NightBlogger

George Galloway talks to a caller about an impending attack on Iran.

At the campaign stop in Austin, Texas, Nader spoke to an audience of approximately 200 about his campaign’s primary issues in the 2008 presidential election. During the press conference — held in a sweltering classroom at the back of a small, suburban Methodist church — Nader also directly addressed an elderly white woman as a “political bigot.” “What is your answer to people, including myself, who believe that the votes you get will take away from the Democratic party and ensure McCain wins?” asked the woman during Nader’s Q&A with the press. “People who say that a vote for you is a vote for McCain.”

Nader grew tense, and his response to the woman was abrupt. “Madam, do you think I’m a second-class citizen?” he asked. “I’d like for you to answer my question,” said the woman. “No, because that question implies that somehow I am less equal in running for election than two crooked politicians in Washington,” he said. “You are a political bigot, wittingly or unwittingly.” It was during his speech, and after the press conference, that Nader said progressives who will vote for Obama as the “least worst candidate” are actually trapped in “political slavery.” More

WASHINGTON - Democratic Party officials plan to file a new lawsuit to compel federal regulators to investigate whether Sen. John McCain violated election laws by withdrawing from public financing. The Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday it will sue next week in U.S. District Court. It will ask the court to order the Federal Election Commission to examine, within 30 days, the legality of McCain’s decision to reject $5.8 million in taxpayer funds.

By turning down the money, the presumed Republican nominee was able avoid strict spending limits between now and the GOP’s national convention in September. At issue is a $4 million line of credit the McCain campaign obtained late last year. While the loan was not secured by the promise of public funds, his agreement with the bank required McCain to reapply for public funds if he lost early primary contests and to use that money as collateral. More

In a front-page article headlined “Is McCain Like Bush? It Depends on the Issue,” the New York Times (6/17/08) managed to locate “striking differences” between Sen. John McCain and George W. Bush on several issues—in spite of contradictory evidence reported in the very same article about the two politicians’ overwhelming similarities on these very issues.

In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes that “on the environment, American diplomacy and nuclear proliferation, Mr. McCain has strikingly different views from Mr. Bush.” Yet Bumiller offers little evidence for these supposedly striking differences. In fact, on the environment, she points out that while McCain has called for limits on greenhouse gas emissions, he “has a mixed record on the environment in the Senate — he has missed votes on toughening fuel economy standards and has opposed tax breaks meant to encourage alternative energy.”

Meanwhile, despite Bumiller’s claim about McCain and Bush’s “strikingly different views” on diplomacy, an accompanying chart includes “Diplomacy with Iran and Syria” as an area where Bush and McCain “mostly agree. ” As the chart observed, “Like the president, Mr. McCain has ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria for now. Mr. McCain supported Mr. Bush when he likened those who would negotiate with ‘terrorists and radicals’ to appeasers of the Nazis, a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama.” More

After reporting that the McCain campaign held a townhall with Democrats and Independents, Fox’s Shepard Smith admitted that the McCain campaign had done no such thing.

“I reported at the top of this hour that the campaign had told us at fox news that the audience would be made up of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We have now received a clarification from the campaign and I feel I should pass it along to you. The McCain Campaign distributed tickets to supporters, mayor Bloomberg, who of course is a registered republican, and other independent groups.”

WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — A key adviser to Sen. John McCain says the Arizona Republican thinks warrantless wiretapping of international communications has constitutional approval.

In an online letter posted by National Review, Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain thinks the Constitution gives the president power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor U.S. citizens’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a federal law requiring court oversight, The New York Times reported Friday.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee thinks “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people … understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Holtz-Eakin wrote. More
See: The Secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

A first strike attack or invasion of Iran at Israel’s request will lead us all into WWIII. Palestinian leaders reacted with anger and dismay on Wednesday to Barack Obama’s AIPAC pledge that Jerusalem should be Israel’s undivided capital. “The whole world knows that East Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem, was occupied in 1967 and we will not accept a Palestinian state without having Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian.”

JOE GANDELMAN
If the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll indicates a trend, Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton will stop pointing to Gallup when she makes her pitch this weekend to a Democratic party committee in Washington in an effort to get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated.

In recent days, Clinton got into political hotwater by claiming “every” poll showed her beating John McCain in a matchup which was not true. She was mostly pointing to Gallup polls, and her later comments were more accurately focused.

But the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll shows rival-for-the-Democratic nomination Senator Barack Obama now regaining his double-digit lead over her among Democrats and statistically tied with Clinton in the votes a Democrat would get against Republican presumptive nominee Senator John McCain. More

WASHINGTON, UPI
Resignations by high-ranking strategists and a disorganized national campaign threatens Sen. John McCain’s race for the U.S. presidency, Republicans say.

Some party leaders say the McCain team has so far failed to unite Republicans nationally as President George Bush did during his 2004 re-election bid. Other leaders worry McCain’s conflicting messages on a variety of Republican issues leave his platform in disarray, The New York Times reported Sunday.

“I think any Republican who doesn’t say panic is in the wind is lying through their shirt.” says Ron Kaufman, an campaign adviser for former Republican presidential contender and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Read more

Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo
Alternet
[McCain]…reveals his inner hot head with an audacious shot across the bow to Obama. If John McCain goes ballistic every time he’s mildly criticized by Barack Obama, this is going to be a much more interesting campaign than I thought. Yesterday Obama said this:

I respect Sen. John McCain’s service to our country. He is one of those heroes of which I speak. But I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in his opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the president more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing, but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.

McCain’s response:

It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of. Let me say first in response to Senator Obama, running for President is different than serving as President. The office comes with responsibilities so serious that the occupant can’t always take the politically easy route without hurting the country he is sworn to defend. Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America’s veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim…

Read more

Photo marcn
Houston Chronicle
A war of words erupted yesterday between Barack Obama and John McCain over passage of Sen. Jim Webb’s proposed new GI Bill. Senator Obama made his remarks from the floor of the Senate, while Senator McCain, who was too busy begging for money in California to be bothered with returning to Washington to actually cast a vote, issued a press release containing some scathing comments about his presidential rival.

The bill, which will provide a package of benefits to veterans returning from the war in Iraq similar to those received by WWII vets, passed the Senate by a 75-22 margin, no thanks to Sen. McCain, the self-proclaimed champion of our men and women in uniform. Read more

Video: Jesse Ventura brawls with Mike Reagan on Larry King.
Jesse Ventura: “Mike Reagan, you’re a chickenhawk!”

JoAnne Allen

A top adviser overseeing finances for Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has quit over his ties with lobbying, a McCain campaign official confirmed on Sunday. Former Texas Rep. Thomas Loeffler, a national finance co-chairman, is the latest McCain adviser to step down amid concern over potential conflicts of interest among lobbyists in the campaign.

He is the fifth person who worked on McCain’s campaign to resign recently over links to lobbying activities. Newsweek magazine reported that Loeffler’s lobbying firm has collected nearly $15 million from Saudi Arabia since 2002 and millions more from other foreign and corporate interests, including a French aerospace firm seeking Pentagon contracts. Read more

Photo soggydan

Jeff Toobin
Huffington Post
Jeff Toobin discusses what a John McCain presidency could mean about the future of the judiciary. Below is a telling excerpt from The New Yorker article.

The question, as always with McCain these days, is whether he means it. Might he really be a “maverick” when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement.

With the general election in mind, McCain had to express himself with such elaborate circumlocution because he knows that the constituency for such far-reaching change in our constellation of rights is small, and may be shrinking.

Read more

Photo Mojo

John Byrne
The Raw Story
“Sen. McCain’s support of regulating global-warming gases like carbon dioxide — the biggest environmental issue before Congress — more closely resembles the stance of his Democratic rivals, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton [than President Bush], though he disagrees with them on how such regulations should be structured,” writes Monday’s Wall Street Journal.

“Besides championing legislation to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions,” the Journal adds, “Sen. McCain has opposed the administration’s call to open parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, citing the refuge as a natural treasure on par with the Florida Everglades and the Grand Canyon in his home state of Arizona.” Read more

Photo Mike Licht

More than 200 economists, including four Nobel prize winners, signed a letter rejecting proposals by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain to offer a summertime gas-tax holiday. The moratorium would mostly benefit oil companies while increasing the federal budget deficit and reducing funding for the government highway maintenance trust fund, the economists said.

The gas-tax suspension has become a flashpoint in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination between Clinton and Obama. Obama estimated it would save the average driver less than $30, calls the idea a “gimmick,” rejecting it on similar grounds as the economists.
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