDD, addressed concerns about the electoral vote tracker in this post:

As it says, when you click on either of the map counters of EV’s:

“This Electoral Vote Map is updated constantly to forecast the 2008 Presidential election based on the latest available state polling.”

The very latest poll in each state, without weighting or averaging.

There isn’t a bias as to the pollster, if you see the poll listed as credible on Pollster.com, or RealClearPolitics.com, it’ll be included. But, if the latest poll is tied, then the result remains the same as the previous latest poll.

This is a forecast made by the very latest poll. If you see a mistake, perhaps a poll was missed that is the latest, then point it out, and one of the admins will make the change.

The forecast isn’t a prediction of the election, but a simple up-to-the-minute poll temperature of the state polling.

(update) And yes, you can edit the map yourself, as one user explains:

1) When you first log onto mydd, it populates the two maps with the most recent single poll for each state.

2) If you then click on the map and change it (for example, you don’t believe that Hillary would lose WA to McCain), the numbers update to your settings – now it becomes like an EV calculator

3) The next time you log on, or refresh the page even, the counters go back to their poll-generated state.

Polling averages (for instance, of the five most recent polls in a state) are great when you have several polls taken within a short period of time, as we’re likely to have this fall.

But I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to average the last five polls in a state if that takes you back a couple of months.

Some people have objected that the MyDD tracker recently showed Iowa in Clinton’s column against McCain. That was based on a Research 2000 poll taken on April 22 and 23, which showed her slightly ahead of him, 43-42. Currently, the most recent poll is from Rasmussen on May 13, which showed McCain beating Clinton in Iowa 45-42. As you can see if you click over to MyDD, Iowa is now red for McCain against Clinton.

You may prefer polling averages to whatever the latest poll says, and I will too, once we start getting more frequent releases of state polls. For now, I think that MyDD’s methodology is sound.

Armstrong is probably the blogosphere’s most prominent Obama critic, and Clinton supporters usually dominate the recommended diary list at MyDD, but I encourage you not to write off everything you see at that site, even if you don’t like Clinton. Anyway, front-pager Jonathan Singer is a big Obama advocate.

Scout Finch put up a link to this article about Bob Barr announcing his presidential candidacy:

He first must win the Libertarian nomination at the party’s national convention that begins May 22. Party officials consider him a front-runner thanks to the national profile he developed as a Georgia congressman from 1995 to 2003.

Barr, 59, helped lead Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He quit the Republican Party two years ago, saying he had grown disillusioned with its failure to shrink government and its willingness to scale back civil liberties in fighting terrorism.

I despised Barr during the 1990s, and I still think impeaching Clinton was an abuse of the process intended to punish presidential “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But I have to admit that he has shown a sincere belief in conservative principles during the past few years. Read this article about the reception he got at the February 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference:

“Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights?” Barr beseeched the several hundred conservatives at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. “Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle?”

Barr answered in the affirmative. “Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?” he posed. “I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes.”

But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. “I can’t believe I’m in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States,” Sorcinelli fumed.

Even if he only gets a percent or two of the vote, Barr could throw some states to Barack Obama this November.

John McCain still has problems with some elements of the conservative base, including libertarians who voted for Ron Paul in the primaries. In a few states, such as Nevada, Paul outpolled McCain in the GOP primaries.

Neiaprogressive noted that Paul got 8 percent of the vote in the Indiana and North Carolina GOP primaries last week. That’s after he received nearly 16 percent of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary.

It will be interesting to see if the beltway media give Barr more coverage than a minor-party presidential candidate would usually receive. He was an important figure in Washington for many years.

cross-posted to Daily Kos

When Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman was running for president in 2003, I started getting e-mails from his campaign regularly. I had never donated to him, but I figured that he must have bought the Iowa Democratic Party’s e-mail list before he decided to bypass the Iowa caucuses.

At some point during Lieberman’s campaign against Ned Lamont in 2006, I unsubscribed from the list.

So I was surprised to find the following message from “Joe Lieberman” (sending address “info@joe2006.com”) in my in-box this morning, with a subject line of “Opting back in to the Joe Lieberman mailing list”:

You have requested to be opted back into the Joe Lieberman email list.

To confirm your subscription, please click this link or paste it into your browser:

(https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:OptIn/state:Confirm/signupId:6421/mid:4121.85946391)

If you do not wish to be added to our list, no further action is required.

What a lie. I never requested to be added back on his e-mail list, and I never would do so now that he is actively campaigning for John McCain.

He is probably just trying to build a bigger list so that he can make the case against our eventual nominee.

Talk about a guy who learned all the wrong lessons in life.

Anyone else out there get the same e-mail?

UPDATE: To clarify, this e-mail came to my other account (the one that uses my real name), not to the address that is published in my profile here and at various other blogs (desmoinesdem AT yahoo.com).

At Daily Kos, commenter josephk says

the email, as has been described and the process through which it found its way into the diarists inbox … looks more like a ‘live email address confirmation’ for a specific demographic

Live confirmed email addresses that have a certain demographic profile (in this case a Liebermann supporter) are of much more value than just a random list that is 2 years out of date

there is nothing ‘dark and nefarious’ as the diarist suggests, nor is it as innocuous as You suggest

it is just simple email marketing

Well, yes, I get e-mail marketing messages all the time, but they don’t (and shouldn’t) start with the deceptive claim that I asked to be opted into their list.

When was the last time Demo Memo, noneed4thneed and I agreed on something related to this year’s presidential campaign?

We’re all against the terrible idea of temporarily suspending the federal gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I have already written about why this is bad policy, but I want to call your attention to this post by Chris Bowers, which explains how disastrous Hillary Clinton’s idea is politically on several levels.

You should read Bowers’ whole post, but here are some of my favorite passages:

  2. Clinton is threatening other Democrats on the gas tax holiday, claiming that opposing it means you are with the oil companies.

[there’s a YouTube here you can watch if you click through to Open Left]

     Not only is that nonsensical, it is reminiscent of the many times that Bill Clinton favored legislation in the face of opposition from the left: NAFTA, welfare reform, the telecommunications act, the Defense of Marriage Act, etc. She isn’t taking on the oil companies with this proposal, she is taking on the American left, just as her husband frequently did while he was President. Clearly, we can expect more of this if she were to become President.

  3. So, why is Clinton taking on the left and helping out oil companies? To score political points. Her campaign has said this in public [….]

     Given that one of the two or three main image problems the Democratic Party has faced over the past couple decades is the perception that we don’t stand for anything and lack core values, publicly stating that a policy proposal is good because it is helping you in the polls is extremely damaging. Of course, it is also the sort of language that both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton use on a regular basis, and which we should obviously expect a lot more of should Hillary Clinton become President. This will have lasting, negative effects on the image of the Democratic Party.

  4. Where did this policy come from? This isn’t a policy that Clinton has been campaigning on for a while–she just came up with in over the last two weeks. Given that she is willing to make some new gimmick the centerpiece of her public policy discussion on a whim in order to score political points, how can we ever believe that she won’t just dump whatever current policy proposals she has if, in so doing, she believes she can score political points with some right-wing gimmick policy?

[…]

The gas tax holiday episode collects all of my worst fears about a possible second Clinton presidency in a single, dark, place that I haven’t entered since the 1990’s. Are we to suffer through another Democratic President who will make impromptu, right-ward shifts toward bad policy, justified in nonsensical, Orwellian language, all the while claiming such a move must be done because it will score huge political points even though it is ultimately a bad political calculation, and then threaten the entire Democratic Party to fall in line behind such a move or else? This is basically all of my worst fears about Hillary Clinton becoming President rolled up into one giant ball of tin-foil and dropped on my front porch.

That about sums it up for me.

Clinton supporters claim that her proposal is different from John McCain’s, because she would impose a windfall tax on the oil companies to make up for the lost revenue from the gas tax holiday.

But if you know anything about how Congress works, you know that the part about the windfall tax would probably get stripped out by amendment (plenty of Congressional Democrats vote with Republicans when it comes to oil companies), or in the conference committee. Then we’d be stuck with the gas tax holiday that Hillary has been demagoguing on for the last couple of weeks, and oil companies would benefit.

By the way, I mentioned a few days ago that Hillary’s proposal seems hypocritical in light of her opposition to a similar gas tax holiday in 2000.

But that very same year, Obama voted to temporarily suspend the gas tax in the Illinois Senate. So he has not always taken a principled stand against this dumb idea either. (hat tip to Jeralyn at Talk Left)

Speaking of Talk Left, Big Tent Democrat made a brilliant observation yesterday. Commenting on a report that the gas tax holiday idea is “DOA” (dead on arrival) because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have spoken out against it, Big Tent Democrat noted that

it is funny how they can not declare FISA telco immunity DOA or how they could never declare Iraq funding without a date certain DOA. I have little respect for the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer.

Me neither.

It sounds like he is leaning that way.

Ron Paul had a strong showing in several states that may be closely contested assuming Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. I would think Nevada would be very much in play, for instance.

Clearly a significant portion of the Republican base is still not sold on McCain. As I wrote last week, Paul got nearly 16 percent of the Republican primary voters in Pennsylvania (about 128,000 people). That was more than John Kerry’s winning margin in Pennsylvania against George Bush in 2004.

If you want to know the details about the pledged delegates and superdelegates for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, keep an eye on the 2008 Democratic Convention Watch site. On the left side of the front page, they are continually updating the delegate counts. Almost every day a superdelegate or two declare their allegiance.

The Daily Kos has also put a delegate counter at the top of the front page, and MyDD has its own counter on the front page of that site, but I think the Democratic Convention Watch blog has the most complete information.

If you want to know where Clinton and Obama currently stand against McCain in any state, check the front page of MyDD, where you will find electoral vote counters on the upper left and upper right side of the screens. These are continually updated with the latest state polls.

I noticed today that for the first time in several weeks, both Obama and Clinton lead McCain in electoral votes. For a long time both were behind, and then for a week or so Clinton was leading McCain while Obama trailed him.

The counters show maps of the U.S. with the states in red or blue, so you can see at a glance that Clinton and Obama have very different paths to victory against McCain.

Today Obama would be projected to beat McCain 275-263 by winning all of the Kerry states except New Hampshire, plus Iowa and Colorado.

Clinton would be projected to beat McCain 287-251 by winning most of the Kerry states except Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire, plus Iowa, Ohio, Florida and Missouri.

The electoral vote trackers change almost every day, so keep checking the front page of MyDD if you are interested.

IowaPolitics.com got a scoop from John McCain’s event in Des Moines yesterday:

Clive businessman Marty Parrish was escorted from Sen. John McCain’s town hall meeting by Des Moines police and members of the Secret Service after asking McCain if he had called his wife Cindy an expletive in 1992.

Parrish, an ordained Baptist minister who holds a master’s degree in political science, was questioned by Secret Service agents before being released. He was not charged in the incident. Parrish asked whether McCain called his wife Cindy an expletive related to the female anatomy, as has been alleged in the book “The Real McCain,” written by Dem strategist Cliff Schecter.

McCain’s response got him a round of applause from the crowd: “There’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language, so I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.”

In an interview with IowaPolitics.com, Parrish said his intentions were simple in posing the question to McCain. The former Joe Biden campaign worker stressed he is very concerned about the Republican presidential nominee’s temperament.

“We have a man whose temper can get the best of him,” Parrish said. “What I am worried about is his temper.”

For background on the anecdote recounted in Schecter’s book, read this post at MyDD.

I’ve said before that the public needs to become aware of McCain’s anger management problem. Kudos to Parrish for asking a question none of the journalists assigned to McCain’s campaign would dare ask.

And just to show that no candidate is wrong 100 percent of the time, McCain made some sensible remarks about the farm bill yesterday.

John McCain is coming to Des Moines on Thursday, and the Iowa Democratic Party and Moveon.Org are planning public events to mark the occasion. This is from an e-mail the IDP sent out this week:

Democratic Activists are needed to help welcome John McCain to Des Moines This Thursday!

Wednesday Night:

Sign Making/Pizza Party to help make all the signs needed for Thursday’s big event. This will be from 6:00 PM-8:00PM at 420 Watson Powell, Des Moines IA, 50309.

Thursday:

Thursday we will be staging a counter protest to McCain’s visit; please join us at 12:30 PM at the IDP office, 420 Watson Powell, Des Moines IA, 50309, where we will meet as a group and then proceed over to make our voices heard across the street!

If available please contact Jeff Perry at jperry AT iowademocrats.org or 515-974-1703.

Moveon.Org sent this e-mail out as well:

With the Obama-Clinton primary still underway, John McCain has largely gotten a free ride in the media. He’s coming to Des Moines on Thursday, hoping to get lots of fluff media coverage. Well, we’re not going to let that happen.

MoveOn members in your area will be putting on a fun event called The Bush-McCain Challenge to make sure local voters and the media know that a McCain presidency would equal Bush’s third term. We’ll have a carnival-style table where people can answer questions and win prizes if they can tell the difference between Bush and McCain’s stances on issues. Media will be invited to come.

Can you help out at The Bush-McCain Challenge table this Thursday between 12:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.? It will be fun, and the more the merrier. Event details and RSVP link are here:

WHAT: The Bush-McCain Challenge in Cleveland

WHERE: 501 Grand Avenue, across from the Convention Complex, Des Moines, IA, 50310

WHEN: Thursday, May 1 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

RSVP: http://pol.moveon.org/event/ev…

We’ll supply the questions and decorations. We need your help to ask the questions at the table, or to hand out flyers to people walking by-promoting the challenge. Local media will be invited and national media who fly around with McCain will receive photos and local news clips of the event to incorporate into their reporting. We’ll also put the best clips from these events around the nation on YouTube.

We saw the impact of regular people fighting back locally during President Bush’s Social Security privatization tour.1 In town after town, we and coalition partners matched or beat Bush’s media coverage by planning events surrounding his local visit that showed why he was wrong.

The Bush-McCain Challenge will be a lot of fun. Together, we’ll make sure voters realize that electing McCain would, in effect, be voting for Bush’s third term.

We hope you can join us for this event. Thanks for all you do.

-Adam G., Lenore, Anna, Noah, Ilyse and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team

 Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

1. Video of pushback events held during President Bush’s Social Security privatization tour

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=742&…

Incidentally, if you are a Moveon.Org member but are not a fan of Barack Obama, you can opt out of their Obama-related action e-mails and still receive their other e-mails. I appreciate that!

The conservative pundits who favored Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson for president are fully on board with John McCain, but he still has a big problem with other elements of the conservative base.

Exhibit A: the results from the GOP primary in Pennsylvania last week. More than two months after it became clear that McCain would be the GOP nominee, he gained just under 73 percent of the vote from Pennsylvania Republicans. Ron Paul got almost 16 percent (more than 128,000 votes), and Mike Huckabee got about 11 percent (more than 91,000 votes).

Think about that. More than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania went to the trouble of voting for someone other than McCain last Tuesday.

McCain did the worst in conservative counties where Republicans need to run up big margins to have any hope of winning statewide in Pennsylvania:

Mr. McCain’s worst showing was in Juniata County, near the center of the state. He received only about 59 percent of the vote, while Mr. Paul took nearly 28 percent. In 2004, President Bush won Juniata with 72 percent of the vote.

Mr. Bush had his biggest win that year in southern Fulton County, with 76 percent of the vote. Mr. McCain picked up 71 percent there, but Mr. Huckabee had 21 percent, his highest percentage in the state.

The conservative Washington Times has more bad news for McCain:

The McCain campaign has said it is on the same timeline for uniting the Republican Party as then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000. In that year, Mr. Bush won 73 percent of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania’s primary, held April 4. His biggest challenger was McCain himself, who won 23 percent, despite having dropped out of the campaign weeks earlier.

But McCain was a far more imposing figure in 2000 than Paul and Huckabee were in 2008, and McCain has also had more time before Pennsylvania to consolidate his lead than Bush had in 2000. To continue to post less-than-dominant showings will only prolong talk that McCain has more work to do within his own party.

And to truly match Bush’s 2000 performance may be out of the question for McCain. Out of 18.5 million votes cast in the primaries so far he has won 43.2 percent. By contrast, Bush finished 2000 with 62 percent of the Republican primary vote.

Then I learned from this diary by sarahlane that Ron Paul says he doesn’t plan to campaign for McCain, and Paul supporters outnumbered McCain supporters at the Nevada Republican Party’s state convention last weekend.

Finally, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a complaint against McCain with the Federal Elections Commission. If you’re too young to remember Judicial Watch, this group repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.

Click the link to read the MyDD post by Jonathan Singer. Judicial Watch’s FEC complaint relates to a possibly illegal in-kind contribution from a foreign national to McCain’s campaign.

As I’ve mentioned before, prominent bloggers have filed a separate FEC complaint relating to McCain’s failure to abide by the spending limits imposed on candidates who agree to take public matching funds during the presidential primaries.

Over at Daily Kos, Markos has a post up about “Clinton’s shameless hypocrisy on the fuel tax”:

   Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday criticized Barack Obama for opposing the concept of suspending the gas tax during the peak summer driving months, a plan both she and Republican John McCain have endorsed.

   The idea to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day was first proposed by McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, as a way to ease the economic burden for consumers during the summer.

   Obama does not support the “gas tax holiday” and has said the average motorist would not benefit significantly from such a suspension; by some estimates, the federal government would lose about $10 billion in revenue.

   “My opponent, Senator Obama, opposes giving consumers a break,” Clinton said, campaigning in North Carolina. “I understand the American people need some relief.”

For once I agree with Markos–this is a bad, bad move by Hillary Clinton. His main point is that she’s a huge hypocrite, because she argued against a similar gas tax holiday when she was running for the Senate in 2000.

Even worse from my perspective, she has flipped to supporting a horrendous idea floated by McCain. I explained why suspending the gas tax is is bad policy in this post.

It’s bad politics as well, because Hillary adopts the Republican “tax relief” frame to score a political point against our likely Democratic presidential nominee. She should never suggest that McCain is more sensitive to the needs of consumers than Obama is. That is flat-out wrong.

This is not how she should be making her case against Obama.  

Very dishonest.

Over at MyDD, Josh Orton picked up on a story from Sunday’s New York Times, which

exposes two more broken McCain pledges: to not to fly on corporate jets, and to not exploit his wife’s wealth for campaign advantage.

First, the campaign finance side – by exploiting a loophole left open by the non-functioning FEC, McCain flew for months on a corporate jet owned by his wife’s company, but only paid a fraction of the cost […]

Not only is he exploiting a loophole to save millions, he’s actually going back on an earlier pledge. In early 2007, McCain’s campaign swore off the practice of using corporate jets […]

Oh yeah, and McCain is also breaking a promise not to use his wife’s vast wealth for his presidential campaign. Click over to Orton’s diary for details on that.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post had a good write-up of McCain’s recent visit to New Orleans. The candidate criticized the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, but conveniently failed to mention his many Senate votes “against relief measures for Katrina victims” and “against an investigation into the failures of the government response” to Katrina. The article notes that “McCain also voted against providing additional funding for first responders’ communication systems”.

If you click that link you can also view a slide show of George Bush and John McCain celebrating with a birthday cake for McCain in Arizona on August 29, 2005, the day the levees broke in New Orleans.

Speaking of McCain in New Orleans, MoveOn.Org sent out an e-mail with details on the results of

its recent petition drive, and the media coverage they were able to generate:

Amazing. The very morning that John McCain visited New Orleans, 140,000 of us signed a petition calling on him to reject the support of extreme right-wing evangelist John Hagee, who said that Hurricane Katrina was a case of God punishing the city for its sins. At the same time, a group of local MoveOn members rallied outside his town hall event with the same message. McCain was asked about the issue at the event, and again by reporters after.

Almost instantly, the fact that McCain was pandering to the far right while playing “centrist” in the Big Easy became a national news story. The Associated Press and Reuters covered our actions, and the New York Times, Boston Globe, and MSNBC all reported on the disturbing links between Hagee, McCain, and the city of New Orleans.1

Best of all, the Baltimore Sun quoted New Orleans MoveOn member Harry Greenberg as saying, “Shame on John McCain for using New Orleans for a photo op while still courting support from hatemongers like Hagee.”2

A big “thank you” to the New Orleans MoveOn members who bravely spoke out for all of us against McCain’s courtship of hatemongers. And thanks to all of you who reacted so quickly to support them. We’ll be spending a lot more time in the next few months telling the truth about John McCain, and we’re glad you’re part of the effort.

-Eli, Daniel, Wes, Laura, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team

 Sunday, April 27th, 2008

P.S. If you want to get involved with rapid response actions like Thursday’s rally in New Orleans, consider joining your local MoveOn Council. You can join a council near you by clicking here:

http://operationdemocracy.org?…

Sources:

1. “McCain sharply critical of Bush response to Katrina,” Reuters, April 24, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3612…

“McCain to New Orleans: Never Again,” Associated Press, April 24, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3613…

“McCain Goes Where Few Republicans Dare, Deep in Democrats’ Territory,” New York Times, April 26, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3614…

“Hagee retracts Katrina comment,” Boston Globe, April 25, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3615…

“McCain criticizes Bush, Congress on Hurricanes,” MSNBC, April 24, 2008 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24…

2. “MoveOn calls for McCain move on Hagee,” Baltimore Sun, April 24, 2008

It’s hard to keep up with all the reasons to oppose John McCain. Last night I wrote about his opposition to a bill that would make it easier for victims of job discrimination to seek legal redress.

If you care about that issue, you can sign the petition on “Equal Pay for Equal Work” at Momsrising.org.

Meanwhile, I learned from this diary by TomP that Friends of the Earth Action is running an ad against McCain on CNN. The ad highlights McCain’s support for the nuclear power industry:

TomP’s diary also includes this great quote from Friends of the Earth Action president Dr. Brent Blackwalder:

You know how self righteous John McCain can be when he talks about corporate pork and earmarks, but do you know why he opposes the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill?  He plans to vote against it not because it could lavish $1 trillion on the profitable oil, gas and coal industries, but because he wants to add hundreds of billions of dollars more in earmarks for the nuclear industry!

On a related note, I got an e-mail today from the Sierra Club slamming McCain’s proposal to suspend the federal gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The Sierra Club notes that the real effect of that policy would be to

[r]aise oil company profits by another 18 cents per gallon — by eliminating the federal gas tax without guaranteeing that Big Oil won’t just keep prices high and take the difference to grow their record profits even more.

The Sierra Club also has an online petition you can sign, which sends this message to McCain:

The best way to deal with high gas prices is to cut, not expand, giveaways to Big Oil. Please vote to end taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax breaks for Big Oil and use that money to invest in clean, renewable energy.

Earlier this week, I got the latest newsletter from Smart Growth America, which also blasted McCain’s proposal to declare a summer holiday from the federal gas tax:

An artificial and temporary reduction of gas prices will simply guarantee that absolutely no money goes towards having suitable roads and bridges for those filled-up cars to drive on – not to mention alternatives to congestion, like commuter rail and transit. Instead, we can send the full price of gasoline directly into the pockets of oil companies. (An estimated $10 billion in transportation revenue would be lost, or enough to fully fund Amtrak rail service for 6 years or so.) Meanwhile, we fall farther behind in maintaining our infrastructure: Rust doesn’t take the summer off.

But that’s not all. To coincide with McCain’s photo-op in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward today, Moveon.org Political Action launched its own online petition calling on McCain to reject the endorsement of right-wing pastor John Hagee. I knew about Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry, but I wasn’t aware that Hagee once said, “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Surely there couldn’t be any more shameful news about McCain to emerge within this 24-hour period, right? Wrong. I learned from Natasha Chart’s post at MyDD today that during a recent visit to Alabama, McCain’s campaign used free prison labor to get out of paying to set up for a private fundraiser.

I guess a campaign that is way behind its Democratic rivals in fundraising has to save money wherever it can.

But it would be more honest for McCain to curtail all campaign spending between now and the Republican National Convention this summer, because he is not complying with limits imposed by his decision to take public financing last year.

If I’ve missed any recent disgraceful behavior coming from the McCain camp, please let me know in the comments section.

One of the worst rulings the Roberts Court has handed down was in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. The five-member conservative majority ruled that the plaintiff lost her right to file a discrimination complaint related to unequal pay because she didn’t file the lawsuit within 180 days of the first discriminatory action by her employer.

Never mind that Lilly Ledbetter didn’t know for many years that she was being short-changed by her employer, which was paying male colleagues substantially more for doing the same job.

The U.S. House passed a bill seeking to remedy this egregious ruling last July. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

would put into law a clarification – wage disparity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability is not a one-time occurrence. Every discriminatory paycheck represents an ongoing violation. Employees would still have 180 days to challenge the discrimination, but from the last check, not the first.

You would think everyone would recognize the value of this bill. Does it make sense for the courts to grant legal immunity to employers that manage to keep their discriminatory behavior a secret for many months? Or does it make sense to allow employees to file a lawsuit within 180 days of the time they have learned about the violations?

The U.S. Senate took up this bill today, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took time off from the presidential campaign to go back to Washington and vote for it.

But John McCain skipped the vote. Though 56 Senators voted in favor, Republicans were able to block it with a filibuster. McCain confirmed today that he would have opposed this bill if he’d been in the Senate chamber:

“I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”

Right, he’s “all in favor” of equal pay–he just doesn’t want women who are denied equal pay to be able to seek legal remedy for that discrimination.

Clearly wage discrimination doesn’t bother McCain nearly as much as the idea that we might have more women filing lawsuits against employers who have been cheating them for years.

If you know any women who might lean toward McCain because they think he is a reasonable moderate, let them know about his stand on this issue.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s scandalous for the Washington press corps to cover for John McCain’s legendary anger management problem after the way they collaborated in making Howard Dean and Al Gore look angry and unstable.

Washington Post reporter Michael Leahy wrote this long article on McCain’s temperament for the paper’s Sunday edition. Read the whole thing. It begins with an anecdote about McCain blowing up at Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley in 1992, and Republicans who know McCain share many other stories as well.

One of the most appalling discusses McCain’s behavior after an election-night victory party for Arizona Republicans in 1986:

After McCain finished his speech, he returned to a suite in the hotel, sat down in front of a TV and viewed a replay of his remarks, angry to discover that the speaking platform had not been erected high enough for television cameras to capture all of his face — he seemed to have been cut off somewhere between his nose and mouth.

A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona’s Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening’s celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler’s chest.

“I told you we needed a stage,” he screamed, according to Hinz. “You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it.”

Hinz recalls intervening, placing his 6-foot-6 frame between the senator-elect and the young volunteer. “John, this is not the time or place for this,” Hinz remembers saying to McCain, who fumed that he hadn’t been seen clearly by television viewers. Hinz recollects finally telling McCain: “John, look, I’ll follow you out on stage myself next time. I’ll make sure everywhere you go there is a milk crate for you to stand on. But this is enough.”

McCain spun around on his heels and left. He did not talk to Hinz again for several years. In 2000, as Hinz recalls, he appeared briefly on the Christian Broadcasting Network to voice his worries about McCain’s temperament on televangelist Pat Robertson’s show, “The 700 Club.” Hinz’s concerns have since grown with reports of incidents in and out of Arizona.

We need to educate Americans who think McCain is a reasonable moderate about this side of his personality.

Also worth reading is Elizabeth Edwards’ latest blog post on McCain’s inadequate health care plan.

After she criticized his plan this month, McCain went on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos to call her criticism a “cheap shot.” Elizabeth Edwards had noted that McCain benefited from government health care coverage his whole life, but McCain pointed out that he didn’t have access to good health care while he was a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam.

If McCain was hoping she would feel too bad to respond, he’s out of luck. She points out some important facts:

Sen. McCain noted that he was not receiving government health care for the six years he was in captivity. That is true. But it has nothing to do with my point – which is that the problem with Sen. McCain’s health care plan is not how it affects us — but how it affects the tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions who, unlike Sen. McCain and myself, do not have the resources to pay for quality health care.

That is not a cheap shot, it is a potentially life and death question for tens of million of Americans. And it is a question Sen. McCain must address.

McCain’s health care plan is centered around the idea that we’d be better off if more Americans bought health coverage on their own, rather than receiving it through a job or government program. But maybe since he has never purchased insurance in the individual market, he does not know the challenge it presents for Americans with preexisting conditions.

A recent study showed that nearly nine out of every ten people seeking individual coverage on the private insurance market never got it. Insurers will disqualify you for just taking certain medicines because of the possibility of future costs, including common drugs as Lipitor, Zocor, Nexium, and Advair. People who have had cancer are denied coverage and those who get cancer run the risk of simply being dropped by their insurer for any excuse that can be found. And insurers make it a practice to deny coverage to individuals in high risk occupations, such as firefighting, lumber work, telecom installation, and pretty much anything more risky than working in an office.

Read her whole post. She also has a go at McCain’s strange suggestion that he might create a “special Medicaid trust fund” to help cover people with preexisting conditions.

We should go after McCain now–not wait for the Democratic nomination to be settled.

Every four years, the Republican Party sets out to brand the Democratic presidential candidate as an out-of-touch elitist, and it’s frustrating how well this strategy seems to work for them. I am old enough to remember how they made Michael Dukaksis, the son of middle-class Greek immigrants, out to be more elitist than George H.W. Bush, the son of a senator who grew up in a very privileged environment, attending elite private schools from a very young age.

Progressive Media USA is trying to turn the tables by releasing this web video about “The Fabulous Life of John McCain”:

I have mixed feelings about this strategy. I don’t think we want to say don’t vote for McCain because he married a wealthy woman and has multiple fancy residences.

On the other hand, it is pretty damning to watch video clips of McCain advising struggling Americans to work a second job or skip a vacation, when we’ve just learned that McCain has an American Express “black centurion” card, which is apparently reserved for people who spend more than $250,000 on it each year.

I also like the clip of McCain answering a question about our economic problems by saying, “A lot of this is psychological.” The video closes by asking viewers how McCain can solve our problems if he can’t understand them.

What do you think about this video and/or the general strategy of trying to brand McCain as a super-wealthy elitist?

The wonderful nyceve caught this unintentional comedy from John McCain as he answered a question about his health:

“Everything’s fine,” McCain told reporters during a news conference. “Like most Americans, I go see my doctor fairly frequently.”

As nyceve points out in her latest diary, “most Americans” do not go see the doctor frequently, especially not if they are only covered through a Health Savings Account. That’s the centerpiece of McCain’s health care plan, but nyceve gives us a reality check:

If all you’re able to afford is High Deductible Junk Insurance which McBush is pushing as a solution to our healthcare catastrophe, then you don’t to go to a doctor “fairly frequently” as McCain does. You don’t attend to routine health problems because you can’t afford to. High deductible health insurance offers bare bones coverage and is insurance in name only.

So what do you do if you have junk insurance?  You wait and hope and pray that you recover. Some Americans even procure medicine from pet stores which often sell a variety of antibotics at low prices.

Her diary also included a link to this report:

More than a quarter of Americans have skipped or postponed an essential visit to a doctor because it was too expensive, a new MSN-Zogby poll says.

Nearly half (48%) say they pay more in health-insurance premiums than a year ago, and 37% say they pay more out of pocket for medical services or prescriptions.

The results of the poll of 9,765 adults suggest that medical expenses are becoming a heavier burden on household finances, even for middle-income Americans.

Go read the whole diary, which includes a video of a 33-year-old man who was uninsured when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He describes the choices he had to make while undergoing cancer treatment without health insurance. Of course, no private insurer will sell him a policy now that he has had cancer, a problem McCain’s health care plan would do nothing to correct.

By the way, DemFromCT points out the inconvenient fact that McCain supported George Bush’s veto of Congress’s attempt to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. When will the media stop calling him a maverick?

The usually-fascinating diarist poblano (see diary history here) has put up an interesting analysis of how a possible “unity bounce” for our nominee would affect the general election outcome.

Poblano cites a piece by Chuck Todd, who argues:

Currently polls show McCain either narrowly ahead or even with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is impressive considering how poorly the GOP, and specifically the president, are viewed by the public.

  But it is a faux lead. If the de facto Democratic nominee is clear within the next 4-6 weeks, that person will see a poll bounce. And according to GOP pollster Steve Lombardo, it could be one heck of a bounce, like post-convention. He anticipates the Democratic candidate will move up 10 points once the primary race is over.

Click through to see how poblano calculates a bounce like that would affect Obama’s chances of winning key states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

I hope he’s right, although I am not convinced that such a large “unity bounce” would materialize.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos front-pager smintheus showed yesterday that the extended primary season has a lot of benefits for the Democratic Party as a whole. Look at Pennsylvania, where the primary is almost always meaningless. Democrats are registering enormous numbers of new voters as both Clinton and Obama mobilize supporters. Also, large numbers of people registered as independents or Republicans have switched to Democrat:

Perhaps the most remarkable news is that Democrats now hold a majority in two suburban Philadelphia counties that have been predominantly Republican for many years, Montgomery and Bucks.

[…]

And nearby in both Chester and Delaware, where four months ago Republicans had about 65,000 more registered voters per county, the deficit has been cut to 35,000.

[…]

All in all, there have been massive Democratic gains this winter in suburban Philly. Democrats also picked up another 50,000 registrations in Philadelphia.

[…]

What does it mean for the April 22 primary? Philadelphia and suburbs have added about 140,000 new Democrats this year, the rest of the state another 167,000.

Even if some of these people are Democrats-for-a-day who want to vote for Obama in the primary just to dispense with Hillary, the majority are likely to vote again for Democrats in the general election.

Keep in mind that Gore won Pennsylvania by about 200,000 votes, but Kerry only won by about 100,000 votes. The people mobilized to participate in this exciting primary season could make the difference between us or McCain winning that crucial state in November.

Relax, Obama supporters. Let the primaries play out and stop screaming for Hillary to drop out now.

Last week Elizabeth Edwards wrote a fantastic guest post for the Think Progress blog asking why people like her (who have had cancer in the past) are left out of John McCain’s health care reform plan. A great video clip of her slamming McCain’s health plan can be found in this diary by NCDem Amy

McCain has ignored her comments, while one of his fund-raisers tried to pretend her concern about cancer patients being excluded from coverage was not a legitimate issue for political discussion.

But at some point, I think McCain will have to address the issues raised by Edwards. This week it emerged that she has joined the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow.

Already on Tuesday she appeared on NPR to explain how McCain’s plan “falls short in every conceivable way.” NCDem Amy’s diary includes a link to the podcast of that NPR interview, if you’d like to listen.

Elizabeth Edwards has been active intermittently on political blogs since the last presidential campaign, and she will be blogging more regularly in her new position.

Health care will be her main focus at the Center for American Progress:

“As many can attest, I have an opinion on everything,” Edwards said tonight about her new role. “But I am particularly concerned about the state of health care in America and I am grateful to CAP for giving me the chance to continue to advocate for universal and quality health care coverage for all.”

I can’t wait.

Oh, by the way, Edwards confirmed in an interview for Wednesday’s edition of Good Morning America that she prefers Clinton’s health-care plan to Obama’s. I am not at all surprised, since the Clinton plan was closer to that proposed by John Edwards during the presidential campaign.

In fact, while I have no inside information, my hunch is that if not for Obama’s inferior health care reform proposal and his use of Republican talking points to attack Hillary’s proposal, John and Elizabeth Edwards would have endorsed Obama for president by now.  

The Republican presidential candidate is at a big financial disadvantage compared to the likely Democratic nominee.

John Kerry raised over $40 million in March 2004 after clinching the Democratic nomination. He was still far behind George W. Bush in the money race, because the president had not had to compete in the primaries and could devote a lot of time to big-ticket fundraisers.

John McCain clinched the Republican nomination on February 5 and formally won enough delegates to be the nominee on March 4. But he only managed to raise $15 million in March. According to Marc Ambinder, Mitt Romney has promised to help McCain raise another $15 million or so from Romney supporters.

To put that in perspective, Barack Obama raised more than $40 million in March, and Hillary Clinton, who is quite the longshot for the Democratic nomination, managed to raise about $20 million that month.

At MyDD, Jonathan Singer noted that Obama raised more money in March alone than McCain raised in the entire first quarter.

I know a lot of you are worried about the continuing Democratic contest, but I think we should relax and let the rest of the primaries play out. The likelihood is that after Puerto Rico votes on June 7, Obama will be far enough ahead that the superdelegates will move decisively in his direction.

Meanwhile, McCain isn’t going to be building any kind of warchest that Obama can’t match.

Over at Century of the Common Iowan, noneed4thneed put up a link to the latest Rasmussen poll of Iowa. Holy cow–Obama beats McCain here 46 percent to 42 percent, but Hillary loses to McCain 51 percent to 36 percent. McCain has hardly ever campaigned here and finished fourth in the Republican caucuses. Noneed4thneed noted that Rasmussen found

McCain leads Clinton by a two-to-one margin among unaffiliated voters. However, Obama leads McCain 46% to 37% among those same voters.

The latest round of Survey USA polls had a similar finding (sorry, no link). Obama and Hillary look poised to win a comparable number of electoral votes against McCain, but they do it in different ways. Obama was ahead in Iowa against McCain, but Hillary was trailing the Republican. Assuming Obama is the Democratic nominee, I have to believe he would be heavily favored to win Iowa. Rasmussen's poll may show his lead within the margin of error, but Obama has a huge volunteer army to draw on here from the caucuses, while McCain didn't build any kind of organization in Iowa.

the ad for John McCain you may see on the lower left-hand side of your screen does not in any way, shape or form constitute an endorsement of McCain by this blog.

Bleeding Heartland will strongly support the Democratic nominee this fall.

We are part of the liberal Blogads Network, which is how the ad found its way to this page. If McCain’s campaign wants to throw away its money advertising on liberal blogs, I’m not going to complain.

(UPDATE and correction: Bleeding Heartland founder Drew Miller informs me that the McCain ad was being served by Google, not Blogads. Apparently Drew put up some kind of filter to block johnmccain.com, so the ad will no longer show up on this page.)

My share of all advertising revenues generated by Bleeding Heartland will be donated to BlogPAC, a political action committee run by the bloggers Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, Mike Stark and Natasha Chart:

http://www.blogpac.com/core

Blogpac funds progressive leadership and experiments with injecting new voices in the political process using internet activism. We give grants, no strings attached, to activists on the internet who have a demonstrated record of success in either creating progressive change or creating the space for progressives to make change. We also seek moments to inject progressive power into the political system through focused internet and new media activism.

Stoller and Bowers used to blog at MyDD and now run the shop at Open Left.

Chart posts on several liberal blogs, including MyDD and Open Left.

Stark is most famous for asking Virginia Senator George Allen (shortly after the “macaca” incident) if he had ever used the n-word. It was a question no mainstream journalist would ever have asked Allen, but the senator’s dishonest reply opened the door to a stream of stories about how Allen had casually used racial slurs in the past.

One of my favorite bloggers, Steve Gilliard, later wrote that Jim Webb owes his Senate seat to Stark, because Stark helped drive a media narrative that was devastating to Allen.

Courtesy of Moveon.Org. Footnotes supporting all these statements, with links, are after the jump.

We need to spread the word that McCain is not a moderate maverick–he is a hard-core conservative. Even my stepmother, who wouldn’t vote for him, was under the mistaken impression that he was pro-choice.

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”2

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3

4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”4

5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.5

6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.6

7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”7

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.8

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”9

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0-yes, zero-from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

UPDATE: DemFromCT wrote a great post today, “McCain Runs Into Trouble On Health Care Reform.” He noted this hilarious headline from the Boston Globe:

McCain camp working out healthcare details

Aides struggle to sort out his promises

One of the biggest scandals in Washington journalism is the media pack’s willingness to cover up John McCain’s legendary temper. The same journalists who happily depicted Al Gore and Howard Dean as angry and unstable rarely mention McCain’s tendency to fly off the handle.

Tom Harkin reminded us of this problem on Thursday:

“Yeah, I’ve been on the receiving end of it and yes, I’ve seen it, and yes, everyone here knows about it,” Harkin said.

“It can be scary,” he said. “Flying off the handle without discussing things with people, working things out … I’ve seen it a couple, three times here.”

McCain claims that what makes him angry is waste and corruption in Washington, but look for stories of his temper tantrums to trickle out in the coming months. This is common knowledge among everyone who has worked in the Senate or the Washington press corps.

A few posts down I mentioned that Elizabeth Edwards has been going after John McCain for his totally inadequate health care reform proposal. As she has noted, both she and McCain could be excluded from his program because their cancer would be considered pre-existing conditions.

Instead of addressing her substantive arguments, McCain’s national finance co-chair, Fred Malek, whines that she should not be talking about cancer in a political context:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

Finding a cure for cancer is a vitally important mission for this country. Supporting that mission should unite everyone – and should be off-limits from the political and partisan battlefield.

…I just hope that it doesn’t become a common occurrence on the campaign trail. The cancer conversation is best left to the experts, researchers, and doctors.

Yes, let’s all join together and find a cure for cancer, while not mentioning that cancer patients could be denied coverage under McCain’s health care plan.

Click the link to read diarist Dean Barker’s discussion of the highlights of Malek’s career. They include his work compiling a list of high-ranking Jews in the  Bureau of Labor Statistics for President Richard Nixon in 1971.

The indispensable nyceve put up this diary about a fantastic blog post by Elizabeth Edwards: Why Are People Like Me Left Out Of Your Health Care Proposal, Sen. McCain?

Just click the link and read the whole thing. We need to hammer McCain on this issue, because his health care reform plan is totally inadequate.

What do you know? Under John McCain’s health care reform plan, insurance companies could exclude pre-existing conditions such as his own recurrent melanoma. Of course, McCain doesn’t need to worry about this, because he has the Cadillac care provided to all members of Congress.

Elizabeth Edwards, who could likewise be excluded under McCain’s plan because of her history of breast cancer, has called McCain on his hypocrisy. Click the link above to read nyceve’s important diary on the subject.

On a related note, Dr.SteveB, who like nyceve advocates a single-payer health care system (that is, like Medicare, but covering every American), reports on a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Internal Medicine. A nationwide survey of 2,193 physicians

showed 59% “support government legislation to establish national health insurance,” while 32% oppose and 9% are neutral. That’s a solid majority of American doctors, and up 10% from 49% in 2002 when a similar study was last done.

This is an excerpt from the article in Annals of Internal Medicine:

Support among doctors for NHI has increased across almost all medical specialties, said Dr. Ronald T. Ackermann, associate director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at Indiana University’s School of Medicine and co-author of the study.

“Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy,” he said.

Dr.SteveB has more on the story if you click the link.

John McCain somehow manages to maintain an image as a moderate, even as he panders to the right wing of the Republican Party.

Watch him try to evade the question of whether using condoms can prevent the spread of AIDS:

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

  Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

  Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

  Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

  Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

  Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

  Q: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”

  Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

Make sure your Republican and independent friends know that McCain supports George Bush’s policies on contraception.

By the way, “Coburn” refers to Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the most nutty and mean-spirited Republican members of Congress. Also, he’s not above citing junk science to back up his political views.

Campaign finance law, that is.

Yes, the big campaign finance reformer is flouting the law that governs public matching funds for presidential campaigns.

A group of bloggers including Markos of Daily Kos and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. The complaint accuses McCain of

violations of campaign finance law for spending beyond limits imposed by his decision to take public financing.

McCain has claimed he is backing off that decision, and justifies it with the fact that he never received any of that public money. However, the law clearly states that he is bound by those limits if he uses the promise of those funds in order to secure campaign loans — something he absolutely did.

Legal expert Adam B explains more about this issue today.

Also, MoveOn.org Political Action sent out an e-mail about this issue, and I’ve put the full text after the jump.

The e-mail includes a link you can click if you want to sign on to the FEC complaint as well.

Incidentally, I have read that McCain also used the certificate saying he had qualified for matching funds in order to avoid the onerous signature requirements to get on the ballot for the Ohio primary. So he didn’t just use the commitment to take matching funds to secure a loan, he also used it to get on the ballot.

Now, worried that he won’t be able to compete with the Democratic nominee financially, he is trying to back out. What a weasel.

I was going to write another post chiding certain Obama supporters for their overheated rhetoric about the evil Clintons (who apparently are now even worse than Joe McCarthy).

Instead, I will attempt to spark a more constructive discussion of the best way to make the case against John McCain in the general election.

Daily Kos star diarist clammyc is absolutely right: “We don’t need a nominee to focus on our opponent”:

But while way too much energy, time, money and focus is spent on the back-and-forth and the less-than really important issues that are facing this country, or the enormous hypocrisy of just about everything that John W. McCain has been saying or doing is getting either ignored or fluffed over, precious time is being wasted to frame McCain and “rebrand him” as the man he is and has become as opposed to the man he once was and represented.

The question is, what is the best way to “rebrand” McCain? There are some good ideas in that clammyc diary.

Jason Rosenbaum wrote a great piece for Open Left, How to Attack John McCain: A Search Study,” which evaluates various frames:

   * John McCain as old and unstable

   * John McCain as angry, with a temper, a hothead

   * John McCain as a war hawk who’ll keep us in Iraq forever

   * John McCain as confused and unprepared (can’t tell the difference between Iran and Al-Qaeda for instance)

   * John McCain as weak and unprepared on economic issues

   * John McCain and his association with radical fundamentalist pastors like John Hagee

   * John McCain as a flip-flopper or sellout

If quantitative analysis isn’t your thing, you might enjoy kid oakland’s half-joking “twenty thoughts about John McCain.”

Finally, for a laugh read Moody Loner’s Dr. Seuss-style poem, “I Will Not Vote for John McCain.”

Consider this an open thread on the best way to run against McCain.

Even I know that Al Qaeda is a Sunni extremist group, and Iran is governed by a Shiite regime.

According to the Washington Post, Republican presidential candidate John McCain hasn’t grasped that fact:

He said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda. In fact, officials have said they believe Iran is helping Shiite extremists in Iraq.

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

It was a big mistake for Hillary Clinton to say a couple of weeks ago that McCain had passed the commander-in-chief threshold. Anyone who doesn’t even know the most basic information about our enemies in the Middle East is unqualified to be president. What have his staff and advisers been briefing him on in the Senate and on the campaign trail?

Over at MyDD, Jonathan Singer summarizes the reaction from around the blogosphere and points out that this was no slip of the tongue. McCain has been making the same erroneous statement for some time, demonstrating that he has no clue about the differences between Sunni and Shiite extremists.

MyDD user Steve M’s take on the situation is amusing.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman was apparently reading my mind:

http://www.samefacts.com/archi…

Given McCain’s buffoonish performance in Jordan, wouldn’t this be a good time for Hillary Clinton to say, “Gee, I thought he was ready to be Commander-in-Chief, but it sure doesn’t sound like it. The least we should expect from the President is some basic knowledge about who our enemies are.”

Take a minute and a half out of your life to watch this video:

The Obama supporters on the blogs are way too complacent about how tough it will be to beat McCain, by the way. This is one of the lines we will need to push to get the job done.

The Des Moines Register released results from a poll that shows Barack Obama would win Iowa in the general election against John McCain. However, the poll shows McCain would win in a matchup against Hillary Clinton.

Obama 53%
McCain 36%

Clinton 40%
McCain 49%

 
These results are similar to Survey USA's poll released earlier in the week.

The most interesting thing from the Des Moines Register poll was Obama's strength throughout the entire state of Iowa and among woman voters.

Other good news in the poll for Obama includes a decided advantage among female voters, who preferred him over McCain by a margin of more than 20 percentage points.

Obama also beats McCain in each of Iowa's five congressional districts, including the GOP-heavy 5th District in western Iowa. Obama also pulls more support from the opposing party than either of the other two candidates, with 14 percent of Republicans saying they would vote for him.

These numbers show that Obama would help Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. Having Obama on the ballot would be a boost to Congressional candidates in Iowa's 4th and 5th Districts and help Democrats get a larger majority in the Iowa House.

A new poll by Survey USA shows Barack Obama winning Iowa over John McCain by 10%. The poll shows Hillary Clinton losing to McCain by 11%.

Iowa:
Obama 51%
McCain 41%

Clinton 41%
McCain 52%

I am not surprised that Obama would win Iowa. However, I am surprised about how far behind Clinton is. McCain barely even campaigned in the Iowa. I thought some Iowans might hold that against McCain and some might not know him well enough to decide to support him over Clinton. It looks like I was wrong.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Obama “Yes We Can” video, but then, I wasn’t exactly the target demographic. (I didn’t recognize anyone in it other than Kareem.)

This parody about the McCain campaign is priceless, though. You have to watch it.

One of the many reasons I supported John Edwards was that I thought he would expand the map for Democrats in the general election. I thought he would hold all of the Kerry states, adding Iowa and Ohio with ease, and would make things competitive in several other places too (like Missouri).

I think Clinton or Obama could beat McCain or lose to him. Clinton’s winning scenario is obvious: turn out record numbers of women and Latinos, rack up a big lead among seniors, thereby holding most if not all of the Kerry states and adding Florida and/or Ohio.

Plenty of things could go wrong with Clinton’s scenario, but it is hard to argue that she would not turn out record numbers of women and Latinos.

Obama’s winning electoral vote scenario is less certain for me. Although nationwide polls show him doing slightly better against McCain than Clinton, he runs behind Clinton against McCain in several key states:

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008…

And that’s before the right-wing hate machine has even opened fire against Obama. With Clinton, we pretty much know where her floor is, but with Obama, who knows?

That’s why Charlie Cook recently argued that Clinton would probably win between 48 percent and 52 percent of the general election vote, whereas Obama could get 55 percent or more, but could also conceivably get below 45 percent in the general.

Yesterday I asked Obama supporters at MyDD to give me their scenarios for 270 electoral votes against McCain. MyDD user JDF came up with this:

http://www.mydd.com/comments/2…

Here is how I see Obama getting to 270. This is a broad strokes view and I put it together relatively quickly so I am sure it is not perfect, but at least shows (from my POV) that it is not a stretch for Obama to get well past 270.

States he WINS

Wash: 11

Oregon: 7

Cali: 55

New York: 31

DC: 3

Maryland: 10

New Jersey: 15

Mass: 12

RI: 4

CT: 7

NH: 4

VT: 3

ME: 3

Michigan: 17

Illinois: 21

Minnesota: 10

That would give him 213 Electoral Votes.

There are 20 in Ohio, 21 in Pennsylvania, 27 in Florida, 13 in Virginia, 11 in Missouri, 11 in Indiana,  5 in Nevada, 5 in New Mexico, 10 in Wisconsin,  7 in Iowa

Puts 130 other Electoral Votes in play that I think fall anywhere from a strong edge for Obama to a moderate edge to McCain at this point.

Also, and this is a stretch, but I would argue that he can compete in states like South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. Which puts another 32 electoral votes within reach but highly unlikely.

All in all I would give the GE edge to Obama. Also, I don’t think you give people in the south enough credit to be able to look past Obama’s skin color or Obama’s ability to transcend it. The people who “would never vote for a black guy” would never vote for a democrat either.

I think this is plausible (except for the part about SC, GA and LA), and I would throw in Iowa’s 7 votes for Obama against McCain. Also, Maine would probably deliver all 4 of its electoral votes to Obama (they don’t have winner-take-all there). Still, that only brings Obama to 221 electoral votes.

Florida is a write-off, given McCain’s strength among military and Latinos, and Obama’s relative weakness among Latinos and seniors.

Pennsylvania and Ohio could be real problems for Obama against McCain, in my opinion, especially when the media start covering Obama’s voting record on gun control in the Illinois legislature.

What do you think?

UPDATE: This diary by Clinton supporter silver spring is quite interesting:

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008…

The MSM is constantly feeding us the theme that Obama would somehow be more “electable” in the general election because he overwhelmingly attracts independent voters, and if Hillary is the nominee, then McCain will get the bulk of the independents.  

There are two things wrong with the above proposition – 1) Even though Obama is attracting more independents, Hillary is not doing bad either; for one thing,  she is attracting more independents than McCain ….  but more importantly – 2) Independents are only one subset of traditional swing voters, the other subsets being Hispanics, white Catholics, white women and suburban voters.  Among the last four subsets above, Hillary is comfortably beating Obama (as well as McCain).

The diary has a lot of good analysis, including this bit, which refers to November 2004 exit poll data:

From the above 2004 numbers it’s interesting to note that Kerry actually beat Bush among independents (as well as Hispanics).  However, Bush comfortably beat Kerry among Catholics, white women and suburban voters.  Thus, it can be logically argued that Catholics, white women, suburban voters and Hispanics are as important as independent voters (if not more so) in order to guarantee Democratic success in November.

Catholics, white women and suburban voters are going to be crucial in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Last month I put up this post on Republican culture, inspired by an article about a Republican focus group watching a presidential debate.

Reading this piece by Joe Klein today, I noticed that the Republican focus group watching the latest debate preferred Mitt Romney to John McCain. Among other things,

They just adored his position on illegal immigration (their dials plummeted when McCain said we had to be “humane.”)

No, we sure wouldn’t want to be humane in our approach to a complicated issue affecting the lives of millions. That’s Republican culture in a nutshell.

Continuing my series of putting odds to things, I thought I'd look at the Republician presidential race. It only seems fair to speculate on the enemy's position while we work on our own…

Again, the scenario I envision is one in which one of the current top three candidates wins the nomination: Giuliani, Romney, or Huckabee. A further stipulation is that whoever wins will not pick any of the other members of the Big Three. So no Rudy/Romney tickets, folks. I had considered Huckabee a top VP candidate, but I'm taking him out of the running since he's sharpening his attacks and becoming a serious contender.

3-1 Fred Thompson The consummate good 'ol boy, Fred is the perfect southern comfort for Guliani or Romney's Yankee personalities. Plus, while Thompson's been slinging a little mud, he hasn't seemed to make any serious enemies yet. His only caveat is that Huckabee doesn't need another down-home southerner on his ticket. Goes best with: Giuliani, Romney

5-1 Charlie Crist Three words. Florida. Florida. Florida. This guy might represent the single biggest “known unknown” in politics today. If he is Veeped, Florida becomes much, much, much harder for a Democrat to win. Yet, the guy is a total enigma–and refuses to tip his hat to any one candidate. Goes best with: Guliani, Romney, Huckabee

7-1 Tim Pawlenty He's the popular Governor of Minnesota and a handsome, young Republican face. He may even deliver Minnesota and put Iowa and Wisconsin in play for the Republicans. However, he has little name recognition as it stands now, and the I-35 collapse happened on his watch–a potential target. Goes best with: Giuliani, Romeny, Huckabee

7-1 Duncan Hunter Strong on immigration, tough on defense. From the sunny state of Cully-for-neea, Hunter would lend credibility to a candidate lacking on these issues. Not to name any names, *cough* Romney *cough*. Plus, “Hunter” would look really good on those signs. Still, he's going nowhere fast in his own race. Goes best with: Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee

10-1 John Boehner He's a fresh face from a swing state. Also, he's been unfailingly loyal to the administration, and Republicans reward loyalty above all else. However, he got a little bit burned on the Foley and Abramoff scandals. Goes best with: Giuliani, Romney

10-1 John McCain War hero. Experienced. Moderate. McCain certainly deserves some recognition from the party after all these years. But his “radical” immigration stance and his “weak” anti-torture stance might turn off key components of the base. Not to mention that he would be the oldest VP ever elected. Goes best with: Huckabee

20-1 John Roberts He's the squeaky clean, likeable and popular Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Going from the Court to the White House is a stretch, but it's not impossible. He just might be the out-of-the-box candidate the party needs. Of course, it is somewhat of a suicide choice. If the ticket would win, they could appoint another moderate republican to the court. If they lose, they lose the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court in one year. A big gamble for sure. Goes best with: Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee

1,000,000-1 Ron Paul Ron Paul would never agree to be any of these guys' VP. But if I include him, I can tag this diary “Ron Paul” and maybe someone will read it for a change.

Never mind the rumors about Sam Brownback endorsing Rudy Giuliani for president; the Kansas senator decided to back John McCain after all. Cyclone Conservatives has a good write-up here, or you can read the Des Moines Register's coverage here. I liked Mike Huckabee's comment in the Register:

Huckabee, campaigning Wednesday in Cedar Falls, said he would have liked Brownback's endorsement, but “we're getting a lot of Brownback's supporters. If I had a choice between him and his supporters, I'll take his supporters.”

Don at Cyclone Conservatives says he knows former Brownback supporters who have switched to Huckabee or Fred Thompson. The person I know who interned at the Brownback campaign plans to volunteer for McCain. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. 

Meanwhile, Bob Vander Plaats, who's chairing the Huckabee operation in Iowa, says they are not worried about missing out on the endorsements of Brownback or evangelical Pat Robertson, who recently backed Rudy Giuliani.