Recently, a fair number of high-profile progressive bloggers have been, to put it mildly, flipping out about Barack Obama's campaign style and his chances in November.  Josh Marshall thinks there need to be consistent lines of attack against McCain.  John Aravosis thinks Team Obama is in a bubble and this is feeling like the Democratic campaigns of the past.  Matt Stoller thinks it's time for message testing to find the attack that'll work on McCain.

All of these are smart people who want Obama to win and see it slipping away.  But they are failing to totally account for the X factor of the election, which is going virtually unmentioned throughout the blogosphere - the historic ground effort that the Obama campaign is banking on to win.  It is not without peril, but it is a very new thing, and I think we have to understand it if we want to understand the twists and turns of this election.

Time for an update on McCain's growing problem as a serial exaggerator and liar, a facet of this campaign that has gone almost uncovered by the traditional media.  Today, just a half-hour ago, we had the very first major media mention of his
"cross in the sand" story being potentially copied from a story attributed to Alexander Solzhenitstyn.  Jack Cafferty read a letter on the air mentioning this (transcript and/or YouTube).  Cafferty didn't editorialize about it but just read the allegation from one of his emailers.  The rest of the program continued as if this wasn't uttered by anyone, but it's starting to get out there.  A religion blogger for the Dallas Morning News brought it up but tried to dismiss it:

If Ceci Connolly has a spare moment from whatever she's doing right now, she could certainly write up this and start an enduring narrative that lasts until November.

This week, 16 months into his campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released his first policy paper on technology. Over at the Wonk Room, former Clinton administration privacy counselor Peter Swire notes that the paper gives McCain credit for "creating” the “Do Not Call” list. But the Federal Trade Commission chairman announced the list two years earlier:

Anyone who was paying attention knew it was going this way:

Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

With an uninspiring candidate, an enthusiasm gap and a host of fundamentals against them, obstruction and suppression is really all the Republicans have left.  You can see exactly where they're worried from this story:

As Barack Obama tries to draw hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls, Republicans are beginning to scrutinize registrants' eligibility as both sides draw a major battle line over voting rights.

Republicans are moving to examine surges in voter registrations in some states. A Republican lawyers group held a national training session on election law over the weekend that included campaign attorneys for Sen. John McCain and other Republican leaders. One session discussed how party operatives can identify and respond to instances of voter fraud.

There are two battlegrounds:

There's been a lot of reflection on the fact that Barack Obama's nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for President will fall on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.  But there's another, more recent milestone associated with the late August time frame.  The day after August 28, 2008 will be the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and the third anniversary of the catastrophic levee failure that caused a man-made disaster in one of America's great cities.

over..

It takes a lot for Bush's Justice Department to investigate one of its own.  But that's exactly what's happening in Washington, as the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is coming to a head, with Bradley J. Schlozman, perhaps the worst of the worst, right at the front as the target.

Glenn Greenwald beat me to today's update on the anthrax case, showing pretty conclusively that the FBI's case, which is being dribbled out slowly, just doesn't add up to much.  One thing I learned from Greenwald is that yesterday's revelation about Ivins' obsession with a sorority being the reason he mailed the letters near their house at Princeton, which already sounded ridiculous (they don't have sororities at the several dozen other campuses closer to his Frederick, MD home?), was also completely factually wrong.

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the "lone nut" anthrax killer, details which don't entirely hold up upon scrutiny.  There's definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn't completely hold together.  In fact, the media reports are almost all contradictory.

An exploration on the flip...

(cross posted at Calitics)

This report of a national conference call to fight Prop. 8 and marriage equality sounds more like a battle plan than a political strategy session.  All the leading figures of the religious right were there, and the language is undeniably militaristic.  I believe that the best way to counteract the theocratic right is to display them in all their radicalism, so the whole country understands the goals of their movement.  So here ya go:

The primary focus of the call was Proposition 8 in California, described by (Chuck) Colson as “the Armageddon of the culture war.” Many speakers invoked the language of warfare, raising up an army of believers, putting soldiers in the streets, being on the front lines of a battle. Lou Engle actually described a massive rally planned in Qualcomm stadium on November 1 as a “blitzkrieg moment.”

Today the Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn Fine, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss Monday's report showing serious violations of the law in the hiring of career Department employees.  What the IG revealed today was that the attitude of extreme partisanship inside the DoJ was pervasive.  Whether people were actively engaging in politicization or just tacitly accepting it, everyone was at least aware of what was happening... everyone except for Abu Gonzales, of course, who does not recall.

Actually the number is probably higher - 22,000 identified themselves explicitly as vets.  Over 55,000 called the special line set up through the VA in its first year of operation.  Some are friends and family of vets, which makes sense, as watching someone close struggle with PTSD or worse must be unbearable.  These statistics are gruesome.

Calls to the VA’s hotline more than doubled this calendar year going from a total of about 21,000 in January to more than 55,000 by the end of June, averaging about 250 calls a day.

over...

John McCain put out this dishonest ad over the weekend attacking Barack Obama for cancelling a visit with wounded troops because "the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras."  The facts show the exact opposite picture, and indeed the footage shown while the announcer is intoning about Obama disrespecting the troops is a shot of Obama... playing basketball with the troops.  It's transparent, dirty and stupid.

And given all that, it's completely unsurprising that the ad has been scheduled to run only in that area with population that is the least credulous, most gullible, and most accepting of right-wing frames and half-truths - the Beltway.

In 2006 we had a crop of Congressional challengers that was poised to win in tough districts and take back the House and Sente.  It was a cautious list, at times a moderate list, and while there have been some excellent progressive lawmakers from that group (Steve Cohen, John Hall, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown come to mind), overall it was a list full of more Democrats instead of better ones.  You never know what you're really going to get from a candidate until they're in office, but this year there are some promising signs that the class of 2008 is substantively better on several issues.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon had a remarkably insightful piece today about the wingnut carping over the Barack Obama speech in Berlin, the media reaction, and his popularity generally.  I really think this is important to understand.  The right has always held a goal of minimizing political participation; normally this is done through voter suppression, onerous voter ID or ballot access laws, and generally disenfranchising those for whom it is hardest to engage in the process.  Now they've taken it a step further, basically planting the seed that ANY participation whatsoever, not just voting but showing up for a rally or working a phone bank or donating money, is toxic and inherently fascistic.  Because their deficit in this election year is enthusiasm, they're trying to make such support and excitement untenable.  Behold:

This is really good to see.

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Stevens and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has been a toss-up for several months now, but the Democratic challenger is now ahead 50% to 41%. When “leaners” are included, Begich leads 52% to 44%.

Begich began running his first television ads of the campaign on July 8 and the survey was conducted nine days later.

You may know that Bob Barr has arrived at Netroots Nation.  He bought a one-day pass and decided to mingle with the assembled conventioneers.  And he drew a crowd.  I first spied him when Kate Sheppard of Grist was interviewing him about his environmental policies (a lot of "we don't know if man is causing global warming, we need further study, etc).  All of us wanted to talk to him, but we didn't quite know what to ask.  But after a couple of minutes it hit me, and my good buddy clammyc lent me his voice recorder and I sidled up to Barr to ask my first question.

Me: Rep. Barr, do you believe the impeachment of President Clinton was a good deterrent to the expansion of executive power and the establishment of the rule of law for the executive branch?

answer on the flip...

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.