Question

Question: Are the other GOP presidential candidates more happy or sad today? Happy because Trump's comments slamming McCain for being "captured" in Vietnam make them all look less extreme? Or, sad because his racist comments about Mexicans are going to lose the few Latino voters the Republicans had?

Kissinger, McCain, And Code Pink

From The Hill:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called protesters "low-life scum," after they interrupted a hearing by calling for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to be arrested for war crimes.

Protesters from the group Code Pink chanted, "Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes!" and raised signs in the air as Kissinger entered the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room.

McCain, the chairman of the committee, at first asked, "Could someone find out where the Capitol Police is?"

Alas, the good Senator was not taking Code Pink's advice and calling for the Capitol Police to arrest Kissinger for war crimes.

In a statement released later, McCain wrote:

The incident at today’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which individuals associated with the liberal group Code Pink physically threatened former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger was completely unacceptable, and those responsible must be held fully accountable for their actions. In my 32 years in the House and Senate, I have never witnessed this kind of physical intimidation of a witness at a Congressional hearing.

And:

Code Pink’s typical protest tactics include interrupting Congressional hearings with chanting and sign-holding, which while disruptive and improper, do not represent a threat to witnesses. What happened today was far different. As Dr. Kissinger entered the hearing room to take his seat, a group of Code Pink protesters rushed up to the witness table to confront him, waving handcuffs within inches of his head. Some senators were concerned enough for Dr. Kissinger’s safety that they came down off the dais to support the witnesses. With no U.S. Capitol Police intervening, the episode went on for several minutes.

Which is, of course, not entirely accurate.  Take a look at the video:


The rundown:

0:18 - Protesters can be heard chanting "Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes!"
0:24 - A rather burly man with a yellow tie (Kissinger's assistant? a Senate staffer?) stands between Kissinger and the protesters
0:28 - A uniformed Capitol Police officer is seen intervening
0:31 - Kissinger calmly sits down next to former Secretary of State George Schultz, who's sitting next to Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright
0:35 - A hand can be seen holding up a pair of hand cuffs between Kissinger and Schultz
0:44 - The Capital police officer can be seen talking on his radio
1:17 - The Capital police officer can be seen directing the protestors to the back of the hall
1:29 - The protestors are seen moving away from Kissinger
1:51 - They're all back in their seats
2:19 - McCain says to one man who seems to be yelling at the committee, "You know, you're going to have to shut up or I'll have you arrested.
2:19 - The Capital police officer is seen leading the man away
2:20 - McCain: "If we can't get the Capitol Hill Police in here immediately"
2:23 - The man goes back for his jacket
2:24 - McCain: "Get out of here you low life scum."
2:27 - McCain apologizes to Kissinger on behalf of the committee
3:04 - Says Kissinger "served his country with the greatest distiction."

A few notes -

• The chanting-bloody-hands-holding-handcuffs protest was done in just over one minute
• McCain seems not to know that a member of the Capitol Police was present at all times
• At no time was the rather burly man with the yellow tie not standing between Kissinger and the protesters.

Now go back and look at how McCain described it for those who may not have seen the video.

Not entirely accurate is a bit of an understatement.

But let's take a look at why Code Pink might think Kissinger should be arrested for war crimes (BTW, I do, too!).

On East Timor, Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2002:

The State Department recently declassified the verbatim conversation between Kissinger and General Soeharto on the day of the invasion of East Timor in 1975. The record shows Kissinger giving warm approval to the proposed annexation, and also promising to keep a flow of weapons coming to Indonesia.

This flagrant agreement to break both international law and the law of the US (which supplied weapons on the specific condition that they be used only in self-defence) contradicts every statement so far made by Kissinger on the subject.

And with that the blood of 180,000 East Timorese are on Kissinger's hands.

Then there's Vietnam.  Take a look at this from Hitchens, again.:

In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic "worked," in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. In another way, it did not "work," because four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that still surrounds the question is that in those intervening years some 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger.

Note that the peace talk sabotage took place before the 1968 election.  Nixon was still a private citizen (albeit one running for President) who had no legal authority to influence foreign policy.  In fact, it's a crime to do so.

It's pretty clear that the war was extended 4 years in order to aid in the election of Richard Nixon.  All the death and suffering in those extended years is on their hands.

Do I need to point out that Captain John McCain was captured in October 1967 and was released in March of 1973?

How much earlier would McCain have been released had Kissinger not sabotaged the '68 peace talks?  How much torture would he not have endured had the man he so deferentially reveres not, in effect, extended the Vietnam war for a Nixon's political gain?

Who's the low life scum here, anyway?

Romney to Announce VP Pick Saturday at 9:00 AM; NBC Says it's Paul Ryan

I'm not going to hazard a guess on this because I am notoriously clueless when it comes to this particular guessing game:

Four years ago, I was participating in a live streaming panel discussion on the KDKA News website the night before John McCain announced his pick of Sarah Palin. Fortunately, I was unable to get out my comment that, "Well, we know it won't be a woman or an African American."  

Four years prior to that, I was "backstage" when John Kerry announced his VP pick. I was one of the volunteers standing by to rip open the boxes and toss out the T-shirts and rally signs emblazoned with -- unbeknownst to me at the time -- "Kerry-Edwards." I had no clue until the second Kerry said the name. (I did, however, get to shake hands with both Kerry and Edwards that same day, but at two different locations in Pittsburgh as they did not appear together in public on the day of the announcement.)

 Yep, I suck at this.

Who knew I was standing so close to the Muslim Brotherhood?

A photo I took on March 14, 2008, whilst standing mere feet away from Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton

While Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) may have decried Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-McCarthyville) baseless attacks on Huma Abedin -- a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- for having imaginary ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Newt Gingrich has come to Bachmann's defense.

Bachmann has also accused the country's first Muslim congressman, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), of being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin has had to be placed under extra security after being threatened. And, Clinton's motorcade was pelted with tomatoes and shoes while in Egypt by crowds who bought into the claims by Bachmann and others of Obama Administration ties to the Brotherhood.

That's our Michele! Spreading joy and sunshine where she goes!

Venture Capitalist Mitt Romney Outspends all Contenders to Acquire Republican Presidential Nomination

Venture capitalist, Mitt Romney, outspent all other contenders to secure the nomination as the Republican candidate for president of the USA Corporation. Romney is expected to spend 1 billion dollars in an attempt to buy the general election in November. If successful, his plans are to dismantle the country and sell it for parts.

Former GOP CEO, John McCain, noted of the buyout that, "the free enterprise system can be cruel."

Filling In A Few Blanks

Every now and then the editorial pages at the Tribune-Review and the Post-Gazette cover the same issue and it's child's play to guess which side of which issue each will support.

Today is no exception.

The Trib say: North Shore connector - bad, Coburn-McCain report - good.

The P-G? As you might expect, sees things differently.

Since the overlap begins with the Coburn McCain report, we'll start there.

The Trib:

Laurel: To Tom Coburn and John McCain. The Republican U.S. senators, of Oklahoma and Arizona, respectively, list Pittsburgh's North Shore Connector as the nation's third-worst waste of federal "stimulus" money. And what a waste it is. Its benefits were oversold. It's dramatically over budget. And it's a monument to both the state in ineptness and the ineptness of the state. It is "waste" incarnate.

And the P-G:

Don't mistake the report this week by Republican Sens. John McCain and Tom Coburn for an economic analysis of the federal stimulus. "Summertime Blues" is a political stunt, designed to make the stimulus sound foolhardy by belittling and mischaracterizing projects it has funded.

As usual in supporting it's position, the Trib relies on some Scaife-funded think tank without ever declaring his support for that think tank. In this case the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy is referenced twice. You get what you pay for, I guess.

In it's defense of the Stimulus bill, the P-G points out:

It begins with an oversimplification, long stated by opponents of the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that "Eighteen months since the law's passage, millions of jobs are still gone and the economy is as uncertain as ever."

That conclusion ignores countervailing findings, such as those issued last week -- by a former McCain adviser who is chief economist for Moody's investment service as well as Princeton economist Alan Blinder -- which said the stimulus program and the bank bailout likely averted a depression.

In doing so, they left something out.

The CBO (that's the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, for you newbies) has declared that the stimulus package:

• Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,
• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,
• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and
• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

So when Coburn and McCain write:

When Congress passed the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, otherwise known as the stimulus bill, it passed with assurances that it would stem the loss of American jobs and keep the economy from floundering. As most can see, it hasn’t.

Eighteen months since the law’s passage, millions of jobs are still gone and the economy is as uncertain as ever. The only thing getting a boost is our national debt – the stimulus has helped push it 23 percent higher, to $13.2 trillion, a new record.

You know they're just spinning. And that everything that follows is just a part of the spin. The facts may be true, but as the frame is skewed, so is the conclusion.

As the P-G points out:

No one is suggesting that every dollar of stimulus money has been spent wisely, but this report starts with a weak hypothesis supported by exaggeration. There ain't no cure for this "Summertime Blues."

As it's Friday and Fridays should be fun, here's some Eddie Cochran:


UPDATED to include the frickin link to the CBO report

Jack Kelly Sunday

The good folks over at the P-G should, perhaps, vet Jack Kelly's sources a little better.

In this week's column, Jack writes:

My friend Jack Wheeler has a solution to the problem of Afghanistan. Get rid of it.

Yes, he's serious. No, he's not a crackpot.

An adventurer who's been in almost every country in the world, Jack Wheeler is one of three real life people on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based. He's climbed the Matterhorn, swum the Bosporus, parachuted onto the North Pole and lived with a tribe of headhunters in the Amazon.

One of the countries where Jack has spent a lot of time is Afghanistan, mostly during the time Afghans were fighting Soviet occupation. Jack was the father of the Reagan doctrine of providing support to anti-Communist resistance movements.

I will set aside the assertion that Wheeler was one "three real life people on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based" because I couldn't find any support for that - aside from Wheeler himself and a slew of references to the Washington Post calling him "The Indiana Jones of the Right."

Unfortunately I couldn't find any reference to that last part at the Washington Post.

I'd love to see a reliable citation regarding either.

In any event, Jack is wrong about Wheeler. He is a crackpot. And unlike Jack, I'll offer up some evidence.

Point one: He's a Birther. March 19, 2009 he wrote:

There are two growing protest movements: the Tea Party taxpayer revolt movement and the “Birther” movement that demands Zero prove he is a natural-born US citizen. These two must merge.

Far from a tin foil hat cause, Birthers are simply asking that Zero provide his actual birth certificate, which he won’t – at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Since all he has to do is provide the same thing all the rest of us do to get a driver’s license or passport, and he won’t, this is prima facie evidence that he can’t. Or there is some scandalous secret he is covering up – such as his real father is not a Kenyan but a radical left black poet his mother was having an affair with, Frank Marshall Davis.

In any regard, until he provides solid proof of his natural born citizenship, we are justified in regarding his presidency as illegitimate.

This argument must be made at every Tea Party protest. We do not recognize him as president until he proves he legitimately, Constitutionally is.

Strange thing about that column, you can't actually find it at Wheeler's website, To The Point News. However, it looks as though Wheeler himself posted it at Faithfreedom.org.

So Wheeler's a birther - enough for me to qualify as "crackpot" but there's more.

Much more. Disgustly much more.

Point two: Jack Wheeler's disgusting assertions about Senator John McCain's POW record. In February of 2008 Jack Wheeler wrote a column for World Net Daily so disgusting that it makes his "birther" bona fides look downright rational.

In the piece Jack Wheeler (Jack Kelly's "good friend") asserts that

• as a POW, John McCain made an "accommodation" with his North Vietnamese and Soviet GRU captors at the Hanoi Hilton and in exchange he was provided with an apartment in Hanoi and the services of two prostitutes.
• the CIA has proof of this by way of a "document swap" with the GRU after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and that since Bill Clinton was a CIA asset since his time at Oxford, the Clintons had access to that proof as well.
• the Clinton would use that proof to blackmail McCain into losing the 2008 election in favor of Hilary Clinton.

Oh, and on top of all that Jack Wheeler asserts that the CIA has been "dominated by left wing hyper-radicals for years."

And this guy's not a crackpot? Unfortunately for Jack, it effectively invalidates whatever Wheeler had to say about Afghanistan. Had he left his crackpot friend out of it, this blog post would have been much more difficult to write (though a lot less fun).

The P-G can do better than this. They have to.

Really, you shouldn't have.

"Complete the danged fence"?!

Really, Sen. McCain. You should not have approved this message:


P.A.T.H.E.T.I.C.

Delusional

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tries to rewrite history by not only claiming that then President Bush asked him to suspend his presidential campaign during the 2008 financial crisis, but that then candidate Obama also suspended his campaign.
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Ha! Funny!

Tom Tomorrow brings up an interesting point in his most recent cartoon.

About the conservatives who are criticizing President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully in support of the protesters in Iran, he says that some of the same folks, not too long ago, were advocating mass death in Iran. Remember this?


Or remember how William Kristol said that Bush might bomb Iran if he thought Obama was going to win?

Or when Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar over at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an Op-Ed in the LA Times in November, 2006, that began with these words:

WE MUST bomb Iran.

Who did they think would get hurt when the bombs dropped?

Glenn Greenwald has the story.

Getting it wrong on Palin

After hearing over and over yesterday on various MSNB shows that Alaska Governor and former Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin was bitching that she couldn't find anyone from the McCain campaign to pray with on the evening of her VP debate, I finally heard the actual quote:

"So I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra. And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, they're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray." [Emphasis added]

Which means rather than being the poor cheerleader with no pep club, she was the mean cheerleader who looked down on her pep club.
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Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

1) Notice who isn't shaking any hands and who isn't offered any hands to shake at the G20 Summit.

"CNN's Rick Sanchez aptly says that Bush looks like "the most unpopular kid in high school that nobody liked."



2) From the Washington Post:

He has returned to where he did not wish to return. Back to walking the spotted white marble corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building. Back to Room 241, which says "Senator John McCain -- Arizona" on the door, and where a trickle of people stroll in on this morning in hopes of getting his pre-autographed photo and to inquire about obtaining tickets for Barack Obama's inauguration. Others stare. He has perfected his own middle-distance stare and the curt nod of someone coping. [Emphasis added]

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Jack Kelly Sunday

There's not much for me to disagree with in this week's column. Jack Kelly even calls the results a "landslide in the Electoral College" and as we all know, when Jack says something, it's gotta be true.

Right?

So Electoral College landslide it is. Thanks, Jack!

At one point, Jack writes:

I give the McCain campaign a C- at best. It often seemed a pudding without a theme. On the paramount issue, Mr. McCain didn't have a message that resonated until Joe the Plumber found one for him. And the way the McCain campaign mishandled its prize asset -- Gov. Sarah Palin -- was appalling.

All this may be true, but Governor Palin's own performance was no less appalling. National Review columnist Kathleen Parker way back in late September called for Palin to withdraw from the ticket. Parker wrote:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

Then Jack writes this:

There apparently was more fraud in this election than in any other in the recent past. But because Mr. Obama's margins in key states were large, the votes of the ineligible and the dead didn't affect the outcome. Republicans weren't robbed. They were beaten, fair and square.

Of course Jack doesn't say where there was "apparently was more fraud in this election than in any other in the recent past" so we're left to fill in the blanks.

Ohio? Smooth.
Pennsylvania? Also smooth.
Florida? "Almost eerily quiet."

So where was this "more" fraud? Any reports of widespread voter fraud in any of the non-partisan organizations set up to watch for it? I couldn't find any.

But I wholeheartedly agree that the GOP was beaten (in Jack's own words) "fair and square." But then Jack immediately contradicts himself with the next paragraph:

Because Republicans cannot reasonably blame defeat on tactical mistakes by the McCain campaign...

Didn't he just give the McCain campaign a C- on its "pudding without a theme" (whatever that means)? So it's now unreasonable to blame the (Electoral College landslide) defeat on the campaign's mistakes? I don't get it.

Jack follows a few paragraphs later with that desperate last-ditch meme of the rightwing noise machine. Here's how Jack puts it:

Despite Mr. Obama's victory, I think America remains a center-right country. But the right cannot prevail if it alienates the center.

Uh, no. Tell me how, when more than 52% of the electorate votes for the guy the GOP branded as "a socialist" we live in a "center-right" nation. Mediamatters.org reports that Democracy Corp released poll numbers showing strong support for the policies outlined by now-President-Elect Obama. How then can we be in a "center-right" country? Michael Grunwald of Time, writing the night of the election, puts it this way:

The pundits are already warning that Obama could overreach, that Democratic congressional leaders are still unpopular, that this is still a center-right country. But it wasn't tonight. Obama will have the luxury of taking office at a time when the GOP is the AIG of electoral politics, when his predecessor has set the lowest bar since James Buchanan, when a supposedly conservative Administration just started nationalizing the banking system, when the public is desperate for change. What is it about tonight's results that suggests Obama should be afraid of progressive action on the cusp of a depression?

And reminds us of the national nightmare we're leaving:

Remember what eight years of Republican rule has wrought: missing weapons of mass destruction, the promises we'd be greeted as liberators, Jessica Lynch, torture, the disintegration of Afghanistan. Also: Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie and Freddie, GM, Chrysler, Social Security privatization, the $700 billion bailout. Also: Brownie, John Ashcroft covering up that bare-breasted statue at the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales politicizing the Justice Department, Harriet Miers, the oil lobbyist who edited those global warming reports. Also: Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Ted Stevens. Also: the Vice President shot a guy, and the President almost choked to death on a pretzel.

The election was a mandate for change, an electoral college landslide and a clear repudiation of both conservative policies in general and the last eight disastrous years specifically.

The Numbers (So Far)

Electoral Votes (as of this writing - Missouri and North Carolina have yet to be decided.):

Obama - 349
McCain - 162

Popular Vote (with 95% of precincts reporting):

Obama - 62,239,016 (52%)
McCain - 55,229,186 (48%)

From Politico:

More than 130 million people turned out to vote Tuesday, the most ever to vote in a presidential election.

With ballots still being counted in some precincts into Wednesday morning, an estimated 64 percent of the electorate turned out, making 2008 the highest percentage turnout in generations.

So as of this writing President-Elect Barack Obama has more than twice as many electoral votes as Senator McCain and a majority of the popular vote. And even with only 95% of the precincts, more people voted for Barack Obama for president than voted for anyone else for president.

This was a solid win - a solid solid win. It was also a firm repudiation of:

• Neoconservative politics - especially on foreign policy
  
• The republican "brand" - and all the ugly that it stands for
  
• The Bush Administration - unpopular war, unpopular president, unpopular policies
  
• Republican campaign policies - the 50-state strategy worked, smear campaiging didn't
  
• The right-wing noise machine - that includes Fox "News" and (of course) local blowhards Quinn, Miller, Kelly, and Honsberger
  
• Wingnuts everywhere - their blogs, trolls, and everything else.
  

They lost.

We won.

Change has come to America.

As if you needed another reason to root for the Steelers!

Ancient lore has it (OK, not terribly ancient) that the outcome of the last game played at home by the Washington Redskins before a US presidential election predicts who will win the White House.

If the Redskins win, then so does the party which occupies the White House. If they lose, the challenging party wins.

This has actually held true for 17 out of the last 18 elections.

Tonight, it's the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Washington Redskins on the Redskin's home turf.

That means Obama's rooting for the Steelers -- and you know who McCain is really rooting for.

GO STEELERS!



UPDATE: Steelers 23, Redskins 6 HA!
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In Case You Missed It

Vice President Dick Cheney has FINALLY endorsed Senator John McCain. Take a look see:


Senator Obama has responded:

President Bush is sitting out the last few days before the election. But earlier today, Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location and hit the campaign trail. He said that he is, and I quote, “delighted to support John McCain.”

I’d like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington’s biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney’s support.

But here’s my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain’s going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?

Colorado, we know better. After all, it was just a few days ago that Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a “common philosophy.” And we know that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain and Dick Cheney share a common philosophy that thinks that empty bluster from Washington will fix all of our problems, and a war without end in Iraq is the way to defeat Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So George Bush may be in an undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney’s out there on the campaign trail because he’d be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush’s economic policy and Dick Cheney’s foreign policy – but that’s a risk we cannot afford to take.

Because a war criminal's endorsement is always a good thing.

Notice Something?

While Senator Obama's speaking in front of tens of thousands of people, the formerly honorable John McCain is having trouble finding six thousand.

From MSNBC yesterday:

A local school district official confirmed after the event that of the 6,000 people estimated by the fire marshal to be in attendance this morning, more than 4,000 were bused in from schools in the area. The entire 2,500-student Defiance School District was in attendance, the official said, in addition to at least three other schools from neighboring districts, one of which sent 14 buses.

A week before the election and he can't scrape together six thousand people in Ohio?

McCain Latest Vile Smear

From the Washington Post:

With the presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers -- a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance -- was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear. [emphasis added]

Josh Marshall has more:

The McCain campaign has been throwing around so much mud and smears in recent weeks that it's easy to miss just how ugly and shameful their character assassination of Rashid Khalidi is. This is an entirely respectable, highly respected scholar. To go further into making a case for him would only be to enable and indulge McCain's sordid appeal to racism. For McCain, personally, to compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi, it's just an offense McCain should never be forgiven for. It's right down in the gutter with Joe McCarthy and the worst of the worst.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the formerly honorable John McCain.

McCain Camp Responds to Letter from Burgess about "B" Hoax

From The Busman's Holiday, here's McCain campaign spokesman Jeff Sadosky:

"The liberal blog post that the councilman cites has no basis in fact, the McCain campaign had no role in this incident. We hope the young woman involved in the incident gets the help that she needs, it's disappointing that Pittsburgh law enforcement time and resources were wasted by her false allegations."

You can read Councilman Burgess' letter here.

Bob Mayo has loads more on this at his blog.
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The Trib Editorial Board Distorts

Well, "distorts" might not be the right word. LIES might be a better one.

Take a look at today's editorial. First they set up the whole "Joe The Plumber" thing and then get to the distortion:

...Big Media scrutinized "Joe's" background. And it appears that it might have had lots of help from Ohio's Democratic Party apparatus, now under investigation.

The Columbus Dispatch says officials want to know if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed to mine personal information about Mr. Wurzelbacher.

Driver's license and SUV information thrice was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database. Information also was accessed by computers assigned to the offices of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rodgers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and Toledo Police Department, The Dispatch reported.

If the allegations are true, it will confirm how Democrats in power abuse that power in pursuit of the destruction of those who dare oppose their policies.

BUT (and there's always a big but when fact-checking the Trib's editorials) let's take a look at the actual reporting from The Columbus Dispatch.

Some questions to keep in mind: Do they report that Ohio's Democratic Party apparatus is now under investigation for peeking into Joe's files as is (at the very least) implied by the Trib's editorial? Do they report that the Ohio Democratic Party had anything to do with someone accessing the files? Do they report the same about the national Democratic Party?

Let's take a look. The Dispatch first reported the story on the 24th:

State and local officials are investigating if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed when they were tapped for personal information about "Joe the Plumber."

A few paragraphs down, however, they reported:

It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why.

Then on the 25th they reported:

The Republican presidential candidate reacted today to a story in The Dispatch about the use of state computers to access personal information about "Joe" - suburban Toledo resident Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

State and local officials are investigating why his driver's license and vehicle registration information was accessed shortly after Wurzelbacher became a household name.

Republicans, including McCain, painted the news as a politically motivated invasion of privacy and an attempt to dig up dirt.

And they added a few paragraphs later:

Who accessed the information, and why, has not been determined. Access to BMV data is restricted to legitimate government purposes. Illegal access can be a crime.

Nowhere in the reporting from the Columbus Dispatch is there any connection made between the local or national Democratic Party and whomever accessed Wurzelbacher's files. And yet the Trib's editorial board clearly implied that there is a connection using the Dispatch's reporting as evidence. I'd say that goes beyond distortion into dishonesty. But that's just me.

It's still possible someone in the Democratic Party over stepped the line in Ohion. But unless and until that's reported no responsible editorial should implicate anyone with such wrong doing.

And no responsible political party should either (as the Ohio Republicans have already done). But considering this is the McCain campaign - a campaign that pushed a hoax story before all the facts were in - it's not surprising that they'd dive headfirst into the mud.