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The answer to Horklog’s question is: Yes!!!

He also offers a juicy question at the end of the post picking up on a Kos post. I’m not willing to go there yet. But I do have this question in my mind: “What woman in her right mind has her water break in Texas and then flies all the way to Alaska to deliver the baby?”

Update: more good stuff on Babygate by reader John Nail at TPM.

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I spent my adolescence and college years in Northern Nevada, so I know that culture from the inside. Sarah Palin’s views on cultural issues and the environment (what they call natural resources) puts her in lockstep with a significant portion of voters in places out West like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. All three are considered swing states, but her political outlook and cultural affinity with the red meat West will play quite well. Being intimately familiar with the type of environmental Neanderthal that Palin is, makes me really, really not stand her. See Grizzly Bay for why.

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Moveon.org sums up the argument against Sarah Palin ever getting near the Oval Office quite nicely.

Andrew Halcro, not “just” an Alaska blogger, brings this stunning tidbit: the McCain is sending a team to Alaska to vet Palin now, after she’s been nominated!

A reader at TPM somewhere made a very valid point - by McCain’s announcement pushing Obama’s fabulous acceptance speech off the front burner, there was no time for any backlash (even that driven by the Villagers or right wing pundits) to form.  In other words, the lasting impression of the speech is a positive one.

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This is one of those lines that are easy to lather, rinse and repeat.

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Or so it is according to the Politico’s Jonathon Martin:

John McCain’s inability to name how many homes he owns is spurring him to play the POW card and Obama’s camp to go further on raising questions about the Republican’s age, the latest signs of a race being fought on increasingly personal terms.

Asked again about the matter in an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, McCain noted: “I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it’s like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation.”

And this morning, on “Fox News Sunday,” top Obama adviser Robert Gibbs made what a fairly obvious dig at McCain’s age, suggesting he was forgetful.

Anyone who was buying that this would be the first post-partisan general election was high on crack. For all the hand-wringing about negative campaigning, everyone knows it works. And it works, in my opinion, on a basic psychological level. If a candidate shows that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win an election, voters feel comfortable that he (or she some day) will go to the same lengths to protect the nation and to fight wars when necessary. I know that the GOP will throw the kitchen sink, and then some, at Obama by way of Rezko, Ayers and Rev. Wright, who is still to come and too risky (i.e. black). The question is whether Obama is willing to do the same, i.e. Keating 5, cheated on his wife and then re-married for money and too risky (i.e. old).

I think the Obama camp is willing to go there, but they need to remember one more thing from the Rove playbook - never apologize for negative attacks.

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Putting all of McCain’s pro-Georgia bluster aside, one can see that Saakasvili set out to what looks like ethincally targeted violence when he launched his military escapade against South Ossetia. It is only through McCain’s revisionist history that one can forget that Georgia started it:

Georgian troops arrived Khetagurovo on August 8 in a storm of steel and bullets, killing eight people and badly damaging the village of ethnic South Ossetians.

When they left two days later, harried by the Russian forces that crushed Tbilisi’s bid to restore control over its breakaway region, locals say their took four prisoners with them and forfeited any chance of reconciliation.

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Thanks to The Carpetbagger Report for keeping track of Flipper John.

My favorite, of a so far 74 flip-flops, goes to the heart of puncturing the McCain-as-maverick lovefest:

McCain believed powerful right-wing activist/lobbyist Grover Norquist was “corrupt, a shill for dictators, and (with just a dose of sarcasm) Jack Abramoff’s gay lover.” McCain now considers Norquist a key political ally.

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Can this McCain really be this out of touch to even flippantly offer blue collar Americans $50 an hour to pick lettuce in a feeble attempt to prove a point that we need illegal immigrants.

For those doing the math, my friends, that works out to $2,000 a week before taxes.

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Who said?

“He is someone who purports to campaign as a man of the people, but who resides in a whole series of wealthy million dollar chateaus and mansions.  It’s just one more contradiction and example of him being out of the mainstream with America.”

See answer, here.

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In stunning news, polling by Winthrop University reveals that McCain enjoys a big sixteen point lead in the South.  Only Virginia, North Carolina and Florida are close. Most surprising, Obama trails the most in the Deep South and amongst working class whites and evangelicals. Even more stunning, these voters find McCain is more honest and capable, but 86% of those polled assure us that race is not a factor whatsoever.  

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Belarus, once part of the Soviet Union, lies between Poland, which just signed a missile defense treaty with the U.S., and Russia.  Thus, I am sure that this and this are pure coincidences.

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Isn’t country star Toby Keith the exact kind of Democrat that the punditocracy say Obama can’t attract?  Weird thing is that Keith also basically called Obama an Oreo recently and everyone thought the crooner meant that as a negative. 

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A Feist-assisted SNAP!“

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When McCain says scary, or stupid, stuff like this, Democrats need to come out swinging hard:

[Woman speaking about Vet benefits and illegal immigrants then finishes with] If we don’t reenact the draft I don’t think we will have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.

MCCAIN: Ma’am let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said and thank you and I am grateful for your support of all of our veterans.

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As I was researching the ‘cross in the dirt’ dust up, I received a mini-education on the treatment of POWs in the hands of the North Vietnamese.PBS’s American Experience documentary series ran “Return with Honor” in 2000, I believe. The vivid history of the American POW is underscored by the drawings of Navy pilot Mike McGrath which recounts the harsh treatment, interrogations and conditions that the Americans were subjected to. See the gallery and McGrath’s commentary, here.

This is, of course, the ironic outcome of taking a look at McCain’s POW experience. I was too young to know what happened in Vietnam beyond reports on CBS News. I suspect that many Americans do not understand that what we would all understand was torture against our men in Vietnam has now been carefully whittled down to euphemisms like, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”Andrew Sullivan points out that by today’s definition brought to us by the Bush Administration, McCain should stop complaining:

The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.  

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Um, with where Obama started negatives could only go up and favorability down.  If one didn’t start from a delusional “it’s going to be a cakewalk” perspective, the latest LAT/Bloomberg poll will just be met with a big yawn, as in wake up and let’s win this election and not just assume it will happen. Update: This TPM reader reflects my view on the state of the campaign quite well. 

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I’ve been thinking this all along. Today’s article in Reuters, that the State Department repeatedly warned the Republic of Georgia to not get into a military tangle with Russia, has only made me believe that Robert Scheer is on to something - that the whole Randy Scheunemann/John McCain/Saakashvili is just too coincidental. The choices are three-fold: (a) the State Department is lying and did not try to dissuade Saakashvili; (b) Saakashvili is completely reckless or (c) as Scheer suggests, someone else outside the executive branch had Georgia’s ear and was whispering sweet nothings.

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If you’re planning on crossing back into the United States by land via Canada or Mexico, be prepared to have your personal information held by Homeland Security for 15 years:

Under the system, officials record name, birth date, gender, date and time of crossing, and a photo, where available, for U.S. travelers returning to the country by land, sea or air. The same information is gathered about foreign travelers, but it is held for 75 years.

DHS and other agencies are amassing more and more data that they subject to sophisticated analysis. A customs document issued last month stated that the agency does not perform data mining on border crossings to glean relationships and patterns that could signify a terrorist or law enforcement threat. But the Federal Register notice states that information may be shared with federal, state and local governments to test “new technology and systems designed to enhance border security or identify other violations of law.” And the Homeland Security Act establishing the department calls for the development of data-mining tools to further the department’s objectives.

More on DHS’s data mining efforts here at Wired. And don’t forget that DHS already believes it has the power to seize laptops of American citizens who are re-entering the country with no individualized suspicion. Law professor Susan Brenner asks the question of whether data that an American computer user accesses on a foreign server is a border crossing and thus subject to a suspicionless search?

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While I’d rather be focus on the timeline of the relationship between the McCain campaign and the Republic of Georgia’s unfortunate foray into South Ossetia, an interesting story is bubbling up in the blogoshphere which is fraught with danger.

It begins with this diary entry at the Daily Kos by rickrocket asserting that McCain’s ever-evolving anecdote of being a POW in Vietnam included an unspoken spiritual moment with an NVA guard who had previously once loosened McCain’s bindings. Per the AP, “He retold his story of a Christmas Day celebration outside his cell, when a prison guard etched a cross into the dirt. ‘For a moment, we were just two Christians worshipping there,’ McCain said.” McCain used the anecdote to great effect yesterday during the Saddleback forum.  rickrocket posits that the story was actually lifted from a story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Gulag Archipelago.  Other Kos diarists picked it up, here and here as did TPM reader, Vaughn. Then Andrew Sullivan and Raw Story have noticed too.

Contrary to some assertions, the Solzhenitsyn cross in the dirt story is not in the Gulag Archipelago. I searched for it using Amazon’s Search Inside function with no luck. Then a comment by Elrod at the TPM Cafe revealed that the Soviet gulag version of the story apparently first appeared in a 1997 article in Communion by orthodox reverend Luke Veronis

“Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.”
[From Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

Now this is two years before the McCain dirt in the cross story first appeared in the Senator’s memoir, Faith of My Fathers:

One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me.

He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed, he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged by humanity.

Those are the basic facts. Luke Veronis recounts an uplifting story in 1997 of a fellow inmate throwing a lifeline to Solzhenitsyn in a moment of deep crisis. McCain tells a story in 1999 of a humane prison guard in Vietnam which is remarkably similar. We also know that McCain retold a 12,000 word account of his captivity in U.S. News & World Report, he made no mention of this incident when it would have made perfect sense to do so.

So, did McCain make up a whopper when writing his memoir and now just can’t resist going back to the well again and again when it serves him to sound pious? We have no way of knowing. Unlike Hillary Clinton’s airport snafu, there is no video to contradict McCain. The prison guard is as unknown now as he was in 1969 and he would be the only witness to the event. Evidence that McCain recounted the story before the 1997 article by Veronis would, of course, lay the whole controversy to rest. The fact that McCain was moved to a different prison camp after May 1969 when a guard did loosen his bindings and the following Christmas is a troublesome fact, but we have no way of knowing if that guard was transferred as well.

But having said all that, Democrats will suffer serious blowback if too much attention is paid to testing McCain’s veracity on this. For whatever reason, McCain has a certain amount of teflon when it comes to the perception of forthrightness. Because John Kerry was already perceived as a waffler when Swift Boat occurred, it fell into a pre-existing narrative that Kerry was a phony. Today many liberals already believe that McCain is a phony too, but undecideds and independents don’t necessarily agree. Because McCain didn’t come back and testify during Winter Soldier but went about divorcing his first wife he didn’t “sin against patriotism” and is thus treated like a hero.

That is why the Bosnia airport snafu so hurt Hillary Clinton. Many democrats had already accepted as fact that she was untrustworthy, so a highly visual anecdote which reinforced that pre-existing belief was mere amplification. Here, the cross in the dirt is swimming against the conventional wisdom that McCain is a war hero without being built on a narrative that questions his trust. Since CNN and MSNBC will not run with this unless they have the pundits to stake out a position attacking McCain’s honesty, we are left with only being left to speculate. Obama surely does not want to start a fight over Vietnam and have his surrogates go on the TV and talk about this. Thus the story will die and fall into the same lore as GWB’s various arrests and service dodging.

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