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.....

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?

As predicted, Bush and McCain and their cohorts are responding to $4 a gallon gas by urging that more federal land and offshore rights be available for oil drilling. This makes no sense because:

First, the crude oil market is global. Oil companies sell all over the world. The price of crude is established by global supply and demand. So even if 3 million additional barrels a day could be extruded from lands and seabeds of the United States (that sum is the most optimistic figure, after all exploration is done), that sum is tiny compared to 86 million barrels now produced around the world. In other words, even under the best circumstances, the price to American consumers would hardly budge.

Second, whatever impact such drilling might have would occur far in the future anyway. Oil isn't just waiting there to be pumped out of the earth. Exploration takes time. Erecting drilling equipment takes time. Getting the oil out takes time. Turning crude into various oil products takes time. According the the federal energy agency, if we opening drilling where drilling is now banned, there'd be no significant impact on domestic crude and natural gas production until 2030.

Third, oil companies already hold a significant number of leases on federal lands and offshore seabeds where they are now allowed to drill, and which they have not yet fully explored. Why then would they seek more drilling rights? Because they want more leases now, when the Bushies are still in office. Ownership of these parcels would serve to to pump up their balance sheets even if no oil is pumped.

Last but by no means least, environmental risks are still significant.

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....

I was in Fenway Park and Yankee stadium in October 2004, at the start of your freshman year here, when the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit in the playoffs to vanquish the New York Yankees and the curse and win their first World Series in 86 years. The experts said it couldn't be done, but the experts knew history, they knew that no baseball team had ever come back from three games down in a series. The experts knew things, but they didn't know those Boston Red Sox.

I was in Darfur, Sudan that same year, and I met refugees who begged me to bring their stories back to the United States so the U.S. government would act. The Darfurians pleaded for humanitarian aid to be delivered, for Sudan's killers to be prosecuted, and for peacekeepers to be sent to protect civilians. The experts said it couldn't be done, that governments traditionally pursue their "national interests," that the U.S. government was too busy with al Qaeda, North Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan to worry about "mere" humanitarian issues. Again, the experts knew things, but they didn't know that STAND chapters would spring up on 500 college campuses across the country, that ordinary people concerned about Darfur would create a 1-800-genocide number, that members of Congress would be given "genocide grades" for their actions and would scramble to move from a C- to a B. The experts didn't know that students on the Pitzer college campus would organize a concert for Darfur that would raise $7,000. And they certainly didn't know that this movement would generate such political pressure that the United States would spend more than $3 billion keeping those refugees alive. They didn't know that the International Criminal Court would indict the leading war criminals. And they didn't know that a peacekeeping force would be authorized. Now let me be clear: the killings have not stopped, and there is far more left to do. But if citizens had deferred to conventional wisdom about what was doable, many more people in Darfur would no longer be with us today....

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....

Meet Alan Schwartz, welfare recipient.

As the chief executive of Bear Stearns, he's getting rather more public assistance than your typical welfare mom -- specifically, $30 billion in federal loan guarantees to help J.P. Morgan Chase take over his firm. But then, Schwartz has had rather more than his share of suffering of late.

As his firm collapsed, he was forced to forgo his entire 2007 bonus, leaving his compensation for the past five years at a paltry $141 million, according to Business Week. Things have become so bad that, the Wall Street Journal discovered, Schwartz has had to rent out his 7,850-square-foot home on the ninth green of a suburban New York golf course -- leaving the poor fellow with only his 17-room, seven-acre home in Greenwich, his condo in Colorado and the athletic center he built for Duke University....

...The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over [Reverend Jeremiah] Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

It's not surprising that the right is using Wright to paint Barack Obama as a closet Farrakhan, trying to let the air out of his trans-racial balloon by insinuating that he's a dogmatic race man. But beyond the fake shock and the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11 -- which have become virtually interchangeable. Wright's unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette. Instead of the requisite "God bless America," he said "God damn America." He said 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost. Now we must all furrow our brows and agree that such dreadful words are anathema and that no presidential candidate can ever have been within earshot of them.

This is absurd. We're worrying about someone in Row 245 who refuses to stand up for "The Star Spangled Banner," while the people who are singing loudest and waving the biggest flags are the ones who got us into the mess we're in today.

Wright isn't the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem...

The news that J.P. Morgan bought investment house giant Bear Stearns for just $236 million, or $2 a share, sent tremors through financial markets around the world today. This is company whose stock was worth almost one hundred times as much a year ago. Its building alone is valued at close to $1 billion, which suggests that all the other assets of this 85 year-old investment bank had a negative value – Bear Stearns liabilities exceed its assets.

Further confirming this view is the fact that the Fed apparently had to make guarantees to J.P. Morgan of $30 billion in order to get the bank to take Bear Stearns even at this price. That suggests the bank had a lot of real garbage on its books. The markets are right to be worried. Of course with the $8 trillion housing bubble in full meltdown, there will undoubtedly be much more bad news for the banks in the months ahead.

One person who does not have to worry is James Cayne, the recently departed chief executive of Bear Stearns. According to the New York Times, he walked with $232 million in compensation over the period from 1993 to 2006. This is just another example of how the global economy rewards extraordinary talent.

The official line is that the Fed had to get involved and make the guarantees in order to keep the markets in order. This is not clear. It is not easy to accept Fed pronouncements these days. After all, just last year Chairman Bernanke was telling us that the problems in the subprime market were likely to be contained. It is time that the Fed comes clean with both an honest assessment of the severity of the problem and increased transparency in its behind the scenes deals with the big banks.

There is something a bit obscene about billions of taxpayer dollars going to the country's richest people, when average workers can't afford health care for their kids.