Some of us use those images for context, you know. What next? Newt’s bespectacled face on an article quoting Chomsky? The Clenis image for an article about Newt?

Okay, I stand corrected — thanks. I think my original point could still stand; McCain looks silly criticizing forms of political speech that have become more popular as a direct results of legislation he championed.

I’m sorry, but McCain and his campaign staff have no credibility attacking the goals and practices of 527s since the candidate himself championed the legislation that led to their creation.

BigD on May 12, 2008 at 7:43 AM

Wrong. 527s existed for decades prior to McCain-Feingold. In the 1990s, groups like the Sierra Club learned that they could exploit the tax code (”527″ refers to a section of the code) to fund political actions and evade disclosure requirements and other inconveniences. Subsequent campaign finance reform established disclosure requirements. In recent years the groups became a more popular channel for big political money due to restrictions on so-called “soft money” contributions to political parties.

http://www.citizen.org/congress/campaign/issues/nonprofit/articles.cfm?ID=8931

Keep the air sickness bags handy.

Canceled Newsweek 30 year ago as it began to get on my nerves even then.

jeanie on May 12, 2008 at 8:49 AM

Made a couple minor corrections. Sorry.

If he doesn’t like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and “adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them,”

I wonder what Michelle tuggs on when she’s upset?

I’ll get my coat.

If he doesn’t like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and “adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them,”

Is this how Barry plans to practice his “aggressive diplomacy” (without preconditions) in a one on one with Ahmadinijead?

No doubt Barry plans to telegraph how serious he is about stopping Iran’s nukes by taking this a step further and showing Mahmoud the soles of his shoes.

And there will be peace on earth and we will live happily ever after…

I mean McCain! McCain!

“he’s heard him yell only twice in four years”

Alrighty then,so this Bermuda Triangle were flying through
on our way to orbit our Sun only seems to affect the Left!

Lets re-cap;

-the media wants everyone to know that Obama is is calm
and collect,like a cat on a hot tin roof!

-wants to talk with Terrorist thugs,since he’s there,I’d
recommend a chat with the beheader,whats there to lose!

-wants to pull out of Irag and surrender,he’ll then send
the rest of the troops to Guam,or Diego Garcia!
UUmm,I think it would be wise to send a few troops to Pearl
it’ll save on the over crowding!

-He thinks theres 57 states!

And now the Liberal media is telling every one that Obama
is one smooth easy going operator!

And the Lib media are also going to tell us, how much
of a temper McCain has that actually doesn’t exist so
I’m sure they’ll be busy manufacturing one!

I’m also curious,is Obama going to get 90% of the airtime,
and McCain gets only 10%,you know that fairness doctrine
the left likes to preach!

Richard Wolfe? The guy who EVERY night on Olbermann’s show says nothing but “You’re absolutely correct, Keith” ?

Marcus on May 12, 2008 at 7:53 AM

You got that right. In any event, it’s the MSM being the same MSM they’ve always been. They usually get away with stuff like this, but not always. Remember Dan Rather’s memo?

Didn’t Dubya agree to ban all 527’s in 2004, after Kerry made a stink about the Swift Boat Vets ad? If I remember, Kerry only wanted the Swiftie ad pulled, but not the others.

…any coordination at all, even to restrict ad campaigns, is strictly illegal.

I didn’t realize restricting these 527’s was illegal, but then how could Bush and Kerry, had they agreed, restrict them 4 years ago…

It’s no surprise that the media are in the tank for Barack Obama, but the willingness of the New York Times to simply misrepresent the facts–while pretending to act as a fact-checker!–is pretty breathtaking. You may think the Times is an outlier, if not a joke, but I suspect that many more news outlets are prepared to follow the Times’s lead in flat-out misreporting the facts, if that’s what it takes to get Obama elected.

The Times story is “On McCain, Obama and a Hamas Link.” It takes John McCain to task for pointing out that Hamas has endorsed Obama. The Times reporter, Larry Rohter, says that John McCain has “again portrayed the Democratic contender as being the favorite of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.” Of course, this is not McCain’s “portrayal;” it is an indisputable fact that Hamas has endorsed Obama and has said that it hopes he will be elected. But the paper’s most egregious error, in its campaign “fact check” column, is yet to come.

Rohter notes that charges and counter-charges have gone back and forth between the McCain and Obama campaigns, but Rohter judges that McCain is mostly at fault:

But important nuances appear to have been lost in the partisan salvos, particularly on Mr. McCain’s side.

McCain, Rohter writes, is guilty because he says that Obama has advocated “unconditional” meetings with Iran’s President:

[I]n a fund-raising letter sent out in April, a spokesman for Mr. McCain wrote: “We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad.”

That, the Times says, is wrong. It quotes Obama adviser Susan Rice denying that Obama has advocated “unconditional” talks with Ahmadinejad:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state.

That’s good enough for the New York Times’s “fact checkers.” The problem is that, contrary to his campaign’s current revisionist effort, Obama plainly has advocated unconditional talks with Iran on several occasions. He was caught on YouTube doing exactly that during one of the Democratic debates. Not only that, Obama’s web site contains this statement:

Diplomacy: Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.

Now that it is convenient for Obama to retreat from his conciliatory attitude toward Iran and other bitterly anti-American states, the Times is happy to help him cover his tracks, even though Obama’s own web site confirms that, exactly as the McCain campaign said, Obama has advocated talks with Iran “without preconditions.”

It will be interesting to see whether the Times corrects this column. Personally, I’m not holding my breath. I think we are about to witness a level of partisanship in the “mainstream” media that has not been seen since the era of professional news media began a little over a century ago. In the past, when newspapers like the Times have misreported facts, people have generally assumed it was, even if the result of bias, inadvertent. No longer. We have entered an era in which leading news organs will intentionally and persistently misinform their readers in order to achieve a political objective–the election of Barack Obama.

Also, this is barely, barely the beginning of the general campaign. What do McCain and Salter expect they’re going to get from the MSM from now on? McCain had his day in the MSM sun during the years he was running against his own party. That party is over. If Salter is going to spend the rest of the campaign complaining about media bias, 527s, and “respectful campaigning,” then the McCain campaign should just pack up and go home now.

McCain needs a positive strategy, not a negative one. I haven’t seen it yet.

What themes do the writers visit in the first two paragraphs of their article?
Temper — Obama doesn’t have one, but McCain??
Richard Nixon!
Racism.
Smear campaigns about Obama’s origins.

Actually, referring to Nixon violates official Obama canon for McCain. The official canon includes:

(1) McCain is old. I am young, and like to serve as a jeans model for swooning reporters.
(2) McCain wants to run the third Bush term and, by the way, did I mention he voted for the war? I am about looking to the future and making change, and he’s still defending his war vote. (Don’t you dare spin that as “McCain is the candidate looking to try to solve the Iraq problem and I’m simultaneously focused on the past AND advocating defeat as the solution.”)
(3) McCain is running his campaign based on distractions, distortions, (racism), and the tired old politics of the past. I am change you can believe in.

I personally don’t know how McCain is going to win. Bush managed to win re-election in 2004 purely because Kerry wasn’t credible on the #1 issue at the time (Iraq), even though (1) voters thought Kerry more credible on almost every domestic issue and (2) Kerry and the demos out-raised Bush. This cycle, McCain may be on the wrong side of the #1 issue, and there’s huge Republican fatigue, and Obama is probably going to out-raise McCain 3:1. Oh, and while the press favored Kerry in 2004, they actually get aroused at the sight of Obama!