... is made clear by this latest US violation of national sovereignty with [ a helicopter strike into Syria ]: DAMASCUS, Syria (Oct. 26) – U.S. military helicopters launched an extremely rare attack Sunday on Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq, killing eight people in a strike the government in Damascus condemned as "serious aggression." A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the foreign fighter network that travels through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military's reach. "We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids. The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for f...

(and it apparently was for millions of Americans, as hard as that is for the rest of us to believe)... ...then with two caveats I think Senator John McCain won the debate. Caveat one: winning the debate has only a passing relationship to being right about the issues, or even getting your facts straight. I caught gaffes and intentional distortions on both sides, although I'd probably give the accuracy award to Senator Barack Obama by a hair. But that doesn't really matter: because tens of millions of people who watched all or part of the debate did not and will not do the fact check thing. They are going to go on gut feeling and stage performance [like assuming that Bush 41 checking his watch or Nixon failing to wear make-up had anything to do with Presidential qualification]. Caveat two: McCain did two things that Ronald Reagan would have approved of (although he did neither as well as the Gipper would have done): (1) he scored on the what-would-you-do-different-as-Pres...

I keep remembering, when one side or the other tries to tell me, "It's over," that neither Senator John McCain nor Senator Barack Obama was supposed to be his party's nominee this year. Now, it's the economy and the expected collapse of the Palin bubble that's going to sink McCain. Except that I don't think--as momentous as the economic news is--that the election is going to turn on the bailout. Why? Three reasons: 1) Most Americans don't understand what's happening, and the tax bill for all this will not hit until well after November. 2) Both candidates are now living on borrowed time, because both of them know that the major decisions will be made by Dubya before either gets into office, but that the resulting recession is going to tar the President who is actually in office when it really hits. So within the next two weeks you are going to see both McCain and Obama looking to bring other issues back to the forefront--because neither of them can...

...and the current AP story on Alan Greenspan criticizing Senator John McCain's tax plan is a case in point. Greenspan critiquing the McCain plan (and even the Democratic glee at hearing that critique) are important pieces of news, and deserve the coverage. But, all of a sudden, about the twelfth paragraph, without any transition, the story jumps into problems McCain has connecting with his base and the impact of Sarah Palin on that process... ...which has not a damn thing to do with the rest of the story. So if you actually want to read a substantive story about what Greenspan said, go visit SwampPolitics.com , and hope that the AP sends some of its writers and editors back to English Composition 101.

... as parsed by Factcheck.org , show that nobody has the monopoly on distortion in this election. Of Senator John McCain's acceptance speech, Factcheck found six major whoppers , including this one: McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have. In Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech, Factcheck unearthed seven bigtime distortions , including this one: Obama noted that McCain’s health care plan would "tax people’s benefits" but didn’t say that it also would provide up to a $5,000 tax credit for families. Why is this comparison so important? Because partisans of both sides love to run to Factcheck to bad-mouth their opponents, which is also essential used as a backhanded way of implying that their candidate is different. For example...

The Moscow Post is predicting that either Senator Barack Obama or John McCain will appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The article is worth reading in the automated translation for sentences like this: Such a purely campaign speech Clinton and Obama, made by them after the funeral ceremony, led to sharp anger among supporters of the Republican Party who believe that the funeral ceremony - this is not the time for the pre-election campaign. However, it appears that Democrats do not miss any opportunity to raise its rating. This is justified by the fact that the war Russia and Georgia, top McCain scored more than 50% and the top ahead of Obama. As a result, a black senator was in the minority. Now he needs to win to make as much effort and tightening under their banners as much as possible supporters. Ah, yes, the wonders of Babblefish : "a black senator was in the minority." Besides, you gotta love the photo they ran with the article:

From The Australian [h/t Real World Libertarian], we discover first that Senator Hillary Clinton has declined to become a major anti-Sarah Palin surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign (perhaps because she recalls that this is exactly the strategy Obama used against her): HILLARY Clinton may be the most obvious choice to throw into the ring against the new darling of American politics, Sarah Palin, but the failed Democratic presidential candidate is refusing the job. "We're not going to be anybody's attack dog against Sarah Palin," a Clinton insider said yesterday.... Her refusal to roll up her sleeves against Palin, who describes herself as "a pit bull with lipstick", has already come under questioning by Democratic apparatchiks. "The strategic imperative right now is to do something about Palin and prevent her cutting through the race," said Democratic strategist Tad Devine. This in reference to ...the roster of prominent women deployed by Obama ...

I keep seeing so many pundits and commenters trying to grapple with Senator John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his VP, and the dichotomous nature of their speeches at the GOP convention, that I thought I'd explain what is going on. Here's what you need to know: 1) John McCain intends to win the Presidency; all decisions are subordinated to that end. 2) He realizes that no conventional strategy stands a good chance at overcoming Senator Barack Obama's momentum, and that he first has to throw the Obama campaign off its game before he can play his own. 3) As Obama rejected the Clinton 50% plus one strategy early on for the Howard Dean 50-state strategy, McCain has rejected the typically Karl Rove strategy of staking his bid on cultural war and the war on terro in the battleground states. Instead, McCain plans a major departure from previous strategies. Here's some background. Traditionally, both major candidates run to their base in the primaries and back to the ce...

I am not quite sure what to do with this set of responses from a recent Democracy Corps poll in North Carolina . The question was about Senator Barack Obama's religion: Do you know what Barack Obama's religion is? (IF YES, ASK:) What religion is he ? Here's the breakdown of the answers: Christian - general: 41% Muslim/Islam: 7% Protestant: 6% Catholic: 1% Jewish: - Other: 2% Don't know: 42% Refused: 1% Some initial observations: 1) I'm not surprised that 7% of the people think Obama is Muslim, although I wonder if that's actually true. Part of me wonders if there are not people out there actually answering that he's Muslim to keep that particular urban legend alive. 2) I think the question was flawed. I can see someone who thinks Obama is Christian but doesn't know his denomination answering "I don't know" to this question, because of the way they would have interpreted "religion." I suspect that if people had been as...

. . . occurred at Al Jazeera in Marwan Bishara's column . Go figure.

Look, I liked the Manchurian Candidate [the original; the remake sucked] as well as the next guy. And I think many of Senator Barack Obama's policies --say it again and put it in bold face-- policies are potential disasters. Especially that one about ignoring Pakistani sovereignty to chase down Osama bin Laden... What I don't doubt is that Barack Obama is a sincere American citizen who believes his leadership and his policies will benefit this country. Maybe also the world, but not specifically Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, or Bumfuck, Egypt. What I don't doubt is that comments like this, in Libertarian Republican , are not meant to report the news, but to evoke these patently ridiculous concerns : Americans are tolerant of foreigners and certainly of immigrants to this country. But a major party Presidential candidate with such strong familial and legal ties to questionable countries such as Kenya, Indonesia and now Pakistan, legitimately could raise serious concerns amon...

. . . which is not some derivative of Heritage, or Cato, or Grover Norquist, but a combination of those two obviously neo-con outfits, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Disclaimer: do not read this as an endorsement of Senator John McCain's position; McCain's tax plan actually comes off worse by comparison in the opinion of the Tax Policy Center. So what's really, really , really scary is that this is apparently the best the Demopublicans have to offer . Second Disclaimer: Senator Obama claims that his tax plan would be far more progressive than Senator McCain's, in that the largest tax cuts would go to low-income taxpayers and the largest tax increases would be visited on the wealthiest Americans. However, as these excerpts show, the situation is much more complex than that. So what does the Tax Policy Center say about Senator Obama's plan? Here are the excerpts [but please go read the whole thing yourself]: As noted, both candidates may be ...

Oh, no, you have to go and make me think again . I'm only going to deal with two paragraphs right this instance (sort of my protest for being drawn away from meaningless athletic competition with possibly the ugliest American uniforms ever worn): So I believe in free marketing when it is small and there is enough give and take among all parties that some symbiotic balance is achieved between all parties. Then individual talent has a chance to move a species forward up the evolutionary ladder…. But when the market gets too big or it merges together so that only one man can control its direction, then I think it needs to be split up and returned back to where every entity must fight for its own existence….. What you make me think of here is the extremely persuasive argument of historian Fernand Braudel that economic activity should really be considered in three distinct albeit interacting spheres. Braudel was looking primarily at the early emergence of capitalism in the 15-18th Cent...

I can foresee a lot of scrambling by leading Democrats trying to explain this one away. What John McCain is doing--as unlovely as the execution of the strategy may appear to political wonks and insiders of both parties--is going right past the money and the pseudo-wonkish seriousness of the Obama campaign to make ads that people will remember, whether they like them or not. And for the first time he's throwing Barack Obama seriously off stride with them. Obama is responding rather than initiating. The strategy is an old one: throw rapid-fire shit at a wall and see what sticks , but it is nonetheless effective. The fact that Paris Hilton and company made a video response actually plays into McCain's hands. Why? Because it doesn't make him look stupid to middle-class America, it looks like he finally got their attention. Remember: McCain is the guy they wrote off as road kill last year, and he's got a lot of experience in not losing . And while everybody's watchin...

The first casualty--probably the main casualty--of this year's political season is . . . reality. Senator John McCain appeared recently at the Sturgis [South Dakota] Rally 2008 to speak to an audience of possibly half a million bikers. It was obviously a good audience for McCain, although not a shoe-in. Bikers are notoriously individualistic, generally united by a visceral love of freedom than any shared formal ideology. What interests me here, however, is not McCain himself, but how the event was portrayed by two different media outlets. Politico.com saw it this way: Every summer, nearly half a million motorcyclists descend on Sturgis, an otherwise sleepy town in South Dakota, for a nine-day celebration of all things Harley. This year, the bikers, strippers and rockers were joined by a most unlikely guest: the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain. McCain's appearance before a veteran-heavy audience of several thousand bikers gathered at the Buffalo Chip...

From the New York Times : Ohio must include the Libertarian Party’s nominees on its ballot in November, a court has ruled, complicating Senator John McCain’s effort to win conservative votes in a hotly contested state rich in electoral votes. The Libertarian candidate, Bob Barr, formerly a Republican congressman from Georgia, will lead his party’s ticket, which includes the vice-presidential candidate, Wayne Allyn Root, and candidates for governor and several Congressional seats. “Ballot restrictions are all designed to prevent competition for the Democrats and Republicans,” said Russell Verney, Mr. Barr’s campaign manager, who said inclusion on the ballot with a party banner should help attract more votes than if Mr. Barr were on the ballot as an independent candidate. The court order, issued Thursday, directs the Ohio secretary of state, Jennifer L. Brunner, to disregard her office’s current guidelines for ballot inclusion, which require eligible parties to gather valid signatures eq...

I reported a few weeks back that Allen Buckley, the Libertarian candidate for the Georgia Senate, had broken through at On the Issues with his own page of quotations (a first for a Libertarian candidate in a State race, I believe). Now the VoteMatch section of On the Issues has placed Buckley as a "Centrist" --in the Moderate range just shy of Libertarian--on the Nolan Chart. If you read their scoring, and you're familiar with Buckley's positions on the issues I think you'll agree with me that he should move up a couple squares into the Libertarian corner of the diamond, but then, let's look at good ole boy Saxby Chambliss' score... I suppose the big surprise would be Bob Barr's rating , now that they've finally gotten him on the site. Of course, the problem is, which Bob Barr do you use for the scoring? If you read the positions scored by On the Issues, about half of them are old Barr positions before he saw the light and drank the kool-aid , w...

Just days after coming out against gay adoption, Senator John McCain has sent out his staff with an Obama-like correction that could have been lifted from Bob Barr's supposed change of heart on DOMA: From Politics1 : Speaking over the weekend to the New York Times, John McCain (R) said "I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption." On Tuesday, McCain's campaign spokesperson issued a formal statement clarifying (i.e., changing) the candidate's position. The new stance: "McCain could have been clearer in the interview in stating that his position on gay adoption is that it is a state issue, just as he made it clear in the interview that marriage is a state issue. He was not endorsing any federal legislation. McCain's expressed his personal preference for children to be raised by a mother and a father wherever possible. However, as an adoptive father himself, McCain believes chi...

The conventional political wisdom is that presidential candidates run to their base during the primaries and then back to the center during the general election. Usually there is an unspoken agreement not to give each other serious grief over the things said to win the primaries, because both candidates have said equally embarrassing things. 2004 was an anomalous election in this sense, because both the Bush and Kerry campaigns sensed that there was not very much center up for grabs. The normal 12-14% of undecided moderate voters in the center without strong party identification had shrunk that year to less than 6%, which left both the Dems and the GOPers in the weird position of having a better potential for picking up votes in their respective bases. There were more anti-abortion, social conservatives, and evangelical Christians available to vote for Bush, and more environmentalists, gay rights advocates, and anti-war activists available to vote for Kerry that undecideds in the mi...

I have, regrettably, never had the opportunity to sit in a court room and watch Waldo as a prosecutor deliver his closing arguments. But I know he learned a lot from Andy Griffith, and when that tall Carolina boy (I mean Waldo, not Andy) stands up and starts doing the "aw shucks, folks" routine, you might as well send a telegram to the guy who puts together the electric chair to get out his screwdriver. So I read What makes a good president for dealing with the world? Beats me , with a great deal of nostalgia and gentle amusement, while using my metal detector to check for hidden mines.... When Waldo says things like this: Of the things Waldo ponders here, of things in the public realm, big areas remain terra incognita. Foreign policy, for example, and how to fight wars. DL has a post up about how he prioritizes electoral issues, and high on his list is war and foreign policy. He thinks both McCain and Obama are doofuses in that field, each in his own way, and has written ab...