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 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."

A Canadian Perspective on Obama's VP choice

The blogger Warren Kinsella:

"But she and Bill will be an even bigger handful if they are outside the tent. And the two of them give Obama - an Ivy League Yankee liberal - some much-needed Southland blue Democrat DNA. And her baggage is old news (whilst Obama's is still newsworthy, and is about to be wheeled out to the National Enquirer and Fox News, within days, just wait).

This insane war in Iraq needs to end, and the U.S. economy needs to get back to what it had been under Bill. America needs some hope again."

Obama's international stature

It's safe to say that the Senator is more popular overseas than at home. Columnists all over the world, like Dr. Sylvester Odion-Akhaine (writing in The Guardian, printed in Lagos), are hanging an awful lot of symbolism on Sen. Obama's candidacy.

"It will applaud the Statue of Liberty and underline U.S. as the bastion of freedom and racial equality despite its abiding contradictions. This is the meaning of Obama's victory. It is left for Americans to choose between 'fear and faith' on one hand and freedom and equality on the other."

There are those, such as Instapundit, who believe that Sen. Obama's international popularity is somehow a sign that he should be unpopular at home. If I live to be a thousand I don't think I will understand that logic.

UPDATE - The link to the Nigerian's column is dead for some reason. I admit I'm something of a neophyte at this. If interested, just google his name along with 'the meaning of Obama's victory' and I'm sure the full story will come up.

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."

You probably don't want to go there...

A video/audio recording of Sen. Obama has been making the rounds (not surprisingly - at all - Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity ran with this non-story on the same day) recently purporting to reveal many 'gaffes' on the campaign trail, supposed to demonstrate something negative about the Senator, though I'm not sure what. He stutters a couple of times, incorrectly identifies a handful of cities, accidentally refers to an asthma inhaler a breathylizer, and loses his train of thought discussing the cost of a program.

The Senator is, of course, talking a great deal lately. And, as any human being would when asked to speak extemporaneously for several hours a day, he has missed a beat or two. Conservatives may not want to get into a discussion of silly-sounding politicians. Nor silly-sounding candidates.

All of these are non-issues. Obama knows what an inhaler is; Sen. McCain knows who Vladimir Putin is. Speech, unlike blogging, has no backspace button. Those hyping these events are trying to score lazy cheap shots.

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."'

The Kenyan Daily Nation on Sen. Obama

'The best we can expect from Obama,' by Philip Ochieng --

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'Exactly what do we mean when we say that Barack Obama has made history? For the professional historian — because he has studied so many cases — the answer is double-edged and scary.

For it is clear that, whatever the history-maker has done, he has done it in opposition to a solid status quo which — precisely because of the breakthrough — is redoubling its effort to roll back the wheels of history.

Barack Obama has done what no other black American has ever done. Yet this is historic merely because, despite amazing futuristic techno-scientific achievements, his country’s mind remains enslaved by the most primitive tribal ideas about colour, gender and religion. '

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Also, 'Barack Obama is Africa's Talisman,' by the Nation's editorial board --

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Kenyans are celebrating Senator Barack Obama’s success in the US Democratic Party nomination, not because they expect goodies from him if he becomes the most powerful leader in the world; they know there won’t be any.

At one level they are doing so because of a sense of kinship. His father was Kenyan, after all.

But the bigger reason is that he is a role model for almost a billion black people in the world today who are used to coming last in everything important. The black race is the poorest, least powerful, most unhealthy, least hopeful of them all.

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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.

The conventional wisdom

It seems that Sen. Obama has a great deal to gain electorally by adding Sen. Clinton to the ticket (for one thing, her popularity among hispanics increases his chances in Florida by a sizable margin), but a great deal to lose administratively - in that she will be unreliable because she's unlikely to accept 'orders' from him or will pursue her own agenda once they're elected.

It seems to me that Democrats ought to be all for it. They're adults; they can learn to work together. Aside from that, who else is there? The name recognition alone seems as thought it would be a boon; Clinton generates high negatives but probably mostly among Conservatives who have never voted Democratic in their lives. Looking to the future, given the pretty thin margin by which Obama won, for now it also appears to be the best chance of a third democratic term after Obama's two terms.

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.

People are reading this stuff.

And, what's more, they are taking it seriously --

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"WHISTLEBLOWER MAGAZINE Finally revealed: The secret life of Barack Obama
Is he America's political messiah – or a Manchurian candidate?

In a few short months, the young and relatively unknown politician Barack Hussein Obama may very well be elevated to the presidency of the United States and command the mightiest military in world history.

Would the eloquent and charismatic Obama unite, inspire and renew a troubled nation, as tens of millions of voters passionately believe? Or is it possible he's a Manchurian candidate – harboring an ominous secret agenda few understand, a man destined to wreak havoc on America should he become president?

That's the question that is explored definitively in the April issue of WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled "THE SECRET LIFE OF BARACK OBAMA."

[snip]

Examination of his U.S. Senate voting record reveals him to be a hard leftist. A little-reported letter from the candidate to the "LGBT community" declares Obama's enthusiastic solidarity with the radical homosexual-rights agenda. His long-time spiritual mentor and pastor turns out to be a rabid, racist, America-hater who claims the U.S. invented AIDS to wipe out black people. Bloggers are even piecing together an intriguing case that Obama, a Muslim in his youth, may still be a closet Muslim.

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We will all look back in a few years and feel very, very ashamed.

It'd be one thing if this were the tin-foil hat crowd frothing in the corner, but reasonably mainstream 'journalists' on Fox and the radio quote or at least praise World Net Daily somewhat regularly.

This just in: Conservative media believes that liberals suck.

Listening to a Christian radio station on the way home from school got me to wondering. The host was attacking Sen. Obama for being 'pro-abortion;' he rolled out the usual quotes and attacks for the benefit of his listeners, Obama thinks babies are punishments, blah blah blah.

I have a feeling that the listeners and watchers of Conservative Christian radio stations, Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Fox et al. are people who would never have voted for Obama in the first place. Christianity's a big tent, and it's a safe bet that Christian Democrats/non-Republicans aren't listening to this station's political hour. So one has to wonder exactly what they believe repeating 'Obama sucks' for the next six months is going to accomplish.

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.

Speaking to the enemy, or sleazy political gamesmanship

The Economist, on whether Sen. Obama intends to 'appease' the Iranians:

"In January 1991 in Geneva, for example, America's secretary of state talked face-to-face to Tariq Aziz, a nasty piece of work who was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and is currently on trial for murder. But nobody has ever been silly enough to accuse James Baker or the president who sent him (one George H. W. Bush) of appeasement. And that is because instead of letting Iraq keep Kuwait, which it had just invaded and annexed, Mr Baker told Mr Aziz that America would throw Iraq out by force if it did not leave. Hardly appeasement."

Later, in the same piece:

"Strange, then, that the very Mr Bush who admonished the appeasers from Israel's parliament has allowed Americans to negotiate with the North for years. If these talks ever make Kim Jong-Il give up his nukes, nobody in his right mind will hold Mr Bush's decision to talk against him. And if it's fine to speak to North Korea, why rule out talking, as Mr Obama says he would, to Iran?"

The cynic in me keeps screaming that cheap political points scored at the expense of skittish American voters may be somehow involved. I can't quite put my finger on how...

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.