Agreeing with John McCain: not a bad thing

Here's a link to a post I wrote on DailyKos and MyDD (reclisted on the latter) arguing that Barack Obama's statements of agreement with John McCain were not only not harmful, but actually productive in light of the current mindset of the American people. Key preview quote:

At a time when regular citizens are tired of the partisanship in Washington and are looking for who is actually going to provide solutions to problems rather than engaging in even more partisan hackery, there are certainly situations less appealing to the American people than, say, a United States Senator having the temerity to agree with another United States Senator in a public debate forum about both economic and foreign policy issues.

That contrasts strongly with John McCain's debate performance, in which he couldn't even look Obama in the eye for the full 90-minute session...

Read the full post here.

McCain's town halls a losing strategy

I have a post up on Calitics delineating the problems faced by the McCain campaign in trying to campaign via town hall. Worth a read.

And don't forget:



Darcy currently stands at just shy of $328,000 raised on ActBlue. That means that across the netroots, we've come more than halfway to Markos' and Goldy's stated goal of $150,000 on ActBlue for Darcy for the entire month of July.

Keep the momentum going.

How far will they go to "support the troops"?

It has long been clear that the Republicans in Congress have been hiding their support of Bush's permanent occupation under the skirts of the notion of "supporting the troops." Well, the Webb amendment has finally forced some sort of separation between those two concepts--and now we finally get to see whether Republican Senators are more loyal to the United States military, or more loyal to Bush.

It's clear where John McCain stands:



Apparently, McCain not only supports Bush's dead-end policy, he's willing to lie about the Constitution in order to get it done.

Webb points out the passage in question on the Constitution, but for the sake of the readers, here is the exact language from Article 1, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power to...make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Pretty darn cut and dry, if you ask me.

But even more impressive is what Webb says when the CNN anchor asks about Bush's veto threat:

Let's see if he dares. And the same goes for the Republicans in the Senate. If they really want to filibuster this, let them be on record as obstructing Senate business for hours and hours and hours just to make sure the troops don't get longer leaves of absence. Let them filibuster, Senator Reid. Make it hurt.