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By Chalmers Johnson
$11.56
By Susan Jacoby
$16.32
$21
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John McCain’s recent “celeb” ad attempted to draw a comparison between Barack Obama and a certain washed-up pop star, but as this video illustrates, the former maverick actually has a lot more in common with Britney “we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes” Spears.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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Now that he is assured of his party’s nomination, Barack Obama has asked the Democratic credentials committee to award full votes to delegates from Florida and Michigan. Those states held primaries in violation of party rules, and their disputed delegations became a major source of division between supporters of Hillary Clinton and of Obama.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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Following on the heels of last week’s probing editorial about whether the creators of “The Dark Knight” are closeted Bush fans hankering to spread their (W-shaped) bat wings in full daylight comes this latest round of barrel-scraping for political analysis by The Wall Street Journal—this time daring to wonder whether Barack Obama shouldn’t hit the McDonald’s drive-through a bit harder if he really wants to win this thing.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Instead of offering puerile ads trashing Obama, McCain should show how he’d be the change U.S. voters are waiting for.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s awfully early for John McCain to be running such a desperate, ugly campaign against Barack Obama. But I guess it’s useful for Democrats to get a reminder that the Republican Party plays presidential politics by the same moral code that guided the bad-boy Oakland Raiders in their heyday: “Just win, baby.”
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“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said Thursday. He was referring to the Illinois senator’s comment Wednesday that Republicans were trying to scare voters about him because, among other things, “he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills.” Meanwhile, some analysts are arguing that the already infamous Britney Spears/Paris Hilton ad was designed to subliminally trigger voter racism.
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AP photo / Muhammed Muheisen
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By Bill Boyarsky — Sen. Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last week no doubt displeased the outspoken hawkish minority in the American Jewish community who want the Palestinians to be crushed. But it may have helped him with the more moderate majority of that community, where he must pick up support.
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By Marie Cocco — There is nothing like the blast of a Baghdad bomb and the wail of sirens to drown out John McCain’s bitter campaign sound bites or the patter of Barack Obama’s “premature victory lap.”
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Do you think that when John McCain helped craft the legislation requiring “I approved this message” at the end of political ads he could have envisioned himself attaching his name and approval to this silliness? Behold, McCain’s attempt to elevate the discourse ... by likening his opponent to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
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A visit to Estonia reminds “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman that the full impact of the American election will be felt across the globe, from Mesopotamia to a small Baltic republic.
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Several leading Republican strategists, both named and anonymous, were quoted Wednesday as slamming the latest in a string of bold attack ads on Barack Obama, this one overlaying images of the young senator with troubled trollops Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. “McCain ads are just catch as catch can, one wild swing at Obama after another,” one strategist told the Washington Post.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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By Robert Scheer — This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them.
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By Eugene Robinson — I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation’s great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the United States government. But that’s precisely what he did.
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Keystone / Eddy Risch
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Once strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton, actress and chanteuse Barbra Streisand says her switch to supporting Barack Obama was instantaneous when Clinton pulled out of the presidential race, and that other Clinton supporters should back the Illinois senator instead of throwing their vote to Republican John McCain in protest.
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Barack Obama’s decision to forgo a visit with wounded U.S. troops in Germany during the European leg of his recent international sojourn gave John McCain’s camp the idea for a new advertisement criticizing the Illinois senator, although Obama’s team and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel beg to differ with its premise.
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AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
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At first it looked as if Barack Obama’s world tour, despite all the media attention, wasn’t going to translate into more votes. The senator himself warned that he could actually lose points for globetrotting. The latest Gallup poll, however, shows a trend in Obama’s favor. The candidate held a lead of nine points on Sunday. Updated.
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Mosaic producer Jamal Dajani warns that early enthusiasm for Barack Obama in the Middle East has been replaced with skepticism.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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During his quick jaunt to Paris on Friday, Barack Obama sent a direct message to Iran, cautioning it to stop enriching uranium or “the pressure ... is only going to build.” Obama had the chance to chat briefly with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who told him that the French would be “delighted” if he won in November’s election.
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In this episode of KCRW’s popular political talk show, “Left, Right & Center,” analysts Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley, Robert Scheer and Matt Miller trade insights, and sometimes even agree, about Barack Obama’s big speech in Berlin, how McCain’s campaign is faring, and other items in the week’s news.
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MTV has become quite the changeling, now resembling not in the least the network that debuted in the early 1980s. Recently, the cable mainstay announced it will start airing political advertisements, and Team McCain seems to be first out the gates with this “Both Ways Barack” attack ad.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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While it might be true that speculation about who’ll become John McCain’s (or Barack Obama’s) vice presidential pick is overblown at times, The Wall Street Journal’s Ken Khachigian might be overlooking certain realities of McCain’s particular case when he says: “Voters don’t select the main course based on the side dish.”
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By Eugene Robinson — While John McCain pouted in obscurity, Barack Obama capped off a whirlwind tour with a commanding performance on the world stage.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The conventional wisdom on certain subjects is so deeply rooted that no amount of evidence disturbs its hold. That’s how it is with those dreary predictions that young Americans just won’t vote.
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It’s not clear whether those were Germans or backpackers chanting “yes we can” in Berlin, but Barack Obama’s speech was a big hit with the crowd, which responded warmly to his call for global unity. The candidate himself cracked up after a line about his father herding goats got a huge cheer.
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AP / Jens Meyer
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While fans deemed it “soaring” and Barack Obama himself tried to play down its importance, the senator’s speech Thursday in Berlin certainly had the visuals and big crowd to support comparisons to JFK’s famous appearance in the iconic Cold War capital.
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By Joe Conason — The strongest argument for Obama is the weak performance of the Republican regime’s vaunted “grown-ups,” including McCain and his advisers. They have gone far in proving that experience can be overrated.
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By Ellen Goodman — For a long time, John McCain has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war’s origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion.
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Jon Stewart takes a whimsical look at Barack Obama’s excellent adventure while Stephen Colbert notes that, with the entire news establishment chasing the senator, “I am the Edward R. Murrow of who’s left.”
Posted on Jul 23, 2008
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By Amy Goodman — The nominating conventions have become elaborate, expensive marketing events, but most people don’t know the extent to which major corporations fund them, pouring tens of millions of dollars into a little-known loophole in the campaign-finance system.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Remember how Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki endorsed Obama’s plan for U.S. withdrawal from the country? And then remember how the endorsement suddenly became a question of “translation”? Well, it ends up that it wasn’t a botched translation at all, and that Maliki’s office personally reviewed the final interview before it was published.
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“Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?” asks an ominous narrator as a distant crowd chants “Obama! Obama! Obama!” and a gas pump is juxtaposed with Sen. Barack Obama’s picture. Onion parody? YouTube mash-up? No, this is the latest television ad from the McCain campaign, and it has host and guest on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” cracking up.
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AP photo / Ziv Koren, Pool
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama is betraying his promise of change and is in danger of becoming just another political hack. Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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By Bill Boyarsky — The adoring media coverage of Barack Obama’s international tour is masking the reality that, whether he wins or loses, we’re almost certain to be stuck in Iraq for a long time, thanks to the legacy of George Bush.
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Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has often been described as a media darling, but that was before Mr. Straight Talk had to run against a political phenomenon. The Arizona senator was already frustrated by his drooping media prestige, but the wall-to-wall coverage of Barack Obama’s international tour, which was kind of McCain’s idea, has him seeing red.
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Before leaving Jordan for neighboring Israel, Barack Obama promised to pursue peace between Israelis and Palestinians “starting from the minute I’m sworn into office,” and to “be concerned and recognize the legitimate difficulties that the Palestinian people are experiencing right now.” His deference to impartiality comes a month after the candidate seemed to cede the city of Jerusalem, whether accidentally or not, to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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The “Daily Show” investigates Barack Obama’s alleged problem with Jews in Florida, where at least one crafty senior is on to the mock reporter’s funny business.
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By Marie Cocco — Using taxes as the centerpiece of—or as a substitute for—a more comprehensive economic policy is the idea that has dominated Washington since the rise of Reaganism nearly three decades ago, but the global forces shaping the U.S. economy are more powerful than a mere tax cut, or tax hike.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — To win the presidency, Barack Obama needs only to battle John McCain to a tie on foreign policy and national security. That means Obama has no need for a great triumph during his trip this week to the Middle East and Europe. His goal is to look safe, sound and competent, and that’s how he’s playing things.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s not a “timetable” for extricating U.S troops from Iraq that George W. Bush is suddenly talking about, and heaven help anyone who accuses him of proposing a “timeline.” No, the Decider says he is now amenable to a “time horizon,” which apparently is a whole different kind of time thing.
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DoD photo / SSG Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army
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Gen. David Petraeus gave his potential boss, Barack Obama, a helicopter tour of Baghdad on Monday. It’s a technique the general has used in the past to show normal life in Baghdad—from a safe distance. John McCain suggested recently that Petraeus would change Obama’s mind and his plan about withdrawing from Iraq, but that plan has newfound momentum and it could easily be Gen. Petraeus who is asked to carry it out.
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Flickr / Joe Shlabotnik
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Sorry, John McCain, but The New York Times doesn’t publish just any presidential candidate. A week after Barack Obama’s “My Plan for Iraq” appeared in the paper of record, a similar essay by John McCain was rejected on the grounds that it recycled attacks against his rival while offering little new information about his own war plans, according to the Drudge Report.
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Flickr / James Gordon
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The U.S. Embassy has reported that Barack Obama arrived safely in Iraq, where he is expected to meet with Gen. David Petraeus and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The candidate is traveling with fellow Iraq war critics Sen. Jack Reed and Sen. Chuck Hagel.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Saying he is “sympathetic to late night comedians’ struggle to find jokes to make about me,” Sen. Barack Obama today issued a list of official campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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Before leaving Kabul for Baghdad, Barack Obama spoke to his intention to increase America’s troop commitment to Afghanistan by 10,000 soldiers. “We have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent ... and I believe this has to be the central focus, the central front, in the battle against terrorism,” the candidate told CBS.
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AP photo
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Barack Obama embarked on his international diplomacy tour—a key step in raising his profile on the world stage and demonstrating his readiness to take over the American presidency—with an important first major stop. The Illinois senator landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday as part of congressional delegation surveying the current situation in that troubled nation.
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video.aol.com
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Dr. Marty Klein, author of “America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty,” has some additional questions for John McCain—who flailed in the face of a perfectly reasonable query about Viagra versus birth control last week—as well as his rivals for the presidency.
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AP photo / Sergei Chuzavkov
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We all know about this week’s Controversial Satire Attempt by that wicked, bad New Yorker magazine, which critics can now bash for being wicked instead of just elitist. (Boring!) That particular faux pas rocked the ever-intertwined worlds of politics and publishing and seemed to prove that poking fun at a certain presumptive presidential nominee can be a precarious enterprise, if not an absolute no-no.
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