"In his eyes"

The president, in his lounge act, sings homage to his friend, John.

Al Qaeda votes

It comes as no surprise, but it appears that al Qaeda is reveling in our economic misfortunes and hoping for the "son of Bush," John McCain to win on November 4.

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market's downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America's economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," President Bush.

Remember folks, this ain't over 'til it's over.

Terrorists are IN the teevee?

A vast conspiracy.

Business leaders oppose McCain's health care plan

What the McCain campaign would rather you not think about.

Officials with eight business trade groups contacted by The New York Times predicted the McCain plan would raise costs and force some employers to stop providing health benefits.

A recent survey of 187 corporate executives by the American Benefits Council and Miller & Chevalier, a consulting firm, found that three-fourths felt the repeal of the tax exclusion would have a “strong negative impact” on their workers. Only 4 percent said they would provide additional pay to fill any gaps.

John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executive officers, said his group instead supported extending the tax exclusion to those who bought coverage on their own.

“One of the things we don’t want to do,” Mr. Castellani said, “is jeopardize 170 million Americans who do get insurance through their employers.”

A number of business officials are worried that Mr. McCain’s tax credits would lure young and healthy workers into the individual market to take advantage of cheaper, less-generous policies. That, they say, would leave employers to cover an older and sicker pool of workers, forcing up premiums.

Workers who found that they had less buying power with the tax credits than with the tax exclusion could be expected to pressure employers to raise salaries or benefit subsidies, the business officials said.

“There are huge questions about the $5,000 per family being an insufficient amount in terms of being able to purchase the same coverage,” said Mr. Josten with the Chamber of Commerce.

Helen B. Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, a coalition of 300 companies, agreed that many workers would face a net loss. “The last thing you want to do to the average working person, especially when you’re bailing out big financial companies, is take something they hold near and dear partially away,” Ms. Darling said.

Economists forecast that the problem would worsen over time because Mr. McCain, according to advisers, would index his tax credits to overall inflation. Health insurance premiums have grown four times faster than inflation since 1999.

It's comforting to know that in a time when IRAs and 401ks are plunging in value, John McCain will take away your employee-sponsored health care. If you're lucky enough to have such a thing. And if you don't, he'll give you an inflation-indexed tax credit and leave you to the ravages of the open, and soon to be unregulated, market.

But remember. John McCain may never have been an astronaut, but he understands the challenges of space.

And he was a POW.

And Obama is black.

With a Bullet

The LA Times has a piece on Steve Schmidt, the strategerizor of the McCain campaign. He's a primary reason I wish so fervently for an Obama victory in November. He bet it all on negativity and winning the day's news cycle. In doing so he squandered McCain's reserve of credibility and character. Has it been worth it to McCain? If he wins, then I guess so, but his image is toxic, his judgement is questioned, and his past -- which he has so carefully polished all these years -- is starting to get examined, which is unlikely to be a good thing for McCain.

For much of the summer the blogosphere was frustrated that while McCain launched attack after attack on Obama's readiness and character, Obama stayed largely above the fray, focusing relentlessly on communicating change and talking (sort of) policy. In other words, McCain talked about Obama while Obama talked about...the people he was talking to.

Now, it's October and McCain and Schmidt have decided that they should continue to talk about Obama. They have little choice. It's too late to begin telling a compelling myth about the life of John McCain. People already had a sense of McCain's life and character, but the campaign he's waged has undermined that. So all they have left is more attacks on Obama. It may work, but I suspect that people have already had their fill of Wright and Ayers (and we have Senator Clinton's campaign to thank for that), and that those two Amurica haters aren't particularly relevant to people's daily lives.

The Keating Five, on the other hand, has the virtue of being really relevant to people's lives and their current anxieties. Obama kept his powder dry and now that people have been reassured that he has the right temprement to be president (Krauthammer's words, of all people), it's now time to use it.

Executive pay

I'm really sick of the McCain campaign.

Meanwhile, it's now McCain's campaign manager and his transition adviser who have been found to be on the retainer of the institutions McCain blames for the financial crisis. That is to say, the most powerful individual in McCain's campaign and the most powerful adviser in the planning of his presidency have been vacuuming in money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Try to square that with McCain's explanation of the crisis: "There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." That's the sort of "educated guess" you can only get from the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who helped persuade Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!

Corrupt, deceitful, dishonorable. And then there's their friends.

The advertisements running here against Mr. Obama come from a group called Freedom’s Defense Fund, a political action committee based in Washington that was formed four years ago and raises money from conservatives around the country. The advertisements have stood out because of the group’s connections — including to its paid consultant, Jerome S. Corsi, the author of the highly negative, largely discredited political biography of Mr. Obama, “Obama Nation” — and what local critics say are their racial overtones.

“That’s all they are — race oriented,” said Ed Bruley, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Macomb. “I think some people will be affected by it, others will see it for what it is.”

It is a view shared by Democratic leaders, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who, in a recent interview with MSNBC, said of the advertising campaign, “The fact that it is being run in a predominantly white suburb tells you that there is an explicit effort to try to divide people by race.”

Todd Zirkle, the executive director of Freedom’s Defense Fund, said race had “zero” to do with the spots. “That’s the standard retort when you want to say ‘Don’t listen to these people,’ ” Mr. Zirkle said.

He said the group’s intention was to show Mr. Obama’s affiliations — although Mr. Obama and Mr. Kilpatrick were never known to be close.

He said coming spots would highlight Mr. Obama’s ties to two white men, the developer Antoin Rezko, a former financial backer of Mr. Obama’s who has been convicted of fraud, and to the Weather Underground founder William Ayers, with whom Mr. Obama worked on an education commission in Illinois and whose past Mr. Obama has repudiated.

Mr. Zirkle said a fifth spot would highlight Mr. Obama’s supposed support for the Kenyan prime minister, the opposition leader Raila Odinga. Mr. Zirkle did not share that script, but Mr. Corsi’s book asserts, without substantiation, that Mr. Obama has been a close supporter of the African leader. Mr. Obama remained neutral in the Kenyan elections.

Next they'll say Obama is for infanticide. Oh, wait...

Shark-jumping

Getting ridiculous.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Wow. Glad I got out of the country before McCain insisted Spain is a Latin American country.

Once again, it isn't so much McCain's response to the question, but 1.) insisting on answering a question he didn't really understand, and 2.) his advisers' doubling down on the gaffe, are what make you question whether the guy should continue to be in the Senate, let alone in the White House.

Character building

As Fred Thompson was drawling a gruesome sketch of McCain's life as a...wait for it...POW, Madame Cura turned to me and asked, "Is that torture?" And I replied, "Not when we do it."

The Arab American connection

This just gets more and more intriguing.

Campaign finance records show Mr. McCain collected a little more than $50,000 in March from members of a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.

Amid a sea of contributions to the McCain campaign, the Abdullahs stand out. The checks come not from the usual exclusive coastal addresses, but from relatively hardscrabble inland towns like Downey and Colton. The donations are also startling because of their size: several donors initially wrote checks of $9,200, exceeding the $2,300 limit for an individual gift.

Making matters murkier, some couples in the family who contributed more than $9,000 to Mr. McCain also gave the maximum in December to either Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or Rudolph W. Giuliani, or both, totaling in the case of at least one family more than $18,000.

On Wednesday, an article in The Washington Post said the donations were collected by Harry Sargeant III, a Florida businessman who has also raised money for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani.

It appears, however, that Mr. Sargeant, the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the part-owner of a major oil trading firm, International Oil Trading Company, did not actually solicit the donations from the Abdullahs and their friends.

That task fell to a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba’a. Mr. Sargeant said in an interview that he has known Mr. Abu Naba’a for more than a decade and has worked with him on commercial ventures, including a contract with the Pentagon to supply fuel to the military in Iraq.

[...]

But when Mr. McCain claimed the mantle of presumed Republican nominee in March, Mr. Abdullah decided to support him.

“This is the horse I’m betting on for the future,” Mr. Abdullah said.

He told his friends and relatives that the contributions were tax-deductible, something he later seemed surprised to learn from a reporter was not true. Many in his circle appear to have little affection for Mr. McCain but said they gave mostly as a favor to Mr. Abdullah.

Abdullah Makhlouf, the owner of a discount stereo store who is one of Mr. Abdullah’s closest friends, and his wife contributed $9,200.

“He’s like a worse copy than Bush,” Mr. Makhlouf said of Mr. McCain.

When a reporter initially contacted Mr. Makhlouf, he denied giving to the McCain campaign.

After eventually admitting to the donation, Mr. Makhlouf added, “I’m still not going to vote for him.”

But wait, there's more.

Convergence of baseball and idiocy

John McCain joins Rudy and Judith today in Giuliani's Yankee Stadium bribe box.

Lots of free publicity, no doubt, as I'm sure ESPN will play shots of them over and over on "Baseball Tonight."

That's gonna leave a mark

Wait, did McCain throw his old friend "under the bus?"

It was ok that Gramm was tied directly to the subprime disaster, but now we hear the outrage.

Fact-totums

The only thing we have to fear is facts themselves.

Back in the USSR

Does John McCain want to reopen the Cold War with Russia out of personal conviction or because he's advised by an aide who "once" worked for former Soviet states?

As president, McCain says he would back up his tough talk with equally aggressive policies. He wants to kick Russia out of the Group of 8, the organization of the world's leading industrial powers. McCain has also long been a proponent of quickly expanding NATO to include former Soviet allies like Georgia. Russia bristles at the notion of the Western military alliance encroaching on her border. "Rather than tolerate Russia's nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks," McCain said in a March speech, "Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible."

This kind of talk -- in particular the call to oust Russia from the G-8 -- has given pause to seasoned experts on that part of the world, who tend to emphasize engagement with Russia. McCain's harsh rhetoric and tough proposals led Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria to write an April column titled "McCain's Radical Foreign Policy." If McCain were to pursue his Russia agenda as president, Zakaria wrote, it would be interpreted by much of the world as an "attempt by Washington to begin a new Cold War."

But the sound of sabers rattling is music to the ears of Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's senior foreign policy and national security advisor. A long-term confidant of the candidate, Scheunemann also supports a very tough stance toward Russia. Unlike McCain, until very recently he was paid to support that stance. McCain, already under fire for the role of lobbyists in his campaign, is taking his foreign policy advice from someone who was a paid lobbyist for former Soviet Bloc countries that are wary of Russia, and seems to advocate those policies the countries and their former lobbyist want. Notably, McCain supports a quick expansion of NATO, and Scheunemann has already helped two former Soviet satellites gain admission to NATO and has worked on behalf of two others.

Until early this year, Scheunemann was simultaneously working for the McCain campaign and as a lobbyist for a shifting menu of Eastern European and former Soviet Bloc countries with NATO aspirations. Some, including Georgia, have chilly relations with Russia. At various times from 2001 through early this year, Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia paid Scheunemann and his partner, Mike Mitchell, more than $2 million. Much of Scheunemann's work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann's clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him.

And the Salon article goes on to note the confusion McCain's feints are creating within the foreign policy wonk community, as his positions on dealing with Russia seem to be "evolving."

While McCain's plan to kick Russia out of the G-8 is widely unpopular, Democrats also support expanding NATO -- but more gradually and with Russia's concerns carefully taken into account. At a meeting at the Council of Foreign Relations on March 7 that included Scheunemann, the Democratic candidates' national security advisors said McCain was too confrontational with Russia.

"Where I get a little bit concerned, Randy, is when you sound like you're issuing ultimatums in a variety of fronts without finding ways to be able to talk and discuss and work through our issues as well," said Mara Rudman, a Clinton advisor.

Scheunemann took a hard line. "No outside country has a veto on [NATO] membership," he said. "With Russia, I don't think Senator McCain's position is secret to a lot of folks," he added. "He often likes to say when he looks into Putin's eyes, all he sees is a K, a G, and a B."

Simons, now a visiting scholar at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, was one of a number of experts interviewed by Salon who believe McCain's hawkish Russia policy is counterproductive. "It is not the right way to deal with this part of the world," Simons said. He described McCain's strategy as "punish and challenge, hit them in the nose, stick them in the eye."

Given the concern about McCain and his advisor's aggressive attitude toward Russia, a recent speech the candidate delivered about nuclear nonproliferation left many Russian experts scratching their heads. In a May 27 address in Denver, McCain struck a strangely conciliatory note, laying out "a vision not of the United States acting alone, but building and participating in a community of nations all drawn together in this vital common purpose," he said. "While we have serious differences, with the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies." McCain then announced that he would seek a new arms control agreement with Russia.

Russian experts, who have eyed McCain's confrontational tone with some skepticism, were obviously confused. Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, said the speech left him thinking that McCain's policy toward Russia is "schizophrenic."

"It is just contradictory," explained Kupchan. "If you really want a breakthrough arms control deal with the Russians, it is probably not a good idea to kick him out of the G-8."

Dig a little into any area where McCain's past and current statements are at odds and I think you'll find a view into the thinking of a man who doesn't really think about policy all that much. Which is what we need, dontcha think: a shallow, incurious man advised by neoconservative lobbyists.

So many questions

Does Bush accept this role? Does it annoy him? Or is he too stupid (or arrogant) to care?

Don't answer.

Meanwhile, why hasn't Phil Gramm been indicted?

Meanwhile, will someone ask Joe Lieberman if God was drunk when he ordered up the holocaust?

Friends

Yesterday and today, Hilzoy has been reviewing the career of Charlie Black, McCain's chief strategist and PR flack to some of the most hateful, vile dictators and strong men of the last half of the twentieth century.

McCain wants to be judged by the company he keeps.

But we shouldn't forget his military strategy, which included not only the massive and indiscriminate use of landmines, but also this:

"Savimbi's military strategy (...) was to make Angola ungovernable. His forces systematically targeted civilians and cut the economic links between city and countryside. He also eliminated internal rivals he regarded as too open to peace."

And:

"In order to instill terror in the population and to undermine confidence in the government, Savimbi ordered that food supplies be targeted, millions of land mines be laid in peasants’ fields, and transport lines be cut. As part of this destabilization effort, UNITA frequently attacked health clinics and schools, specifically terrorizing and killing medical workers and teachers. The UN estimated that Angola lost $30 billion in the war from 1980 to 1988, which was six times the country’s 1988 GDP. According to UNICEF, approximately 330,000 children died as direct and indirect results of the fighting during that period alone. Human Rights Watch reports that because of UNITA’s indiscriminate use of landmines, there were over 15,000 amputees in Angola in 1988, ranking it alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia."

Current estimates put the number of unexploded landmines in Angola at around six million, and the number of people injured by landmines at 80,000.

Want to know what Charlie Black thought about this?

"Black, Manafort doesn't seem troubled by allegations that Savimbi tortured and murdered his rivals within UNITA or his resumption of the civil war. While Kelly declined to respond to questions regarding the substance of the firm's contract with Savimbi, in a 1990 interview Black defended him, saying, "Now when you're in a war, trying to manage a war, when the enemy ... is no more than a couple of hours away from you at any given time, you might not run your territory according to New Hampshire town meeting rules.""

***

Eventually, we cut our ties to Savimbi. When the apartheid government in South Africa fell, removing his other source of funding, he turned to blood diamonds to finance his endless war. Early on, he had claimed to be a democrat, and some conservatives believed him. In 1992, when he lost the election he claimed to have wanted all these years, he just started fighting again. The war went on for ten more years, until his death. When word got out that he had been killed,

"Residents of Angola's dilapidated capital, Luanda, greeted it with jubilation. People honked their horns as they drove through the rutted streets while others danced and fired shots in the air."

They were cheering for the end of twenty seven years of war: a war that would have been far less lethal without American support. That was what Charlie Black was lobbying for: the support Savimbi needed to utterly destroy his country. Thanks to Black's skill as a lobbyist, and his apparent lack of a conscience, Savimbi got it.

This is John McCain's chief political advisor. Think about it.

Better yet. Let's not think about that, and instead think about Obama's "ties" to Bill Ayers or his former pastor, two individuals not involved in his campaign in any way.