Senator John McCain is quoted tonight by Politico as stating that if he is President, members of his cabinet will have to swear that from that point forward, they will never operate as lobbyists.  

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called lobbyists “birds of prey” Wednesday and vowed to enforce a lifetime ban on lobbying for members of his administration.  “Whenever there’s a corrupt system, then you’re going to have these birds of prey descend on it to get their share of the spoils,” McCain said in a half-hour interview with Politico following a town-hall meeting in the southern part of this swing state.

Has Dana Milbank been fired from the WaPo?

The last time Milbank appears on their website is 8/7/08, where he pointedly refused to apologize for the Obama quote:

My colleague Jonathan Weisman and I believe the quote was correct as written, and that this supposed "context" is a recreation, after-the-fact, by Democratic aides who were worried about how the quote looked. Perhaps Obama didn't mean for it to come out that way, but there's every reason to believe it did. The Post's ombudsman will be writing about it this weekend, I think, so we'll see what she has to say.

Today brings us news of the GOP desperately seeking to win the presidential election for Barack Obama.  No, I'm not talking about McCain's giving away Colorado on a silver platter--though it is awfully nice of him to help us out like that.

I'm talking about the attention game.  Every Republican strategist in the their right mind knows that the GOP's only chance to win this presidential election is to make it a referendum on Obama, rather than on John McCain and the Bush Presidency.  Republicans know that by the time Obama and the DNC have spent all their advertising money, John McCain will be synonymous with Bush's 3rd term and voters will reject that option implicitly unless the election becomes entirely about the alternative, giving the GOP the chance to paint that alternative as unthinkable.  

Hello. No real substance here but I thought many of us would enjoy WaPo's humor columnist Gene Weingarten's take on how the "liberal media" is handling Obama.

For those of you who don't know Gene, he was the man who hired Dave Barry at the Miami Herald and was his editor for many years.

Some choice passages from his column to whet your whistle:

Obama's Looks: What we have here is a man whom women swoon over, even though it is plainly apparent that he is a dead ringer for one of those long-faced, spaniel-eared Easter Island heads. There hasn't been this aggressively un-handsome a presidential contender since, I guess, Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, who single-handedly preserved our nation, binding its racial wounds, and who was also known for being an eloquent speaker. A really, really eloquent speaker. Hey, do you remember when Obama said, "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek"? Do you realize the amazing economy of words in that . . .

It is Sunday.  I open my Washington Post, B Section, and on the inside is a piece with a long introduction by Josh White, explaining of his long interest in a man originally known as Detainee #261, who tried to kill himself when his lawyer stepped out of the room, whom the U. S. long asserted was a dangerous terrorist who had tried to recruit others and who was arrested in Afghanistan, where he had ostensibly gone to fight for the Taliban.   And yet, despite having been held  at Gitmo since January 2002 and having been subjected to brutal treatment,

Nevertheless, he was never charged with a crime, never admitted any connection to terrorism and was ultimately released to Saudi Arabia in July 2007.

White has stayed in touch with the man, whose real name is Jumah al Dossari.  And the bulk of the piece are his words, and they are entitled I'm Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo.  Remember, he was in the custody of our government, held and mistreated by our personnel.  This was done in our name.  And miraculously, he offers no bitterness in his words.

Yes, you read that right ...

Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."  

I hope that this provides some sunlight.

For all you scared, greedy, stupid, or cynical Representatives and Senators who voted for the FISA revisions last month, here’s a little something that got lost in the Friday Olympics-vs.-sex-scandal news dump. . . .

Admittedly this is pretty small on the scale of things but this type of thing bothers me and I think we should call out the MSM when we see it happen.

Washington Post:  Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds

Follow me below the jump for an explanation of why this headline is misleading and the article is unfairly biased against the Obama camapaign.

Quick update: Rec list on my 2nd diary...thanks, everybody! I'm proud I was able to bring attention to this in a way that has resonated.

It took me a few reads of Deborah Howell's examinationof  Dana Milbank's column, which painted Obama as the "presumptuous" rather than the presumptive nominee, to figure out whether Howell concluded Milbank practiced shoddy journalism. By decrying the "pernicious use of unnamed sources" in the column's first paragraph, Howell gives the impression that she's taking Milbank to task for quoting Obama out of context. Yet when I examined Howell's piece more closely, I realized Howell ultimately believes that, because Milbank's column is an opinion piece - intended more as entertainment rather than pure journalism -  and no tape exists of Obama's full utterance, the Washington Post is under no obligation to print a correction, despite the fact that Milbank did not make an effort to confirm the accuracy or context of Obama's quote with other's present at the closed House Democratic caucus meeting.

Last week, in the investigation of a major drug distribution network, police staged a no-knock entry into a private residence.  They seized over 30 pounds of marijuana.  Two guard dogs who were a threat to the police had to be killed in the execution of the raid.  Two people in the residence at the time were handcuffed at the scene and questioned as to their involvement in the crime.

Sound pretty straight forward?  More or less standard procedure when police are investigating a large quantity of narcotics?

Sure, the new Ron Suskind book, out today, is already drawing headlines for its revelation about a cooked CIA document linking Saddam to al-Qaeda.  And there may be much more in this vein in the book.  But Suskind's influence -- with the mainstream -- pales in comparison to that of Bob Woodward.

And Woodward, very quietly, has a new book coming out on September 8.  It's so quiet that it is still untitled and is known officially only as his Bush at War Book Vol. IV.

The Amazon page has nothing beyond that and its purported length at 486 pages.  Barnes and Noble doesn't even have the length.  But wait: there is a strong hint about the contents.

Since I was a little less than proactive about this issue last week on television (for reasons which I think will become readily apparent), I thought I'd offer a little preview of an item on tonight's Countdown.

The headline: Dana Milbank won't be on the news hour any more.

Today's WaPo has a great graphic, a a word cloud comparing Obama's blog to McCain's.  The image is copyrighted, so I won't include it (click through on the link above to see it.  You may have to register.)

This sample gives you an idea of how word clouds work.  The size of each word or phrase indicates how often that word is used.  At a glance it shows what the most important (or at least frequently mentioned) ideas are.

Go look at WaPo's picture and guess which is Obama's and which is McCain's.  The article gives it away, so don't peek.

I'll wait for you below the fold.

Although a lot of Kossacks are getting exercised over McCain's version of the Mad Men (check out this great show if you haven't), WAPO has actually published a poll with a national sample of 1,350 working class voters. The sample includes voters between the ages of 18-64 who work at least 30 hours or more per week and earned no more than 27k in 2007.

The poll was taken from June 18 to July 7, so it doesn't actually cover the period of Obama's trip overseas + McCain's flurry of negative ads, but the poll has some interesting findings which should hearten Kossacks and get them refocused on what is really on the minds of the American people.  

Mirror Mirror on the wall- who is the fairest of them all?

Well Our Candidate, "The One" is apparently too handsome even if he isn't "Snow White.".  Too attractive, too young, too popular, just plain too photogenic.  And Republicans have been noticing that he is getting more than his fail share of shots in The Washington Post.  .Deborah Howell, the Washington Post Ombudsman has been counting them up, and finds the paper is tilting in favor of youth and beauty over McCain and Cindy.

Perhaps the greatest challenge that Obama and the progressive community faces is the destruction of the media's carefully crafted and jealously guarded myth of 'the Maverick' John McCain. As billmon's fantastic diary pointed out, McCain has always been an unremarkable politician who willfully embraces politically expediency to the delight of a media that loves to praise hollow and often underhanded gestures of bipartisanship. Describing his self-serving posture in the Keating Five Scandal, billmon notes:

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn’t hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

Basically, McCain's artificial persona has given him cover to indulge the worst tendencies of career politicians while simultaneously being held to a totally inverted set of standards.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Much has already been deservedly written about the utter piece of filth Dana Milbanks published at the Washington Post Wednesday, Milbanks so ably demonstrating himself to be a panting water boy for the Republican narrative of "presumptuous nominee."  Although this element of carrying the narrative is correct, my further take on this amazing arrogance and contempt for the reader was an implacability of judgment, a sickening declaration that Dana Milbanks and the Washington Post will decide the election, not voters.