Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Turns out McCain's approach to foreign policy is rather more bellicose than anyone (other than a hard-core neo-con) imagined in their most horrible dreams.

• Phoenix New Times, Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know — and loathe. Keven Drum has reactions at John McCain and the Low Road
• Too long for TV, but “The High Road,” independent grassroots pro-Obama ad truth squadding McCain is pretty good:

• Another day, another gaffe, ThinkProgress, McCain Gets His Hamdan Facts Wrong, Falsely Claims He Was Found Guilty Of ‘Supplying Weapons’ In Afghanistan
• TalkLeft, McCain's Lobbyist Problem. It won't go away.
• Crooks & Liars, McCain’s Latest Lie: Obama is the ‘Big Oil’ Candidate
• Carpetbagger, McCain’s DHL problem may cost him Ohio
• Carpetbagger, A tale of two affairs
• John McCain has a problem telling the truth
• Reading Adam Nagourney & Jim Rutenberg's NYT article, Embracing a Free-Form Style, McCain Leads a Camp Divided, you can't help but conclude that this guy's management style is a disaster and he has a short attention span.
• Kos, John McCain & the Opening Ceremony at the Olympics suggests a certain tone-deafness
• Brooks Jackson, Newsweek, Fact Check: More Tax Deceptions — McCain misrepresents Obama's tax proposals again. And again, and again. “Summary
  McCain released three new ads with multiple false and misleading claims about Obama's tax proposals.”
• Crooks & Liars, FNS: Rick Davis Brags On McCain’s Maverick-ness; Facts Be Damned
• From Jesus' GeneralInvesting in McCain:
  
• Las Vegas Sun, McCain's attacks on rival fall flat with vets group
• DeLong, The McCain Campaign Makes Up Its Own Facts on Health Care
• TPM TV, Dazed and Confused:
  
  And then Crooks & Liars goes one two better at, John McCain’s Greatest Campaign Hits
• Carpetbagger, Russia, Georgia, and McCain’s reckless belligerence; Cosmic Iguana, McCAIN – READY FOR WAR … WITH RUSSIA?
• Slightly unfair but likely effective ad being run in Ohio called Job Killing John
  
  Unfair because no one could keep them all in America, so for once McCain is being honest here.
• Taegan Goddard, Political Insider, Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis? — and from Wikipedia???
• TPM says, if McCain gets elected, You're In Danger (Why? Because as Kos writer smintheus says, McCain on Georgia: Even Cheney isn't bellicose enough
• Obama goes negative on TV (in a 'me too' fashion?) with “Embrace”:

• DNC Ad, Exxon John
  
  Pretty good parody of the infamous John Cornyn commercial (which also got this good response from Rick Noriega).
• Kos, Vote Boredom. Vote Apathy. Vote McCain
• Greg Sargent, TPMEC, McCain Supports Tax Breaks For Oil Industry — But Not For Wind Power
• The Hill, McCain ignoring calls to cancel controversial fundraiser
• Kos, The McCain Myth: Abortion Rights
• Did Scheunemann Engineer McCain's 2005 Nobel Prize Nomination Of Georgian President For Financial Gain?
• OpenLeft, McCain Prepares to Hand the Internet Over to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T
• Crooks & Liars, The Olympic Ad Wars: Obama vs. McCain
• Mark Adams, The American Street, Uhm, So What Century Is McCain Living In?
• NYT, In Split Role, McCain Adviser Is Sometimes a Lobbyist. And who, dare I ask, could possibly object to that?
• On the 73rd anniversary of the Social Security program, FDR's grandson, James Roosevelt Jr., attacks McCain for wanting to privatize Social Security:

• ThinkProgress, U.S. Troops Deployed Abroad Reject McCain's Iraq Plans, Donate 6:1 To Obama
• Joe Klein, at TIME's Swampland blog, is so disappointed in McCain that he seems to be bidding for membership in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill,
  

  But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the “putting America first” front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action…you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary—and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency—what sort of country—that will produce.

• AFL-CIO brands McCain as a plutocrat willing to trash Social Security.
  
• Is this (“Approval Ratings: The Public v. McCain”) the best anti-McCain ad ever? It could be. It's a grass-roots production by cartwrightdale.

• Ellroon, The American Street, Is that why Mikheil Saakashvili made a direct appeal to John McCain?