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Saul Landau
$19.13
By Matt Miller
$16.50
$22
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Bill Boyarsky — Forget the moderate image, promoted by an admiring media. Forget the so-called straight talk and independence. With the Russian-Georgian war winding down, McCain has firmly established himself as an old-fashioned Cold Warrior and a supporter of the huge oil companies that have a big stake in Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus.
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By Eugene Robinson — Here come the goons, right on schedule. The “author,” and I use the term loosely, whose vicious lies damaged John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign has crawled back out from under his rock to spew vicious lies about Barack Obama.
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By David Sirota — If you believe the chatter, Barack Obama is desperately seeking a white guy—any white guy—to be his running mate. Hopefully, he doesn’t choose Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, whose only major accomplishment is helping to bend his party to the will of corporations.
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After protracted negotiations, Barack Obama has agreed to Hillary Clinton’s name being placed in nomination at the Democratic convention. A joint statement from the Obama and Clinton camps claims it was Obama’s idea to use the symbolic vote “as a show of unity and in recognition of the historic race she ran and the fact that she was the first woman to compete in all of our nation’s primary contests.” Ain’t that special.
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John Schwenkler/Boston Globe
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The Boston Globe has created a graphic that magnifies words according to the frequency of use on McCain and Obama’s respective blogs. Tellingly, the word used most often by both is Obama.
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Jared C. Benedict / Wikimedia Commons
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Labor groups have filed election complaints against Wal-Mart for reportedly telling store managers that Democrats’ proposed labor law changes would drive down wages and force layoffs.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne is not thrilled that his song “Running on Empty” was co-opted by the Ohio Republican Party and used as an anthem for a commercial that Browne believed made it seem as though he supported John McCain’s presidential campaign. Au contraire, Ohio GOP.
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By Joe Conason — The discovery that John McCain’s remarks on Georgia were derived from Wikipedia is, to put it politely, disturbing and even depressing—but not surprising.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Will the Party of Clinton ever become the Party of Obama? It has now been more than two months since Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination, yet here we are, still fascinated with Bill and Hillary Clinton and what they’re up to. Why?
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Wikimedia Commons
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He’s been rather quiet recently, but Flint’s finest is always a lively voice. His latest missive is a six-point plan for how the Democrats can still blow the easiest election they’ve faced in decades. Summary? Don’t be so darn nice!
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blogs.chron.com
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In case there was any residual doubt as to the current status of the relationship between the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama, New York Magazine should dispel that once and for all with the news, somewhat buried in this week’s cover story on race and the presidential election, that Wright will embark on a book tour in October.
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By William Pfaff — British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was the man who said the first three rules of warfare are “Do not invade Russia,” repeated three times. A footnote to that rule would be that while the disputed Georgian districts of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are not parts of Russia today, they were yesterday, and probably will again be tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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John McCain comes off as the tough-talking hard-liner in this Financial Times story about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Even more of a hard-liner than President Bush, who ever-so-reluctantly came around to agreeing with McCain on Monday after initially taking “a much more diluted stance” (just like Barack Obama), as John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, put it in the FT article’s completely unsurprising conclusion.
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freshdames.com
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The power of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement is clearly quantifiable when it comes to her “favorite things” (e.g. book sales), but how about her favorite people (e.g. Barack Obama)? Well, a scholarly duo from the University of Maryland came up with 1 million votes as the impressive, if somewhat strangely derived, number that represents the boost Oprah has given Obama since she gave him her official stamp of approval.
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By Marie Cocco — Before the energy-price crisis, before the mortgage crisis, before the credit crisis and the banking crisis, there was the crisis in health insurance that is in reality a crisis in care.
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amazon.com
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Book browsers will get plenty of face time with the Democratic candidate this fall when “Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise” arrives in stores. It’s a collection of speeches, policy papers and a foreword from the man himself. Proceeds will go to an unspecified charity.
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Celebrities have become mere pawns in the tussle between John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have now released campaign ads accusing the other of being a celebrity and snuggling up to celebrities. Celebrities = bad!
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The core strategy of John McCain’s campaign is to turn Barack Obama into the incumbent, the man who is too familiar yet still mysterious.
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By David Sirota — Twenty-two Electoral College votes in the Rocky Mountain West are up for grabs, meaning this vast expanse is more pivotal than Ohio. And that’s only the beginning of the region’s burgeoning influence on energy, taxes, trade and health care.
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“The Daily Show” tackles the campaign’s premier nonissue: offshore oil drilling. Experts agree that new drilling won’t have an impact anytime soon, but that hasn’t stopped McCain from bloviating, Obama from hedging and the punditry from setting the bar even lower.
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Flickr / Jurvetson (left) and soggydan
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Both John McCain and Barack Obama pride themselves on straightforwardness, but as one might expect, each has lobbed his fair share of less-than-accurate statements. Politico and PolitiFact take a look at some of the doozies the two candidates have told over the course of the campaign.
Posted on Aug 7, 2008
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Raymond Hunter Geisel, a 22-year-old aspiring bail bondsmen, is in custody for allegedly saying of Barack Obama, “If he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.” Geisel soon made matters worse for himself, reportedly joking to a Secret Service agent that “if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle.”
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Bill Boyarsky — After enduring the silly debate over who injected race into the presidential campaign, let’s look at some recent numbers that indicate how Barack Obama could win this close election.
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In the battle to define John McCain, the man himself would have you call him “the original maverick.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, says McCain is running for George W. Bush’s third term. This identity struggle could determine the outcome of the election.
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John McCain has found a theme he likes and he’s sticking with it: Barack Obama is popular and that’s bad. Much worse, apparently, than the Reagan-era economic philosophy the presumed Republican nominee is peddling.
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Just as John McCain was catching flak for bolstering Paris Hilton’s bafflingly resilient showbiz career, another danger appeared on the horizon in the form of that purebred Hollywood golden retriever Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s turned up in a Democrat-sponsored PSA with an angular bob that could slice deli meat and a get-out-the-vote message for expat American voters.
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By Eugene Robinson — I’m confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain’s front-line surrogates know full well what messages they’re sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they—or, more likely, some of the white voters they’re trying to reach—don’t know text from subtext from context, here’s a deconstruction.
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By Marie Cocco — In this summer of our economic discontent, it isn’t necessary to manufacture a financial crisis or to make political hash out of discussing a nonexistent one.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Will the race issue go back into the closet for the rest of the presidential campaign? Of course not, so where do we go from here?
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Both Barack Obama and John McCain have recently changed their positions when it comes to dealing with the burgeoning energy crisis and America’s all-too-apparent dependence on foreign oil, but that doesn’t mean each presumptive nominee isn’t going to keep pointing out the other’s potential inconsistencies and flaws, as Obama’s new ad here demonstrates.
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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 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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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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“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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New Iranian President Wants to Heal ‘Old Wound’ With U.S.
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