Guilt by association...

Powerline (which can do much better than this) quotes at length one of Sen. McCain's top foreign policy advisers, one former CIA Director James Woolsey, on the supposed wrongheadedness of Sen. Obama's intention to return to a more law enforcement-centric method of combating terrorism. That the conservative blog favours McCain's position over Obama's ought to surprise nobody (the merits of both are certainly debatable, and there are plenty of 'experts' supporting each side) but Woolsey appears to be an extraordinarily disreputable source. He was on television the day after Sept. 11 suggesting Iraqi sponsorship of the attacks, and suggested in 2006 that the United States ought to unilaterally bomb Syria.

It ought to also come as no surprise that the Project for the New American Century member may also be a merchant of death, simultaneously supporting the invasion of Iraq (in fact serving on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) while also profiting from its prosecution.

Here is Rightweb on Woolsey and his connections: "Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, a venture-capital firm that, like [Richard] Perle's Trireme Partners, is soliciting investment for homeland security firms. Woolsey joined consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton as vice president in July 2002. The company had contracts worth more than $680 million in 2002. Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal that he does no lobbying and that none of the companies he has ties to have been discussed during a Defense Policy Board meeting."

If the guilt-by-association standard is to be applied throughout this election - which I generally don't support - let it be done fairly, to both candidates.

The undeserved 'Maverick' reputation

So much has been written recently about how undeserved is Sen. McCain's reputation as an anti-partisan Maverick that it almost seems like beating a dead dog at this point. Indeed he is not conservative enough for the talk-radio circuit (although one wonders if anybody short of G. Gordon Liddy could be).

Here, though, is Factcheck (via Congressional Quarterly) with the actual numbers on 'Maverick-ism' or the lack thereof: McCain voted with the president's position 95 percent of the time in 2007, and in no year has voted with the president's position less than 77 percent of the time, as in 2005.

Sen. Obama voted with the president's position 40 percent of the time last year, and Sen. Reid of Nevada did so 39 percent of the time. Obama voted with the Democrats 97 percent of the time in 2007.

The Conventional Wisdom on the VP choice

The conventional wisdom of a brief poll of international bloggers seems to be that Sen. Obama will choose Sen. Clinton. Here is the Australian John Quiggin:

"My record tipping elections is not great, though I called the 2007 election for Labor ahead of most pundits. It remains to be seen whether I’ll get even a passing grade on my prediction, in January, of a relatively narrow win for an Obama-Clinton ticket over McCain-Lieberman for the Republicans. I’ve got the nominees right, and Hillary for VP seems like a no-brainer."

I'm dubious about windfall profits taxes

And so is Powerline. Here is John Hinderaker's excellent post on the Senate's blocking cloture vote of the WPT. Sens. Obama, Clinton and McCain were all absent.

"Our oil companies control tiny amounts of petroleum (relative to the world's big players) because they are shackled by Congress, which prohibits them by law from accessing America's abundant petroleum reserves. If you want gasoline prices to come down, write, call and email your Congressman and Senators and tell them to allow the oil companies to do what only they can do: bring us more oil."

Annenberg Factcheck, on the Gas Tax holiday

A transfer of revenue essentially from the government to the oil companies.

This just in...

Sen. McCain has crazy supporters (via Americablog, through Instaputz). So does Sen. Obama (via Powerline).

Does any of this have any bearing on anything? Are Powerline, Little Green Footballs and Instapundit* trying to score cheap political points with their already skittish readership?**

No. And yes.

* Instaputz is of course not scoring cheap political points, since TS mentions the insanity of both candidates' supporters, via a link to Instapundit.

**They must be counting on their readers to spread the word, since nobody who had any intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama would ever read any of those blogs for information.

The Real Numbers on Missed Votes

The top three vote-missing Senators for this session, and their corresponding percentages of votes missed out of the total, are as follows - Sen. John McCain, 60.4%; Sen. Tim Johnson (The South Dakota Senator who suffered a stroke in 2007), 53.3%; Sen. Barack Obama, 42%.

Oddly enough, the workaholics - those who haven't missed a single vote - are not generally household names: John Barrasso, Bob Casey, Susan Collins, Russ Feingold, Charles Grassley, Herb Kohl, Mark Pryor, Kenneth Salazar, and Olympia Snowe.

Comparison of Financial Transparency

According to www.opensecrets.org, Sen. Obama has disclosed 94 percent of his funding sources, while Sen. McCain has disclosed 87 percent.

Who ought to be lecturing who about funding sources?

And from the Jerusalem Post...

Ministers of the Knesset (MK's) weigh in on Sen. Obama's clinching of the nomination. The Likud Party, not suprisingly, is the most upset, while the other parties' representatives all say, essentially, that 'both will be good but McCain will be better.'

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'Following US Sen. Barack Obama's victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton early Wednesday morning, MKs from across the political spectrum warned not to discount the newly-crowned Democratic candidate as a potential supporter of Israel.

"We must remember that no American president will act in the way that we fear the most - no matter which candidate, Israel is important to American non-Jews," said MK Benny Elon (NU/NRP), the leader of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus.

"It is dangerous, incorrect and unhealthy to begin to get into all kinds of unproductive comments against Obama or to preemptively launch an anti-Obama campaign," he added. "I think it's a great mistake to begin to make him into Muhammad or to talk about him being photographed as an Arab. It is incorrect hysteria."

Elon did, however, acknowledge that so far, Republican candidate John McCain's voting record was solidly more "positive."'

Asahi Shimbun, on 'President Obama'

From the paper's 6 June edition:

'At long last, the race to name the Democratic candidate for U.S. president has been settled with the emergence of Sen. Barack Obama as the first African-American nominee. His candidacy dashes Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's challenge to be the first woman to win the nomination. Obama, who was born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother, will go up against Republican Sen. John McCain in the Nov. 4 presidential election.

The sensation that Obama stirred from the outset of the primaries must have caught many readers by surprise. Can the United States really change that much and overcome racial prejudice against blacks? This is the question that has been on their minds.'

The rest.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden endorses Sen. Obama

Otherwise unremarkable in a season of pronouncements of adulation and fealty, but I thought waiting until the final votes were cast was a classy move. To this day I don't understand the great rush to get Sen. Clinton out of the race; I never saw why she shouldn't go to the convention, had neither candidate secured the necessary delegates. If the DNC wants to build in some sort of 'when you're 200 behind we're calling the mercy rule,' that's fine, but until then that's the system - I've always felt playing hard until the final buzzer was a mark in somebody's favor (leaving aside, of course, the wretched campaign she has run).

Getting it done pre-convention is of course extremely advantageous to the Democrats, but if the party big-wigs don't want candidates exercising their right to go to the Convention, they ought to change the rules.

Sen. Obama still has five months to take on Sen. McCain, which is more than enough time for both of them. It's not as if McCain has built up any great lead because he finished his primaries early - the margins are still just about as razor-thin as they were when McCain was still slugging it out with Govs. Romney and Huckabee.

Where the money goes

To subsidize struggling farmers David Letterman and the owners of the Utah Jazz, of course -

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"Consider their latest masterpiece, the 2007 farm bill that Congress this week delivered, several months late, to George Bush. Congress and the farmers have conspired to make an already unjust agricultural policy—a system that has subsidised the “farming” activities of such paupers as David Letterman and David Rockefeller—even worse. Through a complicated and overlapping system of government-sponsored insurance, counter-cyclical assistance, disaster aid and legacy payments tied to nothing, the five-year, $307 billion bill lavishes cash on wealthy farm households, the main restriction on collecting it being a means test that applies to couples making more than $1.5m a year. And even that can be avoided by employing a reasonably competent accountant.

Shockingly, the bill's authors tied some future subsidy payments to today's record commodity prices, therefore guaranteeing already well-off farmers high incomes. Commercial farm households, which get most of the largesse, will have an average income of $229,920 in 2008, says the Agriculture Department. And it means, as the department points out, that the government could owe billions in subsidy payments to these big farmers if and when prices dip again."

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Sen. Obama voted for this piece of junk. Sen. McCain, to his credit, did not. Also to President Bush's credit, he exercised a little fiscal prudence for once and vetoed the bill, though it was overridden.

Sen. Obama's prophetic 'purple' speech

There are those who believe that margins of victory in 2008 are going to be a good deal narrower than they were in 2004, whomever turns out victorious. Via The Economist --

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"If he (or, should a miracle occur, Mrs Clinton) stumbles, however, it may be because the electoral college has worked against the Democrats. With five months of campaigning still ahead, all predictions should be taken with a fistful of salt. Nonetheless, it is at least plausible that he (or she) might rack up pointlessly large majorities in liberal states while narrowly failing to carry enough swing states to win.

Geography, as so often in history, is key. The electoral map did not change much between the last two presidential elections. Only three states, all small, switched sides between 2000 and 2004: Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico. But this year could be very different. John McCain is an unusual Republican, distrusted by the party's evangelical base but popular with independents. Mr Obama's prospects are even harder to discern, since no black American has ever come this close to the presidency and people may lie to pollsters about his candidacy."

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Interesting that a British magazine echoes Alterman that the Democrats are geographically handicapped.

Florida, Michigan, Obama and November

I have read and listened to various sources arguing that supporters of Sen. Clinton dissatisfied with the DNC's Florida and Michigan decision could tip those states in favour of Sen. McCain come general election, assuming Clinton has not Boss Tweeded the nomination away from its rightful owner by then. If Clinton supporters might actually jump en masse to McCain out of spite or genuine preference (although it's hard to imagine why a supporter of Clinton would prefer McCain over Sen. Obama, given that Obama's policy ideas are much nearer to Clinton's than McCain's), Obama's supporters could have serious cause for concern.

Florida has voted blue only four times in the past sixty years (excluding 2000), once each for Clinton, Carter, Johnson and Truman. Of Democratic presidents over that period, only Kennedy and Clinton (in his first term) won without Florida. Michigan is a stranger case, having voted Democratic for the past twenty years, Republican for the twenty years before that, and Republican three times, Democratic twice in the twenty year block before that. That adds up to solidly blue demographics in the short term but solidly purple in the post-WWII long term, with Republicans edging the Democrats by an 8-7 margin in the fifteen elections since 1948. McCain's famous appeal to independents may be hard for Obama to counter in a well-balanced state.