Senator McCain,

Many times you have told the story of the North Vietnamese guard who drew a cross in the dirt on Christmas Day.

http://thepage.time.com/...
http://www.npr.org/...
http://query.nytimes.com/...
And on page 228 of your book "Faith of my Fathers"

Never however, have you mentioned the year of the Christmas Day when this experience happened to you.

At Rick Warren's forum on Saturday, you called it "a moment I'll never forget" and you have talked about it many times. So give me a Straight Talk answer, Senator McCain, which year was the Christmas that that guard drew a cross in the dirt in front of you?

Shortly after John McCain came back from Vietname in 1973, he wrote a detailed 12,000 word report of his experiences that was published in US News and World Report.

Even though McCain goes into a lot of detail in that story and mentions religion a few times, there is no mention of the cross in the sand story, even though it would have fitted in well with the whole narrative. There are numerous mentions of Vietnamese guards in the reports, mostly bad ones but also good ones, but there is no indication at all that any of them would have been Christian, although "[a] lot of them were homosexual".

In all this brooha about checking tire pressure, I am surprised that we are even talking about tire gauges.

When I lived in the UK, about once month when I was at the petrol gas station to fill up, I would use the machine there to inflate my tires, and instead of needing a tire gauge, I could just set the machine to a specific pressure and it would inflate my tyres tires to the right pressure. Some machines even had a list with popular cars and the recommended tire pressures.

Imagine my surprise when I moved to the States and I drove around 3 or 4 gas stations before I realized that things were rather behind the times in that regard and all the machines were manual.

Can't we just force Exxon to spend some of that $11.8 billion they made last quarter to provide these automated tire inflation machines at all their gas stations instead of 120 million American car owners having to spend a buck or two each to buy a tire gauge?

Well, this is interesting news reported by the Guardian.

The US plans to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years as part of a remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush. The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section - a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.

The special interests section would be based in the Swiss embassy.

Apparently the State Department has been pressing for this for quite a while, and they now seem to have won, and the hawks have lost.

Following on from fishbowlAMERICA's diary about how Alabama's attorney general Troy King has disappeared from McCain's campaign website, I can now exclusively reveal that this is not the only case of one of McCain supporters withdrawing their support, but that it seems that John McCain has been dumped as the prospective nominee of the Republican party.

Evidence below the fold:

A juicy story has just hit the wires: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/...

Original article in the Sun Herald

Senator Thad Cochran, R-Miss, the man who said "the idea of McCain as the GOP presidential nominee sent a chill down my spine", and not exactly one of McCain's best buddies, has said that McCain grabbed an associate of Daniel Ortega during a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua in 1987.

Apparently some members of the Axis of Evil (tm) are not as evil as others, or maybe they can't be used just as much for domestic political gain, as the Bush administration has decided to lift sanctions against North Korea http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/...

The North Koreans must be happy that Iran is now the flavor of the month in neocon warmongering circles, as they are suspected to be much farther in the development of a nuclear weapon than Iran, have done a few fairly successful long-range missile tests, and have lied numerous times about the state of their nuclear program.

What do you say? Oil? What does that have to do with anything?

Via McClatchy:

"California's coastline is an international treasure," Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday. "I do not support lifting this moratorium on new oil drilling off our coast."

Arnie can be a bit of a pain for the Republicans. He is a high-profile governor from a large state, so would normally be a potential presidential candidate if it weren't for the fact that he's not a natural born citizen. But now that the only thing left to aim for in his political career is the Senate, and not the presidency, he doesn't have as much need to pay attention to the interests of the national party as he has to pay attention to his own standing in California. Which means he is likely to say things that play well in liberal California and conflict with the national Republican message. Which can be a bit of a problem for the GOP considering how high-profile Schwarzenegger is.

Interesting article in the Seattle Times today about an issue we have heard about on the blogs occassionally but has completely gone under the radar of the MSM.

Ron Paul supporters are working hard to influence the GOP state conventions in favor of their candidate, and the Seattle Time states that up to 40% of the 1100 delegates to attend the Washington GOP state convention starting today could be Ron Paul supporters. It is unlikely that they will be able to overturn John McCain, but it looks like Paul will get more delegates than the original caucus would indicate, and there is still some resentment about the state GOP stopping the count of the causus in February after McCain was deemed to have won.

A nice little issue had been brought up by Arianna Huffington :

Did or did not John McCain vote for Bush in the 2000 general election?

It is also getting into the MSM: McCain says he voted for Bush

And the way it is framed is brilliant, if McCain says he didn't vote for Bush, he will be seen as vindicative, mean, disloyal and a bad loser. If he did vote for Bush, well, that ties him closer to the 21% President. (I mean just look at he headline, what kind of unconcious message does that give?)

HuPo quotes from an O'Reilly interview where McCain seems to contradict himself:

Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, McCain told O'Reilly, "I voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004."

[...]

O'REILLY: Did you vote for President bush?

MCCAIN: Of course not. I campaigned all over this country for him.

So is he telling the truth, is he lying, or does he just have one of his senior moments?

It's a lose-lose for the Maverick (tm) :)

An awesome protest idea from towncalleddobson

(Thanks to merrinc on Balloon Juice for the link)

1. Get a flag pin.

2. Pin it to your gas receipt

3. Mail it to:

  Charlie Gibson
  ABC News
  7 West 66th Street
  New York, NY 10023

That's a way of telling them to stick it somewhere, and point out what is important to voters. Not that $8 million/year Charlie will understand the significance of a $100 gas bill for working class people. In his eyes, everyone makes $200,000 per year at least.

Now:

1. Does anyone know where to get cheap pins?

2. This opens ideas for so many more protests. How about sending them a copy of your unemployment notice with a flag pin complete with the Made in China sticker still at the back? Or a copy of that notice that the VA has decided to cut your veteran's benefits for some undefined reason?

According to the BBC

Baghdad's military command has extended a round-the clock curfew in the city for an indefinite period.

So how pissed off would you be that after 5 years of occupation you can't even go out on the streets of your own capital? During full daylight? During all hours of the day? Wouldn't you think that any solution would be better than the current situation, and that you would fight to make it change? Because face it, you can't go to work to earn money, you can't even go to the stores to buy food for your family, your kids can't go to school and you can't go out to see your friends or family. You are a prisoner in your own home.

If the incompetence of the US occupation keeps backing ordinary Iraqis in a corner like this and give them a life not worth living, the insurrection will only get worse.

A regular rebuttal here on Daily Kos to comments along the lines of "I am never going to vote for Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee." has been along the lines of "But think what kind of Justices McCain would appoint to the Supreme Court."

That is all correct, but it leaves out one big question: What kind of Justices would Clinton appoint to the Supreme Court?

As reported on msnbc, both Clintons today take on Nancy Pelosi's comments over the weekend that

If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party.

Both Clintons basically said that the superdelegates should be able to overturn the results of the primaries and caucusses.

Bill:

I don't know that it will be an easy decision, but that's what leaders sign up for

Hillary:

I think it's a question about everything and I think people are going to have to take everything into account

It is clear that the subject of experience, i.e. Obama's supposed lack thereof and McCain's and Clinton's is going to play a significant role in this campaign. For example, it is the subject of this week's cover story of Time.

However as pointed out in that article:

"Experience never exists in isolation; it is always a factor that coexists with temperament, training, background, spiritual outlook and a host of other factors," says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith. "Character is your magic word, it seems to me — not just what they've done but how they've done it and what they've learned from doing it."

In today's Washington Post, McCain's attorney Robert Bennett reacts to the news that Lowell Paxson confirms that he did meet with McCain as follows:

"We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?"

I guess this is a foreboding of how White House press briefings will go if McCain becomes president. Examples after the fold:

The "College Republicans", i.e. the Bush Jugend, are holding "Islamo-Fascism awareness week" next week on about 100 university campusses across the US. This is to:
"confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat,"