Following yesterday's monumental screw-up by John McCain, proving once again that he either doesn't understand or has forgotten key elements about this war, McCain's campaign has responded to questions about his claim that the surge made the "Anbar Awakening" possible:

Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge ... but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy, because to credit them would be to disparage the judgment of Barack Obama and praise the leadership of John McCain.

Wrong. That is not the debate. That's a cheap strawman by the McCain campaign, has no basis in reality, and has nothing to do with what John McCain said yesterday.  

Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.

Portraying questions about that statement as a cricicism of McCain and the troops is nearly as contemptible as McCain's recent claims that Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign." The debate, the question, is, was John McCain unaware that the "Anbar Awakening" began in 2006, did he forget, or was he lying for political gain?

McCain's campaign has been complaining endlessly about the lack of media coverage they're receiving. Well, here's a chance for the media to give McCain what he's been asking for...and a chance for them to do their job.  

"We need to focus not on middle-east oil, but on mid-west innovation. ~ Senator Major John Boccieri(D-Alliance)

In July, John spoke about high gas prices and his energy solutions at a Canton gas station. You can watch video excerpts below:

More below the fold!

Frustrated GOP wingnuts have initiated, during the past week, a new strategy against Obama.

I suspect it originated with Limbaugh. They march in lockstep and every talk show host and talking head is now parroting the same description of our candidate.They no longer refer to him as Obama or Barack or the Dem. candidate.He is now just "The One" to these creeps and their kool aid lemmings.

But just because these goons are completely transparent to us, don't for a second underestimate the danger of this new wrinkle.It is a cleverly planned addition to their constant daily effort to define Barack Obama to Americans before he can solidly define himself.                

Hmmm....Is German Chancellor Angela Merkel getting captivated by our candidate even though she has not yet met him? Or is she compensating for the embarrassing flap over Sen. Obama's previous request to speak at the Brandenburg Gate?

Running on the merits of George W. Bush is not the sort of thing that occurs to most politicians in the year 2008. Perhaps Mr. McCain is reading different polls than the rest of us, but on this he really is a maverick!

Republican John McCain on Wednesday credited the recent $10-a-barrel drop in the price of oil to President Bush's lifting of a presidential ban on offshore drilling, an action he has been advocating in his presidential campaign...  "The price of oil dropped $10 a barrel," said McCain, who argued that the psychology of lifting the ban has affected world markets.

After months of trying to shame Obama into visiting Iraq, Obama is now on perhaps the most successful campaign week the entire campaign, and his trip was the hot media ticket. By contrast, the McCain press corps apparently numbers in the 20s.

Barack Obama has a newly chartered jumbo jet, loaded to the gills with reporters and network anchors accompanying him to the Middle East and Europe, while McCain's traveling press corps numbers only about 25, including camera crews. While CBS News anchor Katie Couric and ABC News anchor Charles Gibson are traveling with Obama, neither CBS News nor ABC News sent even a correspondent to cover McCain. (NBC News is covering both). And this is hardly unique to this week. Only the Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal among big newspapers are consistently covering McCain. NEWSWEEK almost always has a reporter on the plane, but Time and U.S. News do not.

Hmmm, who is missing from that list? It couldn't be Fox News, since we're told that Obama has been "reaching out" to them to appeal to "the middle" people pretend watch the RNC's official propaganda mouthpiece. Not that they didn't try to get a ticket on the hottest political act of the summer. Crooks and Liars has the admission via Stephen Colbert. (Really.)

video of FOX & Friends]
DOOCY: Why are you not on Barack Obama’s airplane heading to the Middle East right now?
WALLACE: Well, I called the Obama campaign several weeks ago and said that I’d like to go and my invitation has apparently been lost in the mail.
[end video]

Well played, Obama campaign.

Meanwhile, McCain left another rambling message about how none of his family will visit. No wonder Wallace is steering clear.

When we launched this campaign, no one believed it would be easy. We knew that, this time, our opponent could not take this race for granted. We knew that he would attempt to distract the voters of this district from his ten-year record of failed leadership.

It's clear now that Lee Terry is frightened, and his campaign will say and do anything in order to win this race. He hired an east-coast political operative who is a master of dirty campaigning. He recruited our former primary opponent to head up a "truth squad" that is hardly interested in the truth. He has been spreading lies and disinformation on websites and blogs, all in an attempt to tear his opponent down so that he won't have to answer for his own record.

Believe it or not, the McCain Campaign, as reported by MSNBC, has just released a statement claiming that John McCain's timeline on the Iraq Surge vs the Sunni Awakening is the correct one.

"McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said late Tuesday, ‘Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge ... but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy, because to credit them would be to disparage the judgment of Barack Obama and praise the leadership of John McCain.’"

Are you kidding me?  It doesn't minimize our troops, McCain is minimizing the efforts and success of the Iraqis, because if they're remain "incompetent" he can have his glorious 100 Year Occupation. Problem is, they aren't incompetent and the everyone has started to realize that would be Emperor McCain isn't wearing a stitch.

h/t Syb :)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

 So, this is my first diary, and I'll try to keep it brief, I guess. I got to thinking this morning about the conversations I've been having lately with some of the people in my orbit, and I wonder if others are having the same experience. I went to a baseball game the other night with a friend, a die-hard Republican who is very active in local politics and a generally knowledgeable guy. It was a 2 hour car ride, and we got to discussing politics by way of talking about a mutual friend who is running as a GOP State House candidate we had both done some work for (hey, I do freelance web design, you take what you can get.) The thing that surprised me as we got around to the Presidential race was his clear resignation to the fact that John McCain is doomed in this campaign, as are many Republican members of Congress. It's an interesting theme that I've heard repeated by many of my Republican friends.
 While this would seem to be a good thing on it's surface, I wonder why it's not being used to Democratic advantage.

I prepared  this spreadsheet using the data from pollster.com's OH GE polls page.

Here's a chart of Obama's leads (Obama minus McCain for each poll, +ve or -ve) generated by the spreadsheet which compares Rasmussen Reports (RR)'s numbers with trends from all other pollsters:

The blue curve (a so-called "polyline") is the 5-poll moving average (i.e. it's the average of the 5 most recent polls) for non-Rasmussen polls. The red polyline shows RR's trends (the big red dots are RR's poll results) while the green polyline shows those for Non-Rasmussen pollsters. The light pink line is the 3-poll moving average.

My favorite answer to any of the press' questions of Obama in the past few days is, (and I'm paraphrasing) "My job is to look past Iraq.  Of course, General Patreus will tell me what he thinks of conditions on the ground, his need for more or fewer resources, etc.  That's his job.  He's the Commander in Iraq.  But my job is to take his opinions into account and look at our strategy in the region, and look beyond Iraq."  

What a tremendous, smart statement.

If only McBush would take their blinders off and start looking at the whole of the Middle East and a comprehensive foreign policy...  Of course, they're not going to do that.  They want permanent US bases in Iraq and they want to tinker with the oil revenue at all costs because since they ousted Hussein and had elections, our presense there has never been about security and surges.  It's been about oil revenue and control.  

The headline: "Obama tour staged for political pop"

Or, "EXTREE, EXTREE, OBAMA RUNNING FOR PREZ!"

JERUSALEM — Barack Obama doesn’t travel light.

Halfway around the world, the Obama campaign machine appears as sprawling and seamless as it is on its home turf. As the presumptive Democratic nominee tours five countries in five days, he brings an entourage that would make a pop star envious.

From the saturated media coverage to the one-on-one meetings with heads of state, the trip already had a White House feel. The scope of the traveling staff simply adds to an aura of a president-in-waiting. On Tuesday, aides attempted to invoke White House rules and traditions by requiring reporters to withhold the names of senior advisers who brief the press. But they were reminded twice by reporters that they were not in the White House and that Obama was not the president.

FINALLY – IT’S ALL OUT IN THE OPEN  !!!  
We can all relax – the pressure’s finally off.  Thank God.

JUST THIS LAST WEEK, all those fears that Americans have been burdened with have been calmed, with the solutions provided.  What a relief!  I for one am totally relieved, and thankful that the government spokesmen have laid it all out.  God, what took them so long ?

I almost burst into a fit of rage when I was greeted with this headline on the front page of CNN.com "PUMA's Stalking Obama." I went on to read an article which inflates the importance of a fringe group. I expect to see a Column on the Constitution party next week Mark.

Mark is kind enough to included some wonderful quotes from the head of PUMA, Will Bower. Like this one,

"I have never voted for anything but a Democrat, and I feel that there has been an internal coup, and they are putting forward a candidate that does not represent the will of the Democratic Party," Bower said.

When I was in boot camp, we would have classes—weapon’s training, etc.—in the second floor bay where we were housed.  Strategically based on the wall at the front of the bay were the seven army values, amongst these 'honor', 'integrity' and 'personal courage'.  I’m sure the thought was that the more you soaked in the words, the more they moved to the forefront of your mind and, subsequently, your life.  The idea being that, when making choices in how to conduct yourself, to use the values as a guiding force.

It wasn’t enough to simply be a soldier in accordance with those values.  They were core values with which to live your life.

John McCain lacks almost all sense of honor, integrity & personal courage.

In this video (in Spanish) O2B candidate Joe Garcia essentially accuses the right-wing Cuban-American Frank Calzon of the Center for Free Cuba of essentially pilfering tax-payer funds. Later in the show, Calzon throws a hissy fit and storms out (and you don't need to know Spanish to be entertained by this clip):

A subsequent federal audit found $500,000 missing from Calzon's operation, lost into the pocket of the corrupt South Florida Cuban-American mafia. Just like Garcia had charged. Now, after finding more such discrepancies, Congress has frozen all funding for these corrupt groups.

Congress has put the U.S. Agency for International Development's $45 million Cuba program's 2008 funding on hold, following a series of troubling audits and cases of massive fraud, The Miami Herald has learned.

In a quest to get the funding hold lifted, U.S. AID on Friday ordered a bottoms-up review of all its Cuba democracy programs and suspended a Miami anti-Castro exile group that spent at least $11,000 of federal grant money on personal items.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., ordered a hold on the U.S. AID Cuba program funding last month, in part in response to a $500,000 embezzlement at the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington disclosed earlier this year, federal officials said.

In a memo sent Friday to various members of Congress, Stephen Driesler, AID's deputy assistant administrator for legislative and public affairs, said the agency recently implemented stricter financial reviews. That new review turned up irregularities at the Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia (Group in Support of Democracy), a Miami group criticized in the past for using federal funds to send Nintendo games to Cuba [...]

A report by the Cuban-American National Foundation released in May showed that less than 17 percent of $65 million in federal Cuba aid funds spent during the past 10 years went to ''direct, on-island assistance.'' The bulk of the money, the report said, went to academic studies and expenses of exile organizations, mostly in Miami and Washington.

The report echoed findings by The Miami Herald in 2006 and a congressional Government Accountability Office audit that found lax oversight of the programs and came as the Bush administration prepares to dole out a record $45.7 million in Cuba democracy grants.

This is essentially a big chunk of the payoff the corrupt Cuban exile community gets for having its three South Florida Cuban American representatives (and Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, too). $45.7 million doled out in patronage fashion to all the co-conspirators, and that's not even including the millions wasted on Radio Marti in similar fashion. Democracy in Cuba? Pshaw! There are fancy dinners to be bought! The high life to be lived.

As you can see in the videos above (even if you don't speak Spanish) is that Joe Garcia has been fighting for accountability for those who receive US tax dollars, and isn't one to let ideology override the interests of the taxpayers.

On the web:
Joe Garcia for Congress
Orange to Blue ActBlue Page

Race tracker wiki: FL-21 FL-18 FL-25

Sorry for the short blast, but the Picayune just posted a piece updating their efforts to find out just what exactly John McCain is doing in New Orleans today.

Setting aside rumors (mine, mostly) that Old Grand Dad will actually be announcing Gov. Bobby Jindal as his running mate, the McCain campaign has been running in circles trying to figure out some meaningful appearance to counteract the images of Barack Obama ruling the world stage.