MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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A good Obama comebacker

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“Pocket” TV Ad

Obama unveils energy plan, new attacks on McCain

(CNN) — Barack Obama’s campaign released a television ad Monday that calls for a windfall profits tax and accuses John McCain of being in the pocket of big oil.

The ad charges that major oil companies have donated $2 million to McCain’s campaign and says that “after one president in the pocket of big oil, we can’t afford another.”

McCain surrogate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Monday blasted the ad as being “dishonest.”

“That’s really sad,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.” “I didn’t know that Obama had stooped to dishonesty.”

Romney said it was dishonest because corporations cannot give contributions to candidates and because employees of oil companies have also donated to Obama.

The Washington Post reported that McCain received $1.1 million from oil and gas industry executives and employees in June — three-quarters of which came after he called for lifting the ban on offshore drilling on June 16.

Obama’s ad sources the Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics, which showed that Obama has received about $345,000 from the oil and gas industry this year.

Under Obama’s proposal for a windfall profits tax, the government would tax some of the profits from big oil corporations and use it to provide a $1,000 rebate to people struggling with high energy costs.

Obama’s ad comes as he kicks of “Energy Week” — with stops planned in Ohio and Indiana where gas prices and rising heat bills will be on the agenda.

Obama travels to battleground Michigan on Monday to unveil details on his energy policy.

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August 4, 2008
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A question that needs to be asked

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The former New York City Public Advocate Mark Green (and a man who has run every office under sun in New York State) asks a pertinent question:

What about McCain’s character? By MARK GREEN, Monday, August 4th 2008

Pundits on the the talk shows say that the ’08 election is all about Barack Obama: Can he pass the commander in chief test and avoid gaffes and reassure white voters? But another question is whether John McCain can pass the character test.

So far, he’s failing.

What? A bona fide war hero and POW survivor is being questioned about character?

Well, yes. It’s time that McCain and his acolytes stopped assuming that his extraordinary military service nearly 40 years ago gives him immunity to questions about being President today in a different century.

First, there is the unpleasant fact that in the past week McCain has sounded more like Joseph McCarthy in his patriotism-baiting of Obama. When he repeatedly says that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign,” he’s imputing a political motive that he can’t know and that is contradicted by the available evidence.

Continue . . .

August 4, 2008
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Gergen exposes McCain's codes

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Gergen Calls Out Racial “Signals” of McCain Ads

From HuffPo:

On Sunday, longtime Washington hand David Gergen took umbrage with John McCain’s recent attack ads, charging that the Senator was using coded messaging to paint Barack Obama as “outside the mainstream” and “uppity.”

“There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, ‘he’s not one of us,'” said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. “I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it’s the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, ‘The One,’ that’s code for, ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas,’ we get what that’s about.”

August 3, 2008
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Lowest Common, er, Shut-up!

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John McCain’s Respectful Campaign

Josh Marshall and his talkingpointsmemo.com is absolutely the gold standard of political blogging, the very best. His team has been mixing in superb video reports, like the one above, which shows John McCain to be the craven, disreputable politician that he is.

August 3, 2008
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McCain’s Unscrupulous Start in Politics

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From the beginning, John McCain traded heavily on his “heroism” in Vietnam to make his way as a politician. Now, we’re are being asked to not only look past the defects of this deeply flawed and corrupt man, but actually elect him president because of his past.

If only he were running against a Republican. What use would they make of that past?

McCain Used POW Past Heavily In First Election by JACQUES BILLEAUD,

PHOENIX — A newcomer to Arizona, John McCain used his wife’s wealth, ties to powerful Washington figures and, most of all, the emotional power of his five years in a Vietnamese prison to launch his political career 25 years ago.

Well-known today, McCain’s harrowing experience during the Vietnam War was new to voters in his 1982 race for an open congressional seat. McCain saturated local TV with an ad focused on his military record that showed him getting off a plane on crutches shortly after his release as a POW.

“It showed he was a hero. It would bring tears to your eyes,” said rival candidate Ray Russell, a veterinarian who finished second in the Republican primary that year.

In his 2002 book “Worth the Fighting For,” McCain himself acknowledged his strategy: “Thanks to my prisoner of war experience, I had, as they say in politics, a good first story to sell.”

The 1982 race to replace retiring Rep. John Rhodes launched McCain’s political career. It cemented his reputation as a tireless campaigner and set the stage for things that would come back to haunt him, including his troubled relations with GOP conservatives and his ties to Charles Keating, a savings and loan financier later convicted of securities fraud.

Although he had moved to Arizona less than a year before announcing his candidacy, McCain overpowered Russell and two GOP state lawmakers in the primary and then trounced his Democratic opponent in what was then the state’s most Republican congressional district. His 6-point edge in the four-way primary was the smallest victory margin of his career in Congress.

August 3, 2008
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Bill Clinton’s Shameful Demise

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Unfortunately, all the good Bill Clinton did as president, the goodwill he won with African Americans and the great relationships he forged over the course of his political, he’s not intent on frittering away in bitterness. He’s affronted by Sen. Barack Obama’s political ascent and he’s not going to let it go, promising now to speak his mind next year.

Next year?

Give it a rest, Mr. Clinton. The nation has more pressing matter to attend to than the swamp in your mind.

Clinton Embraces Return to Ambassador Role: After the Bitter Primaries, He Calls Charity ‘My Life’ By Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, August 3, 2008; A01

KIGALI, Rwanda, Aug. 2 — There will be no Clinton restoration — not this year, at least. But the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton has begun.

The former president in many ways ended the Democratic primary campaign more isolated than his wife, with his own friends and allies unhappy with his flashes of anger and ill-chosen words and blaming him in part for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat. With a negligible relationship with Sen. Barack Obama — he has spoken to him just once since the primaries — Clinton has been shut out of the Obama campaign almost entirely and does not know even basic things, such as the role he will play at the Democratic convention.

It is uncharted territory for the most successful Democratic politician of his generation, and part of the reason he was in Kigali on Saturday, the latest stop in a grueling journey across Africa to visit some of the places where his charitable foundation has been active — and in the process re-establish his role as a global elder statesman. At the same time, Clinton began, slowly, to discuss the bruising Democratic primary season that ended two months earlier.

In his first extended interview since his wife exited the campaign in defeat, Clinton said he was glad to be back doing international foundation work. “This is my life now, and I was eager to get back to it, and I couldn’t be happier,” Clinton said in a hotel suite, with three aides looking on.

In a session that lasted more than 45 minutes, Clinton described his role in the 2008 campaign as “a privilege, an honor,” and said, “I loved it,” but he declined to discuss any of his own possible mistakes, describing them as a distraction. “Next year, you and I and everybody else will be freer and have more space to say what we believe to be the truth” about the primaries, he said.

Clinton volunteered very little praise of Obama, beyond describing him as “smart” and “a good politician” when asked about him toward the end of the interview. He did, however, muse at length about the role that race could play in the general election — the issue that some of his former black allies angrily accused him of introducing in the Democratic primaries — as a factor, if not a decisive one.

August 3, 2008
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‘Distortion, Innuendo, and Outright Slander’

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That’s how New York Magazine describes the latest phase of John McCain’s campaign against Sen. Barack Obama for the presidency. McCain’s campaign has devolved into a childish, name-calling, wallow in the mud series of taunts.

Some in the media will now say that this is not the John McCain they know, that he is doing something different than they expected of him. But this is the true and only McCain. He is a craven, petty, volatile manchild unsuited for the office of the presidency. The press was just too busy currying favor with him to notice.

If the press is going to be sporadic in their duty of holding the candidates accountable for their campaigns, where do you go to get the truth?

August 3, 2008
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A Modest Proposal on Offshore Drilling for Oil

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Obama Shifts, Says He May Back Offshore Drilling by MIKE GLOVER, , August 1, 2008
(AP Photo/Mike Carlson: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. answers an audience member’s question, Friday, Aug. 1, 2008, during a town hall meeting in St. Petersburg, Fla.)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Friday he would be willing to support limited additional offshore oil drilling if that’s what it takes to enact a comprehensive policy to foster fuel-efficient autos and develop alternate energy sources.

Shifting from his previous opposition to expanded offshore drilling, the Illinois senator told a Florida newspaper he could get behind a compromise with Republicans and oil companies to prevent gridlock over energy.

Republican rival John McCain, who earlier dropped his opposition to offshore drilling, has been criticizing Obama on the stump and in broadcast ads for clinging to his opposition as gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon. Polls indicate these attacks have helped McCain gain ground on Obama.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage _ I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

I imagine everyone who read the above news dispatch was as disappointed as I was to hear Sen. Obama pander this way. I thought Obama, of all people could be on the better side of angels on this issue and point out that any oil that we get from drilling offshore, like in ANWR:

1). is likely to be negligible;

2). will not come online to help us out of the current energy crisis;

3). there’s no guarantee that Exxon and the other cartels would sell anything that is found there to American consumers;

4). if oil is found, it’s just more revenue for the oil cartels that are now funding John McCain’s campaign of personal destruction against Obama;

There are more sensible arguments that could be made against the Republican trope of drilling offshore in the U.S. as answer to challenges to our sources of energy. Obama, I thought, would be the person to make the argument. Unfortunately, since Sen. Obama has now let this pander genie out of its bottle, we should make the best of it.

Before I lay out my modest proposal, I should say that I don’t know anything about oil, I don’t begin to understand peak oil, and that my proposal has been thoroughly panned by everyone I have told it to. And let me also add that I realize that there is no consensus on any remedy to skyrocketing gas prices.

That said, here is my modest proposal:

If drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR ) we must, then all the oil we get from such exploration must be added to our Strategic Petroleum Reserve (more than 700 million barrels of crude oil that are stored in a series of caverns along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico) and kept for the nation’s emergency oil needs. Created after the 1973-74 oil embargo as a way to counter the impact a natural disaster, terrorist attack or massive embargo might have on this country’s economy, the national stockpile of oil was tapped in 1991, 2000 and 2005.

Here is how I propose to do it:

Form a national consortium to be funded by all the oil cartels. They will provide the personnel, resources, research and technology to explore and exploit this endeavor. The best part about this is that they will do it for free without any of the proceeds going to them. Their reward for doing this is to not be known as the rapacious scumbags that they are.

Such a plan will meet tremendous opposition from everywhere, especially the oil lobby. It will take tremendous courage for a politician to propose and for Congress to enact such a plan. So, why not set a up a commission to set up precisely how to implement such a plan. The only condition is that all the oil must go to the national reserve and that the cost for funding this endeavor come from the combined profits of all the oil cartels.

There, I’ve said it, up to you to debate the merits of my proposal.

August 2, 2008
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Who’s the Dark Horse?

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Michael Allen asked me whether I can think of any potential running-mates for Obama who: (1) hails from the West; (2) fits the Jim Webb profile; and (3) doesn’t offend any traditional Democratic constituencies.

That’s easy: Chet Edwards.

Edwards is Nancy Pelosi’s choice for vice-president. He’s a nine-term centrist congressman from Waco, Texas. He used to represent Fort Hood and is well respected by military leaders and veterans’ groups.

The Dallas Morning News has published an editorial supporting an Obama-Edwards ticket, and here are five reasons why Edwards should be Obama’s VP pick.

You can find plenty of Chet Edwards on YouTube.

I think that he’d be an excellent choice.

I also think that Obama has several terrific options. Mike’s question is premised on a belief that Kaine or Sebelius would be bad choices because either one would offend Hillary supporters — Kaine because he’s supposedly pro-life and Sebelius because she’s a woman who’s not Hillary. I don’t agree. All of the top-tier candidates have pluses and minuses. None of them, with the possible exception of Al Gore, would have an enormous upside, and none of them would be a huge mistake.

Kaine is becoming the conventional-wisdom best choice. My guess is that he’ll get the nod if Obama is tied or ahead in the polls when he makes his choice. If, on the other hand, he’s behind in the polls at that point, he’ll try to make a bigger splash by choosing a woman (probably Sebelius) or a dark horse (like Chet Edwards).

Cross-posted from Facebook.

August 2, 2008
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What About the Smog?

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Wearing pajamas and flip-flops in public is a fashion faux pas according to an etiquette book released by Beijing officials.

For Beijing, Etiquette Isn’t a Game By LORETTA CHAO, August 1, 2008; Page A7

BEIJING — From pollution to terrorism, the list of worries Beijing officials have to contend with is substantial, with fashion now apparently one of them.

Beijing officials have distributed 4.3 million copies of an etiquette book outlining rules on good manners and foreign customs, including rules about what not to wear. The guide is part of an effort by various departments within China’s government to clean the city up in preparation for the at least 400,000 foreign visitors who are expected to descend on its capital for the Olympic Games, which start Aug. 8.

Among the no-no’s: more than three color shades in an outfit, white socks with black shoes, and pajamas and slippers in public.

“No matter what, never wear too many colors…especially during formal occasions,” the book said. “When you wear [formal shoes], be sure to wear socks in good condition…socks should be a dark color — never match black leather shoes with white socks.”

“Older women should choose shoes with heels that aren’t too high,” it said.

The book, published by the Beijing Municipal Government’s Capital Ethic Development Office, is part of the department’s effort to make Beijing more “civilized,” officials said.

Along the same lines, Beijing authorities announced earlier this year that they would step up efforts to fine people who spit in public as much as 50 yuan ($7.33).

CONTINUE . . .

August 2, 2008
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