There has been plenty of coverage of John McCain's negative ad right in the middle of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. There has been little about how it calls on us to believe a defunct Economic theory or that it wants us to assume that Barack Obama has already taken the bunk into his calculations.

That Sen. Bomb Bomb Iran expects to get away with these gross misrepresentations shows that for all his supporters' whining about the media coverage, they're depending that the media will not give the ad the serious scrutiny it deserves.

Sen. Barack Obama said he's willing to discuss offshore drilling as part of a compromise in order to get a Comprehensive Energy Policy. While I would have thougth that offshore drilling wouldn't be needed, it's on the table now and we must deal with it.

I think we need to make our demands now to show what a REAL energy policy looks like, and to show that we have a LOT of chits from previous compromises that we hadn't pushed for because it seemed Conventionally Unwise.

Listening to the Conservatives whine about how "Liberally biased" the MainStream Media is, you would think they'd know not to give their enemies any ammunition. I've seen so many times they have done just that, either they know it's a big lie or they're masochistically begging to be humiliated.

First up, the Citizens United ad campaign. The NY Times reports today that "Senator Barack Obama" is "an overhyped media darling."

What makes this such a spectacular display of chutzpah is that the commercial features Kenneth Blackwell, former Secretary of State for Ohio and other characters that you wouldn't think the Republicans would want to be linked to by this media.

Taday's New York Times had a story about a hotelier whose donations to an anti-gay marriage campaign spurred a boycott by his gay clientele.

While the case raises some questions whee we need to tread carefully so we avoid charges of hypocrisy; on thorough examination, they are bogus claims and Doug Manchester, the innkeeper in question, is a crybaby.

The Washington Post reported on President Bush's guilt-tripping Congress because they wouldn't respond to the increasing price of gas Exactly the Way He Wanted Them To:

Bush's move was aimed at increasing pressure on Democrats to act. It also raised the likelihood that offshore drilling would become a prominent part of the ongoing presidential campaign.

Bush first called on Congress to lift its drilling ban last month, saying he would simultaneously rescind the executive ban announced by his father, President George H. W. Bush, in 1990 and formally implemented in 1992. But he said today that he decided to act now because Democrats have failed to schedule any hearings or take the issue seriously.

"It's been almost a month since I urged Congress to act, and they've done nothing," Bush said. "As the Democratically controlled Congress has sat idle, gas prices have continued to increase."

If Congress failed to act after one month, how guilty is Bush for not acting after 6 years, 10 months, and 3 days?

Back when columnist George Will had a conscience (that's right, I'm a dinosaur who actually remembers back that far), he criticized our country's dependence on oil. In today's Washington Post, he talks about $4.00 gas as though there was nothing wrong with our refusal to conserve; that it wasn't the duty of Americans to save energy, it was the duty of politicians to sacrifice everything to insure the uninterrrupted supply of oil. He speaks of the opposition to opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as though that was the only thing keeping the low gas prices from returning.

In the recent California Supreme Court decision overturning the state's ban on gay marriages, two of the dissenting justices, Marvin R. Baxter and Carol A. Corrigan, used a sophistry coined by Robert Bork to object to a proclamation of equal rights.

Bork had written that the Roe v. Wade decision had "short-circuited" debate on abortion; and because few have publicly refuted that argument, many mistake it for Constitutional law, including Baxter and Corrigan.

Two reports on the Republican efforts to use "fraud" to suppress the legitimate votes of eligible citizens: In one newspaper, I received a confirmation of my suspicion that Indiana's Voter ID law was not serious about fighting fraud. In another was a story that the suppressors were now using fear of noncitizens to go after the legitimate voters who are too poor to get proper docs.

An editorial in today's Washington Post poses as criticizing Sen. McCain's speech to the Republicans on Supreme Court nominees. They gloss over such huge assetrions on McCain's part that they're actually supporting him by pulling their punches.

Specifically, they come out for a Supreme Court picked by the Spoils System of old, where the most extreme partisan hack can get on and where "even mediocrity should have a seat," to quote Sen. Roman Hruska (R-NE) from the Nixon years.

Did the Founding Fathers intend the "Advise and Consent" provisions to reward parties for winning both the Presidency and the Senate, giving them the ability to put partisan hacks and ideological extremists on the court; or did they want to make it harder to put such people on? Look up "rhetorical question" in the dictionary, you'll see that used as an illustration. That such a question needs to be asked shows the state of American politics today.

The discussion I've seen about the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore II decision (aka Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections) has tended to be abstruse and doctrinaire. I thought I'd come up with a handy guide on how to combat the various talking points floated by those who want to cloud the issue.

1. You don't stop vote fraud by making the fraudulent voters vote absentee.

2. One fraudulent vote equals one legitimate voter denied their rights--not a thousand.

3. Flying's a luxury, voting's a right.

4. Judicial Legislation isn't just when Liberals do it.

These may seem no-brainers, but they seem to have eluded the R. A. T. S. on the Supreme Court.

Michael Gerson, in his column in today's Washington Post, tries to paint Barack Obama as an abortion extremist based an a totally one-sided survey of the issue.

Gerson wants us to think that a recent swing of the pendulum is Truth for All Time; when in fact, the swings are predictably almost always away from the most recent threat.

He also tries to portray antiabortionists as a group as being reasonable based on the example of an unrepresentative few.

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain said he was concerned that

Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training and financing Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, which is a Sunni insurgent group.
(snip)
It was not until he got a quiet word of correction in his ear from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain as part of a Congressional delegation on a nearly weeklong trip, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.

"I’m sorry," Mr. McCain said, "the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda."

If he's correct in his belief that we should be concerned about Iran, that would mean that we shouldn't take his word that the Surge is working.

In today's Washington Post, columnist Charles Krauthammer launched a salvo in the coming General Election campaign; trying to tag Democrats as defeatists in Iraq. In order to do that, he must ignore a major player in Iraqi politics--Moqtada al-Sadr, whose ceasefire has contributed substantially to the reduced violence since the Surge started.

The AdWatch in today's WaPo comments on Mitt Romney's criticism of John McCain's tax record.

By Howard Kurtz
The Ad: John McCain, an honorable man. But is he the right Republican for the future? McCain opposes repeal of the death tax, and voted against the Bush tax cuts twice.

What Willard Romney is really saying is that  we should run up big deficits, for no other reason than the inmates who comprise the Club for Growth have taken over the asylum.

Mitt Romney's new campaign ad wants us to see him as heroicly defying a smothering orthodoxy: Political Correctness. Beyond the specific issues involved, this is bogus because, outside of academia, Political Correctness is just about never heard except dismissively or defiantly. I'm sure I'll hear from those within academe whose experience is little different from mine on the outside. The phantom menace of "Political Correctness" may make Romney look heroic, but it requires no greater courage than breathing in and out.

I was just reading an article by Forrest Church in the UU World, about the efforts to get the country to accept the Separation of Church and State. This story is excerpted from Dr. Church's new book, So Help Me God

Most of the story is pretty familiar to those of you who read the diaries of Troutfishing or the writings of Chris Rodda; but what caught my eye was that the battle continued to the end of the War of 1812.

James Dobson, writing in today's NY Times, gives us a textbook example of the use of code words in political statements, words which seem to mean one thing but connote something entirely different to insiders.

When the Maryland Court of Appeals rejected the arguments for gay marriage in Conaway v. Deane, et. al., they made too great a fuss that the MD Equal Rights Amendment wasn't violated because it didn't establish gays as a class, that didn't raise Constitutional questions, that because gays had theoretical relief through the political system, the courts needn't be involved; and that because marriage is built around procreation, denying it to nonprocreative couples is within the state's interest.

I am not a lawyer, and I might have missed something because my existential crisis kept me from going to law school in the 1970s; but the majority decision seems to me to be based on a desire by the court to keep its hands off. They rely heavily on other cases of judicial passivism, and give only token acknowledgement of the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts.