This week, one attack by John McCain on Barack Obama has become an article of unquestioned faith repeatedly declared in the mainstream media: that Obama broke a promise to accept public financing in the general election. There’s only problem with this claim by the press: it is demonstrably untrue and fully refuted by the facts. Yet the mainstream press has been nearly unanimous in falsely claiming that Obama had broken a promise to take public financing.

...Even progressives fell into this trap. Rachel Maddow declared on June 20 that his stand was "a reversal from his previous position." Joan Walsh of Salon.com proclaimed that Obama "flip-flopped on campaign finance law."(Race to the White House, June 20) Nick Baumann of Mother Jones wrote, "Obama is making a politically expedient decision and essentially going back on his ‘Yes’ answer to a questionnaire that asked whether he would forgo private financing if his opponents did the same."

So what’s the truth. Below is every single case I could find reporting in the media about Obama’s comments on public financing:

1. Even in February 2007, before Obama’s massive fundraising became evident, Obama’s staffers were explicit in stating that public financing in the general election was an "option" and not a commitment.

2. The March 2, 2007 New York Times reported Obama’s campaign saying that he would "aggressively pursue an agreement."

So from the very beginning, the Obama campaign stated over and over again that public financing in general election would require an extensive agreement that went beyond merely having both parties accept the funding.

3. In response to a November 2007 questionnaire to the Midwest Democracy Network and Common Cause, Obama wrote: "My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election....If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

No one could read this answer as suggesting that Obama would accept public financing under any condition. Obama explicitly "requires" a promise by the Republican to adopt a "fundraising truce"–meaning not using the parties or 527s as a way to cheat the system.....

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy."

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they'd had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month. But the correlation only held in males....

Remember Congo, the dog that was sentenced to death last year for attacking a landscaper? The single most important issue for New Jerseyans?

Corzine spokeswoman Lilo Stainton said the governor's office has received 10,000 telephone calls, e-mails, letters and faxes about Congo, more than any other issue since the governor took office. Corzine hasn't got involved, except to say that he's going to leave the matter to the courts.

They succeeded. Sure, the state was still unaffordable, thousands of children lacked health care and reports of corruption continued to elicit a collective shrug, but at least Congo was spared. Congratulations, New Jersey.

Congo the German shepherd attacked again -- this time a member of his owners' family.

As a result, the local couple who fought a successful high-profile campaign to spare their beloved Congo from a death sentence after he mauled a landscaper on their property last year had Congo and three of their other dogs euthanized Wednesday morning after the dogs attacked a relative visiting their home Tuesday, authorities said.

In the latest incident, Congo was one of four dogs that attacked 75-year-old Constance Ladd, the mother of one of the dogs' owners, Elizabeth James, police detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said Wednesday.

Ladd had puncture wounds and lacerations to the top of her head, chest and right forearm and injured her hip when she fell to the ground as the dogs pounced on her, Silagyi said.

This isn't really about Congo, nor is the purpose to point fingers or assign blame. There's nothing wrong with people lobbying their government for perceived justice. But how do we explain a state whose people will write letters and make phone calls for one dog, but ignore what are arguably much more pressing issues?

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house....

The accused has no lawyer. He doesn't know much about the allegation against him, the evidence to support it or the name of his accuser.

Whatever proof of innocence exists probably won't make it to the three judges deciding his fate.

The rules say the judges must presume the government's evidence valid. They can consider something someone told another person, according to someone else, who was told of it by yet another person who heard it from someone claiming to have seen it with his own eyes.

Oh, and by the way, the judges can also take into account information obtained through coercion, even torture.

So it is for Guantanamo Bay detainees trying to shed the unlawful enemy combatant label given them by the U.S. military to justify their indefinite detentions. Some of the 270 detainees have by now been kept behind bars for six years.

This is what happens at their Combatant Status Review Tribunal, a process created in 2004 after the U.S. Supreme Court forced the administration to do SOMETHING to cull the innocent from the hundreds of aliens suspected of connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

If, in spite of all the advantages given the government at the CSRT, the judges decide it failed to prove that the man is, indeed, an enemy combatant, the judges may have to explain why to their boss, who could order a do-over.

That's if the detainee wins that first hearing, the CSRT.

If he loses, he can appeal and get a lawyer, finally. And if the lawyer finds proof of his innocence? Too late. New evidence isn't allowed.

Barb (at the GOS) has an excellent list of ways McCain has demonstrated his support for the troops he claims to love so much. A sample:

McCain has repeatedly voted against amendments in the Senate that would have…covered such important services as improving care at veterans’ hospitals, providing mental health services to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse problems. [2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/2006]

In 2006, McCain voted against the Kerry amendment that would eliminate increased fees and co-payments for veterans in the TRICARE health care program by raising the discretionary spending limit by approximately $10 billion. The provisions would have been fully offset by eliminating creating corporate tax breaks. [2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006]

McCain was one of only 13 Republicans to vote against an amendment that added over $400 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. [2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/2006]

More at the link. The media won’t bring any of this up, however. Even though I am now becoming more left leaning than I have ever been, I still had the impression that the media supports Democrats (or gives them a fairer hearing anyway.) More and more, I am seeing that this is nowhere near the case. McCain gets a pass because is supposedly “a hero.” I’ve never been sure why he is a hero. He graduated 4th or 5th from the bottom of his class. He wrecked three of his own aircraft (if I remember correctly) and he was captured in Viet Nam. Unless I missed the part where he jumped on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow servicemen, I don’t know where the hero part comes in. But I digress.

He needs to be exposed for the person he is – someone who, demonstrably, does not support the military he claims to love so much.

I HAVE a suggestion for the enraged Hillary Clinton supporters who plan to vote for John McCain to protest her failure to win the nomination.

Try this instead: Proceed to the kitchen, select a knife and plunge it into your chest.

Same difference.

Only you won't be taking the rest of us with you.

Yes, this from a fervent Hillary Clinton supporter.

Voting for John McCain is like holding your breath until you die to punish your parents - a really shortsighted act of self-destruction.

If McCain wins, your children will continue to be killed in Iraq. Your family will continue to be without health care. Your employer, the hedge-fund tycoon, will continue to pay less taxes than you do.

If McCain wins, self-righteous hacks in state legislatures will decide whether you or your daughter have to carry a fetus to term, even if you or she could die in the process.

Is that the kind of world you want to live in? ...

... "No one who embraces Hillary Clinton's values and accomplishments could seriously support John McCain for president," said Kathryn Kolbert, the Philadelphia lawyer who argued the 1992 Casey abortion case before the Supreme Court. She now heads People for the American Way.

"When Clinton supporters understand what it would mean for them and their daughters to live with a Bush-McCain Supreme Court for the next 20 years, the idea of backing McCain will be unthinkable."...

An axiom. When voters watch a presumptive presidential nominee considering this or that running mate, they think: What if the president dies? When the presumptive nominee considers this or that running mate, he thinks: What if I live?

Which brings us to the dotty idea that Barack Obama should choose to have Hillary Clinton down the hall in the West Wing, nursing her disappointments, her grievances and her future presidential ambitions while her excitable husband wanders in the wings of America's political theater with his increasingly Vesuvian temper, his proclivity for verbal fender benders and his interesting business associates....

...Obama's choice of a running mate will be the first important decision he makes with the whole country watching, so it will be a momentous act of self-definition. If he chooses her, it will be an act of self-diminishment, especially now that some of her acolytes are aggressively suggesting that some unwritten rule of American politics stipulates that anyone who finishes a strong second in the nomination contest is entitled to second place on the ticket.

Behind the idea that Obama should run in harness with Clinton is this wobbly theory: Because the Republican Party is in such bad odor, if you unify the Democratic Party, that will suffice to win the election, and she is a necessary and sufficient catalyst of unity. But she is neither. She would be a potent unifier of John McCain's party, thereby setting the stage for exactly what the nation does not need: another angry campaign of mere mobilization rather than persuasion.

Surely she, the most polarizing Democrat, is not the only Democrat who can help Obama appeal to the voters who rejected him in Kentucky and West Virginia. And as his running mate, she would nullify his narrative. The candidate embracing the "future" should not glue himself to Washington circa 1993. Someone promising to "turn the page" should not revert to an earlier chapter. Someone whose mantra is "change" should not embrace her theme of restoration -- that the 1990s were paradise and Democrats promise paradise regained....

...Clinton, having risen politically in her husband's orbit, is a moon shining with reflected light. Were Obama to hitch himself to her, he would reduce himself to a reflection of a reflection.

Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

I acknowledge that some people can find nonracial reasons to vote against Obama -- his youth, his inexperience, his uber-liberalism and, of course, his willingness to abide his minister's admiration for a racist demagogue (Louis Farrakhan) until it was way, way too late. But for too many people, Obama is first and foremost a black man and is rejected for that reason alone. This is very sad.

I loathe what has happened to Hillary Clinton. This person of no mean achievement has been witchified, turned into a shrew, so that almost any remark of hers is instantly interpreted as sinister and ugly. All she had to do, for instance, was note that it took Lyndon Johnson to implement Martin Luther King's dream, and somehow it became a racist statement. The Obama camp has been no help in this regard, expressing insincere regret instead of a sincere "that's not what she meant."

I loathe also what Hillary Clinton has done to herself. The incessant exaggerations, the cheap shots, the flights into hallucinatory history -- that sniper fire in Bosnia, for instance -- have turned her into a caricature of what her caricaturists long claimed she already was. In this campaign, Clinton has managed to come across as a hungry hack, a Janus looking both forward and backward and seeming to stand for nothing except winning. This, too, is sad....

Bowling 1, Health Care 0

By ELIZABETH EDWARDS
Published: April 27, 2008

FOR the last month, news media attention was focused on Pennsylvania and its Democratic primary. Given the gargantuan effort, what did we learn?

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles — information that voters will need to choose the next president — too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I’m not surprised.

Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture....

1. Log Cabin Republicans: all the self-interest plus extra self-loathing!


2. What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world's rich consumers. This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a "crime against humanity".


3. For you Macsters out there: tweak your GMail IMAP and Mail.app settings.


4. Has anyone heard of the New York Institute of Photography? I've decided that I need some serious education if I want to progress with my photography. I picked up a copy of
   Shutterbug
   magazine to read on the plane on Wednesday, and I didn't understand half of what they were talking about. It was kinda depressing, really. This NYIP thing may be a way to start.

...Still single (the tabloids have, usually erroneously, linked him with various women, including Kylie Minogue), David is pretty careful in all his choices. The only area in which he goes positively mad is in his choice of clothes. In fact his wardrobe can be very flamboyant, which is why those who know him quickly gave him the monicker of “metrosexual”.

In the early days many of my friends (principally male, I’ll admit), thought that he must be gay. “He has to be – you’re his best friend, and look at the way he dresses,” they’d protest.

Leaving aside the suggestion that an association with me reflects on a man’s sexuality, I had to break it to them that just because a guy wears a red velvet suit and is able to form a close friendship with a woman he isn’t sleeping with doesn’t necessarily mean he’s homosexual.

David, meanwhile, took all this teasing in his stride; he is so unmacho and fair-minded that the speculation about his sexuality never bothered him . “Why would it?” he’d say. Now, that’s what I call a real metrosexual....