Barack Obama NOW!

ThinkProgress reported this news yesterday:

During an interview with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), CBS Evening News host Katie Couric noted that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said recently that “there might have been improved security [in Iraq] even without the surge” and asked McCain, “What’s your response to that?”

After first calling Obama’s claim “a false depiction of what actually happened,” McCain proceeded to falsely claim that the surge “began the Anbar awakening“:

McCAIN: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

But in a puzzling move, the CBS Evening News did not actually televise McCain’s false claim tonight. As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported, “CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric’s question, but in response, it inserted part of McCain’s answer to another question instead.”

On YouTube, masterp2323 provided a semi-reconstruction of the actual conversation:

JedReport also did a re-construction, using excerpts from Keith Olbermann’s Countdown TV show:

(recycled from Huffington Post)

Barack Obama met with a crowd of cheering troops and State Department workers in Baghdad Monday night.

“So I don’t care whether you are a Sailor, a Soldier, an Airmen, or Marine. A National Guard, a Reservist, active duty, we just want to say thank you,” Obama said.

“Back home, as I travel all across the country, every single day I meet your friends, your family members, your co-workers, and the main thing they want me to communicate is how proud they are of you,” Obama continued. “They may disagree on politics. They may disagree on the issues. But the country is absolutely united in the excellence, the devotion, the dedication with which you have performed your duties, here.”

While Barack Obama is embarking on a journey to the Middle East and Europe, John McCain is embarking on another important mission. He’s discovering the internet.

Andy Borowitz has the full story.

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog, hilzoy summarizes the problems that the al-Maliki statement presents for John McCain and the whole argument for him as a candidate.

McCain’s entire rationale, as a candidate, turns on Iraq and related issues, like terrorism and (to a lesser extent) Iran. What else is he going to run on? His grasp of the economy? His health care proposals? The widespread popularity of the Republican brand? He can’t even run on the rest of foreign policy: McCain’s approach to foreign policy has always lacked any kind of integrative vision; he treats problems in isolation from one another. This means two things: first, McCain really doesn’t have an overarching foreign policy vision, and second, for him, Iraq has always been The Big Thing, and as a result, everything else got slighted.

(Minor factoid: the Issues page on McCain’s website doesn’t have an entry for foreign policy. An Iraq page, yes; likewise, pages on the Space Program and Second Amendment Rights. But foreign policy? Nothing.)

On Iraq, McCain begins with a huge disadvantage: he advocated the invasion of Iraq, which most Americans feel was a mistake. (He’s always urging voters to look back and consider who showed good judgment on the surge, but he doesn’t want them to look too far back, lest they find themselves thinking about who showed good judgment on the invasion.) He therefore has to argue something like this: now that we’re in this mess, we need someone we can trust, someone who will be able to manage this catastrophe as well as possible. McCain is solid. Obama is untested, inexperienced, risky. There was always a problem with this story: namely, it involves saying that we should trust McCain, who made the wrong call on invasion, over Obama, who got it right. But sowing doubts is pretty much all McCain has.

Read the rest by clicking here.

Dr. Larry Hunter, a life-long conservative, wrote an endorsement that posted in the New York Daily News where he discussed his choice to vote for Barack Obama.

I’m a lifelong conservative activist and I’m backing Barack Obama
BY LARRY HUNTER
Wednesday, July 16th 2008

I’m a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp’s Empower America.

This November, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that’s antithetical to almost everything I believe in?

The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies - this is the difference between venial and mortal sins.

Taxes, economic policy and health care reform matter, of course. But how we extract ourselves from the bloody boondoggle in Iraq, how we avoid getting into a war with Iran and how we preserve our individual rights while dealing with real foreign threats - these are of greater importance.

John McCain would continue the Bush administration’s commitment to interventionism and constitutional overreach. Obama promises a humbler engagement with our allies, while promising retaliation against any enemy who dares attack us. That’s what conservatism used to mean - and it’s what George W. Bush promised as a candidate.

Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don’t take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn’t bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things - fiscal responsibility, spending restraint - and it didn’t mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it’s taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.

Besides, I suspect Obama is more free-market friendly than he lets on. He taught at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of right-of-center thought. His economic advisers, notably Austan Goolsbee, recognize that ordinary citizens stand to gain more from open markets than from government meddling. That’s got to rub off.

When it comes to health care, I am hoping Obama quietly recognizes that a crusade against pharmaceutical companies would result in the opposite of any intended effect. And in any event, McCain’s plans in this area are deeply problematic, too. Take drug reimportation. McCain (like Obama) says he’s perfectly comfortable with this ill-conceived scheme, which would drive research and development dollars away from the next generation of miracle cures.

But overall, based on his embrace of centrist advisers and policies, it seems likely that Obama will turn out to be in the mold of John Kennedy - who was fond of noting that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Over the last few decades, economic growth has made Americans at every income level better off. For all his borderline pessimistic rhetoric, Obama knows this. And I believe he is savvy enough to realize that the real threat to middle-class families and the poor - an economic undertow that drags everyone down - cannot be counteracted by an activist government.

Or maybe not. But here’s the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I’m still voting for him.

These past eight years, we have spent over a trillion dollars on foreign soil - and lost countless lives - and done what I consider irreparable damage to our Constitution.

If economic damage from well-intentioned but misbegotten Obama economic schemes is the ransom we must pay him to clean up this foreign policy mess, then so be it. It’s not nearly as costly as enduring four more years of what we suffered the last eight years.

Hunter is the former staff director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and president of the Social Security Institute.

Here’s Dr. Hunter, discussing his choice on MSNBC Countdown:

The Military News Network just released some video footage of Barack Obama visiting in Kuwait. Here’s some roll of him with visiting troops, shaking hands, autographing photos, and throwing a perfect basketball shot at 3:15.

There’s also some footage of Obama giving a speech to the troops. The audio is so-so, but the content is very powerful. Unlike President Bush, Obama didn’t have to bring a plastic turkey with him to share some goodwill.

If there’s a common theme of of the Obama campaign, it’s all about finding solutions to problems in a rational manner.

I love this little video clip. This was one of the winning entries to MoveOn.org’s Obama in 30 Seconds Contest. Reggie Schickel of Hanover, NH created this little masterpiece.

If you want to check out some of the other entries to this contest, as well as some other excellent videos, be sure to check the MoveOn.org YouTube channel.

Here’s another great MoveOn.org video - “All in Your Head.”

Three months ago, John McCain was furious when someone in the media mentioned that his nineteen year old son Jimmy was serving in Iraq. John McCain believed that sharing this type of information with the public would create a real security risk for his son.

Today, John McCain unleashed a security risk for his opponent when he casually mentioned that Barack Obama would be visiting Iraq this weekend.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend.

The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator’s trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials’ visits to Iraq in advance.

“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.

Josh Marshall weighs in why John McCain made a serious mistake by doing this sort of thing:

The Reuters piece hints at it. But if Obama is going to be in Iraq this weekend, this is a major breach on McCain’s part. As a knowledgeable insider notes …

“If it is true that Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, it is a very serious mistake for McCain to have disclosed it publically. Even for run-of-the-mill CODELs the military gives guidance like, “Please strongly discourage Congressional offices from issuing press releases prior to their trips which mention their intent to travel to the AOR and/or the dates of that travel or their scheduled meetings. Such releases are a serious compromise to OPSEC.” If Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, I can not begin to imagine how much this is complicating the security planning for the trip.”

It’s known that Obama is leaving on his foreign trip this weekend and the Journal OpEd page this morning said that Obama could arrive in Iraq “as early as this weekend.” And with a slew of reporters in tow, it’s not exactly highly classified information. But there is a reason definite information about these sorts of trips aren’t released in advance.

Hypothetically, maybe McCain was just guessing. But even so it would still be a serious lapse of judgment on his part.

There’s a word for what John McCain did.

Clueless.

The John McCain campaign held a press conference today, where they made this statement:

I think the American people have had enough of inflexibility and stubbornness in national security policy…We cannot afford to replace one administration that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with a candidate that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq.

So Barack Obama is too much like G.W. Bush? HA! This is funny….

Just as a reminder, here’s what John McCain stated about comparisons with G.W. Bush:

That John McCain is such a funny guy…

After hearing Team Obama describe the New Yorker cartoon as “tasteless and offensive,” Jon Stewart of the Daily Show responded with what he wished Barack Obama would have said:

Really? You know what your response should’ve been? It’s very easy here, let me put the statement out for you: Barack Obama is in no way upset about the cartoon that depicts him as a Muslim extremist. Because you know who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists! Of which Barack Obama is not. It’s just a fucking cartoon!“

I, for one, approve this message!