McIlheran Watch: Black is White, Up is Down, and McCain is a Grown Up

by folkbum

I am a lucky guy. I think. Somehow, after all these years of duels and ripostes, in the last couple of weeks Patrick McIlheran has added me to his mailing list. That means every few days or so I get an email from him with the full text of a column of his slated to run in the next day or two.

Thursday night I got his preview of Friday's column*. (Confidential to PM in Bay View: Next time, use the BCC field. Your sole liberal correspondent might feel a bit weird about being your sole liberal correspondent, and was probably happier when he believed there was a more even distribution.) "Here’s an early look at my column in Friday's Journal Sentinel. You’re seeing it because I send a heads-up to a select group of talkers and bloggers whose work I admire. You’re among them." See? Lucky!

It certainly perked me up when I read on in his emailed introduction: "[I]n Friday morning's paper, I’ll note one good reason to vote for McCain rather than Obama is that the old guy, for whatever his faults, simply seems more grown up." I'm still cracking up.

The actual column is also a hoot. I mean, no one should be surprised that McIlheran is encouraging people to vote for John McCain instead of Barack Obama. But the "grown up" argument really is kind of the crux of his argument.

It's absurd to begin with, seeing as how eight years ago we were assured that if we elected George W. Bush, the grown-ups would be in charge again. The administration we are not yet finished experiencing has proved to be anything but grown up. What kind of crazy person thinks that making the argument again is a winner?

But here's what he says in the paper: "If you're still undecided, it's likely because you realize that either man's presidency will be shaped by events and issues yet unknown. All we can go on is our judgment of their judgment. I'll put it simply: Judgment is formed by experience. Obama has little and asks us to trust him anyhow. McCain, by contrast, has a record you can judge."

I have a hard time believing that anyone who's still undecided hasn't already considered the "experience" issue an discarded it. I mean, it was Clinton's biggest club in the primaries. It was, for a long time, the most effective argument John McCain himself had against Barack Obama. I say "for a long time" because John McCain has repeatedly done the best he could to undermine not only his own experience, but also the judgment that supposedly comes with it.

I have written previously how the McCain campaign has seemed like one hail mary after another. McCain's campaign has always been uphill, given that the present president from McCain's own party is currently about as popular as gonorrhea. McCain, having run towards Bush in the primaries to placate the Republican base, is now running away from Bush as hard as he can. But to rely, as I wrote then, on the hail mary as the first-down play (not to mention second, third, and fourth) is kind of the opposite of sound judgment. It certainly belies his experience of having run two honorable and sensible (but just one victorious) primary campaigns. The John McCain of 1999-April, 2008, was not a hail-mary thrower.

Recent stories have made it clear just how it happened that McCain blew it on that score, and it was with yet another hail mary--his hiring of Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt. When you're John McCain, and you've been standing up to (and the victim of) Karl Rove politics for the last decade, how do you then embrace them? (Answer: You embrace them because all your previous campaign staff, professional lobbyists almost to a one, belied your anti-lobbyist image.) I think by now you've seen those stories--this one being particularly instructive--and you get the sense anymore that McCain's campaign is anything but grown up. They want to win the news cycle, not the White House. They want to make a splash, not a difference. And McCain is letting it happen.

McIlheran isn't done there. He tries to make McCain look like the grown up during the financial crisis when McCain suspended his campaign (where "suspended" means kept running ads and making campaign appearances for a few days) and Obama didn't. McIlheran suggests that Obama didn't know what he was talking about during that time, and yet we know that when the two sat with President Bush and Congressional leaders at the White House, it was McCain who was unprepared and unable to talk intelligently about any of the proposals. McCain took credit for the first bill's passage just before it failed. Even Republicans involved in the bill's writing agreed that McCain politicized it--again, looking to win the news cycle. McCain first, I guess.

McIlheran defends Sarah Palin with the same tired and ultimately ridiculous excuses you hear everywhere (plaints about "Katie Couric's pop-quiz ambush about newspapers," for example). He brings up McCain's time as a prisoner of war, and how it supposedly shaped his judgment--but that was 40 years ago and McCain has repeatedly failed just this year to live up to the promise of that judgment.

In the end, McIlheran's argument is unconvincing to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to this election. There are plenty of people who will back McCain because of his stand on particular issues, and those people are making (the wrong but) sensible decision based on the facts in front of them. This argument--that McCain has the judgment to be president--flies in the face of those very facts. Hard-core conservative Republicans, including at least one former McCain advisor from the pre-Schmidt era, have been saying exactly that left and right over the last month, and urging a vote for someone whose judgment they trust--Barack Obama.

Luckily for McIlheran--and McCain--the groundwork has been extensively laid for scapegoating Wednesday morning. It's Palin going rogue, maybe, or all ACORN's fault. All of that, however, is just a convenient way for McIlheran and his ilk to avoid the real failure--McCain.

*Note: While I was working on this post last night, the preview of Sunday's column rolled in. It's a doozy, too. Something to look forward to, I guess.

Does WISGOP know who their candidate is?

by folkbum

In the past two days, I have received four mailers from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Mailers are not cheap, which means the WISGOP is investing a pretty significant amount of money to get me and my generally Democratic neighbors in this zip code to vote against Barack Obama. Whether this is the best use of their money now, instead of, say, heavily targeting a few of the closest State Assembly races where they are liable to lose seats and control of that body, is not for me to say. I don't give them my money, so I don't particularly care how they spend it.

But note that I said they wanted me to vote against Barack Obama. I did a quick tally of some word frequency from these four mailers. See if you notice what I noticed:

34 Obama
9 Rezko
9 Gun/ Firearm/ Arms
8 Special Interest/ Political Favor/ and variants
7 Lead/ Leading / Led/ Leadership (to suggest Obama doesn't lead)
2 McCain

If I just count the three mailers I got today, most of these would be about the same, except the McCain number would fall to zero. In fact, yesterday's mailer, the only one to mention McCain, does so only on the inside of the mailer and does so with the inclusion of a number of flat falsehoods about the Republican candidate. Falsehoods like, "Led the effort for a bi-partisan agreement to address the Wall Street Meltdown" (the truth being, of course, that he was simply grandstanding and in the important meetings he didn't say a single intelligent thing about the problem). Even if it were true, the public is none too keen on the bailout that resulted. There are more problems with the way they describe McCain, but I'll stop there.

In addition, it's obvious that the photos of Obama have clearly had their brightness adjusted to make his skin look darker in almost every single photo on these four mailers. (There are seven pictures of Obama--the undarkened one is a fuzzy shot of Tony Rezko's face with the back of Obama's head--and one picture of McCain, soft-focus, and backlit in such a way as to give him a bright white aura.) They're full of distortions about Obama's record, too, such as the reference to this AP story ominously titled "Obama fundraiser, convicted of fraud, spills beans." The story is clear that Obama is not one of the spilled beans: "But based on the known facts, charges so far and testimony at Rezko's trial, there's no indication there'll be a so-called 'October surprise' that could hurt the Democratic presidential nominee--even though Rezko says prosecutors are pressing him for dirt about Obama."

Pretty sad sampling from WISGOP, isn't it? Four direct mail pieces, all focused entirely or almost entirely on the other party's candidate, all full of half-truths, distortions (of fact and photos), and outright lies. Is this what the GOP is reduced to in the state of its birth? Shameful.

This Map Rocks

by folkbum

Election season brings maps--reds and blues, swings and solids, and so on. But this is my new favorite election map for the season. Warning: It may require a shower when you're finished.

Competing Views on PA

by folkbum

It's going to be an early night November 4, unless we want to stay up to check the series of tubes for updates on the fate of Ted Stevens.

How do I know? John McCain is betting the farm on Pennsylvania, where polls close at 7 PM our time. At about 7:03 our time, the AP and everyone else is going to call PA for Barack Obama, and we can all start drinking (for one reason or another). The pollster.com average for PA as I write this shows Obama with a 15-point lead.



I've read two theories on why McCain is making PA his last stand. One, from Tim Dickinson, is that McCain is just doing it for show, to "create the appearance that he’s still playing offense." That's not a bad way to look at it--McCain is jiggering the optics to suggest that he's not really toast yet.

But I think that's wrong. I agree with dday, here:

Pennsylvania does not have early voting, and absentee voting is restricted. Unlike Minnesota and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania doesn't have same-day registration. So voting is concentrated on Election Day, and the state GOP is trying to make the election illegitimate [through attacks on ACORN and so forth].

I've written about this over and over again: All the cries of "fraud" that we have seen (note--these are only cries, not evidence of wide-spread voter fraud) are not designed to insure the purity of the election process. They are designed to delegitimize the inevitable Obama victory. McCain can't win states like PA, but he can raise a fuss that his loss was fraudulent. And if McCain loses by less than PA's 21 electoral votes, then Republicans and their media enablers have an excuse for the next four years to pretend that Obama is not the president.

Personally, I think a 20-EV loss would be a miracle for McCain at this point, but Republicans may still be able to construct the fantasy that the election was stolen across multiple states--like Wisconsin. Which is why it is important that we turn this into a rout. You can help, please. Click on the thermometer and contribute to Obama or some of the local Democrats, please.

Dampen the Rich

By Keith R. Schmitz

The McCain campaign along with Empress of the North Sarah Palin have been whipping up their mobs by labelling Barack Obama's tax plan as socialist. This is of course in lieu of a real program for America part of their brilliant strategy of balling up every handful of mud they can get their hands on and lobbing it out to voters. This is what desperation smells like.

According to this article by Steven Coll on the New Yorker site, the Obama "socialistic" tax plan would soak the rich to the tune of $45,000 per every million in income.

$45,000? Socialism can do better than that.

Sykes and all the rest of the rightie blogs like to treat you like rubes by talking about percentages, but we don't take percentages to the grocery story, send percentages to our mortgage company or use percentages to put your kids through college. That's cash.

We can do math while many around Wasilla are doing meth. Using the 38% at the top bracket, that million in income leaves $620,000, pretty much the after tax income of roughly thirty families.

Throw in the nick this income takes in property taxes and state taxes, plus that $45,000, there is still room for that Mercedes and to cover Sarah Palin's wardrobe.

Still, there will be screaming that government does nothing, so why should anybody pay for it? But there was one thing that has to be dealt with -- the tax cuts on the wealthy which have put us into hock to the Chinese and that did very little solid to juice the economy.

That has to be paid for. Any ideas who can do it?

Yet Another Exploding McCain Cigar

By Keith R. Schmitz

Sarah Palin, "the foundations of our economy are strong," pallin' with terrorists and now Joe the Plumber. What these all have in common is try as he might, so much of what of McCain tries to do blows up in his face.

Now it looks like the Joe the Plumber allegory has sprung a leak (no righties, this is not an attack on Sam Wurzelbacher).

Looks like people have woke up and realized McCain's economics will do nothing for them -- or Sam.

John McCain -- Socialist

By Keith R. Schmitz

Think back in the not too distant past when the McCain ads and his winger Greek chorus were lying (that in the McCain campaign is known as "advertising") about how Barack was going to "raise your taxes."

That assertion got spanked real good in the real media and by other independent sources as an outright lie.

So it was time for Jeffery Dahmer look-alike Rick Davis to retool. True that those under $250,000 a year -- including Sam "Joe" the Plumber -- would be seeing their taxes drop lower under the Obama plan.

So Davis and company had to get people's minds off of that benefit with guess what kids?

A good old fashioned appeal to racism!

Because some folks who pay no taxes would get a tax credit, something once weighed by Richard Nixon as a way to eliminate welfare, average people are made to forget about how they themselves would make out and get resentful about you know who.

"Robbing" from the upper incomes to fund this tax credit is being labelled by the right wing regimented as socialism. Thank God we get to bring that term out of mothballs. For the right wing, the classics never go out of style.

But whoa, wait a minute. Focus for a minute on what McCain is proposing when it comes to health care. Aren't you on the right getting all jiggly about McCain looking to provide everybody in America with a tax credit to get into a private health insurance plan? This would fund the fantasy of "consumer health care."

So if everyone gets this credit, wouldn't that include people who now pay no income tax?

So contestants, what's the difference between the "socialistic" Obama tax plan and the McCain health care plan?

What's Happening on the Emerald Coast?

By Keith R. Schmitz

h/t Jim Rowen

Love those fun toys on the Internets.

Phil Ball with the Isthmus in an article on the grassroots vitality of the two presidential campaigns invites you to try out their widgets for finding events within a chosen area by plugging in a zip code.

Ball tries a couple of areas to demonstrate that the Obama campaign has a lot more going on than McCain, particularly in Wisconsin.

Take a whack. Here's McCain's widget. Here's Obama's.

My mother lives in Destin. It sits on the Emerald Coast on Florida's panhandle, perhaps one of the most conservative coast. I get great amusement reading the out of this world letters to the editor from the wailing residents that see ink in the Fort Walton Beach paper.

So what's happening within a 25 mile radius of 32541?

If you want to take in an event for John McCain there are none. Barack will keep you busier with 12 events going on within an easy drive of Destin.

Will Obama carry Okaloosa County? Highly unlikely.

Will the infrastructure be in place to give trouble to the GOP and grow the grassroots?

You betcha.

Joe the Plumber Benefits under Obama

By Keith R. Schmitz

OK, let's bite on this one since we will be hearing about Joe ad infinitum for the next few days or so until attendees at Palin rallies who have so little self control they will make the top of the news again.

Let the Joe the Plumber wars begin!

Three points where Joe would do better under an Obama administration:

1) He is clearly under the $250,000 level where he would benefit from McCain's tax program. At less than that income he does better based on Obama's program.

2) He would get a small business health care benefit based on Obama's program.

3) He would get a $3,000 tax credit per each new job based on Obama's tax plan.

And one more:

Since trickle down doesn't work he would have more customers who could afford his services.

McIlheran: Allergic to Logic

By Keith R. Schmitz

Classless, tasteless, brainless, witless, more less than meets the eye, the day to day display of Patrick McIlheran in ink and on the web by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel must be a perpetual practical joke on the right wing readers.

They think that the paper is making up for its, in their view, hideously liberal content giving this lone voice in the wilderness a hearing. Never mind that the Journal Company is providing over six hours of in kind donations to the GOP with their line-up of hitters on right wing unreality, led off by the redoubtable Charlie Sykes, spewed throughout the great state of Wisconsin.

For the rest of us, this is burlesque and non-stop inanity.

Witness Paddy Mac's latest offering. Most endearing is his faux populism, which from time to time he proves is phony in this blog post on the closing of the Janesville GM plant, in which he proclaims, "If you hated SUVs, you're happy now, right?"

As with all great events, Paddy leaves out the great men who made things happen. In this case the management of GM who failed to recognize where the price of oil was heading.

The eventual tightening of the oil supply is something that was well known to many industry experts and economists, something that many saw coming.

But why was nothing done? Because in the corporate world those who make quarterly targets are richly rewarded and nobody dares to suggest retooling the product line into something less profitable yet marketable. It was no wonder that the padlocked doors at the Janesville Plant would be the result.

But as usual in Paddy's world the workers get to eat the dirt while those responsible get to bail out with golden parachutes.

And who caused this? Environmentalists. What a beautiful mind.

One more thing. Paddy came out of his elitist closet on Sunday in his column about the Obama tax plan. By the way, if you want to get the number on your savings, click here.

As you all know one of the prime McCain campaign lies was that Obama was going to raise your taxes. Now after countless independent analysis and non-partisan articles have blasted that myth, there is a new attack as laid out in McIlheran's Sunday column.

This champion of the common man wants us to cry bitter tears because "Uncle Sam takes money from someone else and gives it to you." He is now turning the "welfare cheat" charge...on us! Brilliant way to bring together the races.

Things are really getting desperate with right wing because Paddy lives right in the echo chamber, but now he is urging us to deny ourselves the tax cut and feed it into the trickle down machine, which now Americans recognize as being truly on the fritz.

I used to get ticked over McIlheran's columns. Now it is impossible to not feel entertained and, I hate to say it, superior.

ACORN-supporting candidate delivers rousing keynote at pro-immigration rally

by folkbum

But not who you think:

Leaders from a diverse array of sectors will hold a rally in Miami on Thursday, February 23, 2006, in support of comprehensive immigration reform in an effort to keep immigration reform at the forefront of the public debate. Leaders from both political parties, immigrant communities, labor, business, and religious organizations will gather to call on Washington to enact workable reform.

The rally will feature Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as the headline speaker along with elected officials, immigrants and key local and national leaders. Sen. McCain is one of the chief sponsors of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act; bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform legislation introduced last Congress and scheduled for consideration by the Senate in the coming weeks. A similar rally with Sen. McCain is planned for New York City on February 27. [. . .]

The rally in Miami is being sponsored by the New American Opportunity campaign (NAOC) in partnership with ACORN, Catholic Legal Services - Archdiocese of Miami, Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, Florida Immigrant Coalition, Miami Dade College, People for the American Way/Mi Familia Vota en Acción, Service Employees International Union, and UNITE HERE

As Bart Simpson would say, the ironing is delicious.

Give the People What They Want John

By Keith R. Schmitz

If John McCain wants a source for political advice, he could do no better than the crowd in Waukesha. McCain should run with the tip from such insightful politicos as James T. Harris who speaks for all people of color, "I am begging you, sir. I am begging you. Take it to him."

Do it John. Show That One his place.

Real charming was the seething sullen guy who brought his bar talk to the rally and was bellowing about socialism. You all did us proud.

In other words, in the next debate lay wood on Barack Obama. We're quite sure the Democratic nominee will have nothing to say. And it is probably best if he didn't, but just kept on talking about the economy.

The media creation McCain has fiddled with stories about questionable "pals" while our economic Rome burns.

The problem McCain has is the typical shiny objects the GOP used in elections past are not providing the necessary distraction and the only way out is to steal votes or yank people's franchise.

The real advice McCain should follow is from Joe Klein in Time magazine.

(I)t would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower.

You are watching losing, and losing it, in action.

The Error of Ayers

By Keith R. Schmitz

You got to feel sorry (I think I can) for the GOP this year. Not only did they have a crop of candidates who, to quote Howard Dean, reminded you of something out the 1950's, but the creme that rose to the crop was a media created fraud.

Think about all the cheap shots and dubious constructions that worked for the Republicans in campaigns past. They became so addicted to them that the apparatchiks formerly employed by Darth Rove felt a content free campaign could win this thing.

But now that the poll numbers for McCain are sagging, the campaign is turning to the McCarthyite guilt by association William Ayers attacks on Barack Obama.

But the irony is the blind ideology of the GOP brought to you by that past electoral success has led to this toxic economy so bad that now most voters are not susceptible to these siren songs. Even the racism that worked in years past may look like a costly luxury.

The clock is running out.

Comedy Club

By Keith R. Schmitz

Charlie's blog posts should come with a laugh track.

Here's one of many, this one over how McCain should for the debates ah, "take off the gloves:"

This is the hour of reckoning. Can this country afford a 4-year Socialist knocking America down to the same economic and political level as every country in the world just to prove to everyone else that we're no better. It's like giving trophies to everybody just because they played rather than being the champions. We must defend that status of most envied nation in order to give others hope that there is a champion that will defend them against tyranny. It's time. Give 'em hell, John!

Hard to believe that there are not only thoughts like this, but that someone is even trotting these out in public.

The big question is when will McCain start talking about an issue in his commercials?

Keep goading him on Charlie. A second performance like the last debate should be good for knocking off another 2 or three percentage points.

You don't need a weatherman to know when Palin's blowing smoke

by bert

Pallin' around with terrorists? That's the best this pitbull with lipstick can do?

On the one hand I can see why McCain strategists and their servile pundits are playing up the Bill Ayers connection with Barack Obama. Palin carried that message yesterday. Ayers, who said in 2001 he opposes the "indiscriminate killing of human beings by either fanaticism or official policy", was nonetheless a member of the most notoriously militant anti-war radical group of the 1960s, the Weather Underground.


This group's use of bombs, which in one case killed a police officer, was wrong and contemptible.


Almost all anti-war activists and politicians of the time would also agree, which is why this splinter group earned the acrimony of just about everyone else at the time. Yet all that matters is the perceptions of voters today, and strategists think they can wound the Obama campaign with someone else's old splinter.


On the other hand, I don't see this working for a lot of people. Is our collective perception of the Vietnam Era -- what historians call our public memory --that mangled and highly selective? Did the 1960s gives us just one bad guy: the dirty hippies?


I am obviously not the base that this talking point is aiming to energize. And that's not because I was a hippie; like Obama I was still a little boy in the 1960s. I just don't get why he the wayward militants were the only domestic terrorists of the day.


Take Henry Kissinger, for example. While I don't admire Ayers, I am way more troubled by Sarah Palin's link with Kissinger, from whom she sought to learn about world affairs two weeks ago. Kissinger is a war criminal with blood on his hands shed during the Vietnam War period. Why Ayers bad, Kissinger not so much?


This is the period that also gave us National Guard soldiers at Kent State University in 1970. Chicago police officers who laid open the heads of young women in Chicago in 1968, and Milwaukee had those young guys waiting at the south end of the viaduct with two-by-fours and tire irons for the open housing marchers to arrive.



If I try to take it all in, some wistful sadness comes but not much selective outrage anymore. According to the New York Times, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley views the actions of a young Ayers 40 years ago "in the context of a polarized and turbulent era."

Sarah Palin and theMcCain campaign think a majority of voters aren't wise enough to do the same.

Senate Vote On Bail Out -- Live With It

By Keith R. Schmitz

One man with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns.

Don Corleone in The Godfather

Now that the Senate has done what it had to do -- no matter how disgusting it is -- and pass the bailout plan, and it looks likely that the House will have to do something similar. What next?

That is the question. Do we follow the same philosophical fantasies that got us into this mess in the first place? And no, it was not the minorities that led to this crisis.

Or do we trash the nonsense that gave us a Hershey economic high, that is a big boost and then crashing let down?

It is clear the leadership we need from the McCain campaign. Is K-Street crowd that comprises his "StraightTalk Express" is mainly trying to get him elected so we can pick up where we left off.

Obama, on the other hand, has real economists on staff and not corporate enablers.

What we need going forward are real investment reforms that not only clean things up on Wall Street, but a commitment that these regulations will morph as those on the Street figure to climb over the rules.

Also tasty is the idea from Jim Cramer of Mad Money that we have "show trials." There were many who lied on their financial statements and that has to be punished.

Out of McCain we will continue to have the inane focus on that minutia known as pork barrel spending. As he says, when it comes to pork barrel spenders, thanks to him "you will know their names."

He has already done that.

Sarah Palin.

Earmarks -- A Pin Prick in the Fed Budget

By Keith R. Schmitz

Hey Barack, next time Senator McCain prattles on about ear marks, ask him if he knows how big the federal budget is and what else he plans to do with his time.

Here's help from Grasping Reality with Both Hands.

Love it when I brought up earmarks a while back and some of you whined about how $16 billion is a big number.

Would you like an eyedropper of ice cream with your slice of pie?


The McCain campaign really DOES think you're stupid

or "Hey! Look over there!"

by folkbum

For a long time, I have resisted the meme going around that John McCain's campaign was willing to throw all kinds of crap into the race on the theory that people are too stupid to notice that it's crap. I've resisted because, you know, not even I am that cynical. But, to paraphrase the Bard, some people have cynicism thrust upon them:

Inside John McCain's campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. "It would be fantastic," said a McCain insider. "You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week."

Look, we're not talking about Princess Bristol of Wassilla, heir to the throne. If anyone were going to command every camera as Princess of the Realm it would have been Jenna Bush. But--and it pains me to say this--the Bushes did that one just about right, demanding and getting a private respectful ceremony.

Seriously, if the McCain campaign (and Palin family) goes through with this kind of plan, not only does McCain deserve to lose the race in a landslide, but the Palins ought to be arrested for child abuse. Bristol has got to be the most used and abused and exploited child since the kid who played Webster.

Only Lobbyists Speak for John McCain

by folkbum

It's a pretty amazing feat: The McCain campaign has spent the last several months going through a whole litany of names of people who, though connected in intimate ways with the campaign, actually do not speak for John McCain.

You might recall Phil "A Nation of Whiner" Gramm, sent by the campaign to speak to a newspaper editorial board acting as a surrogate for the campaign whose comments were disavowed because, they told us, he does not speak for John McCain.

Friday night, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was watching the debate in a bar in Philidelphia, and a cub reporter asked he a question about Pakistan. She answered with a statement of policy that was too close to Barack Obama's position, so today John McCain went on TV to tell us that Sarah Palin does not speak for John McCain.

And not too long ago, we had an advisor to the McCain campaign telling us that when John McCain himself is out there on the stump and says something, that doesn't mean that John McCain is speaking for John McCain. (I am sure I am forgetting many more examples of this.)

So who can we listen to? Apparently the only ones whose words we are allowed to take as gospel are those of his spokespeople and others running his campaign. You know, all the lobbyists.

Johnny Come Lately

By Keith R. Schmitz

It has been just announced that John McCain will be deep in the heart of Dixie at Ole Miss tonight to take on Barack Obama in the long awaited first presidential debate. At least the U of Miss didn't drop $8 million for an Obama solo and I will get to enjoy some glacomole.

No tension here, though perhaps McCain's debate prep was probably just as suspended as his campaign. His supporters better hope not.

At least he won't have that moose in the headlights look that his running mate had during the Couric grilling of an unprepared student taking a pop quiz.

Now the suspense is did his staff interrupt their part time lobbying long enough to cook up another stunt. Maybe McCain will have the word "soy bomb" written across his chest.

My money was on him appearing. Wish there would have been a pool.