This new McCain ad is very powerful and therefore very scary.

Opposition research:

qo

They're trying to make this a culture war election as they successfully have many times before (68, 72, 80, 84, 88, 00, 04). At this point, I'm more for Obama than many of the Kool Aid kidz, as I see all of his FISA, campaign finance reneg et al as the old politics Obama's been successfully playing all along. I always felt 'politics is politics,' and took the "I'll change the culture of Washington" with a grain of salt, so Obama's current moves don't dampen by wish for a Democratic president.

But I'm struck by the irony of how all of the 'change we can believe in' and 'yes we can' worked on [a minority of] Dems but he'll need more than that to beat McCain nationally. Unfortunately.

I think he'll win, but it's going to be close.

Here are the top stories this week related to our soldiers here and abroad, taken from the Our Troops Newsladder.

In Part V of its War Torn series, The New York Times examines the increased rates of alcoholism among returning combat veterans. (nytimes.com)

After the deadliest month in the war in Afghanistan so far, President Bush announced plans to increase the number of troops deployed to Afghanistan. 28 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in June, outnumbering the June count in Iraq, which has triple the number of forces there. (armytimes.com)

Sorry if it bothers anyone to read about stuff that has nothing to do with politics, but I thought some folks might find this interesting, or even useful, especially if they read this site a lot.

If you're a news junkie like me and you've never heard of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, you're missing out.  It's essentially a system that lets websites publish their stories in a standardized format so that readers can easily check what's new on their favorite sites  from a program that's similar to an email client.  RSS saves me a boatload of time when satisfying my addiction, because I don't need to load a whole website to see whether there are new stories available -- I can skim story titles and summaries very quickly and if I want to see the full story it's just a click away.  You can even get a beep when there's a new article to read.   If you browse the web on a PDA or phone RSS is just about the only way to get by withot going insane from the wait and/or being robbed blind by data overage fees,

MyDD makes use of RSS, even though as far as I can tell there aren't any links to the feeds anywhere on the site.  This is a shame, but some googling reveals that the main feed is located at: http://www.mydd.com/rss/index.rdf

and the diaries feed is at: http://www.mydd.com/rss/diary.rdf

Instructions for using these feeds are available all over the place, but if anyone has questions, feel free to ask in the comments.  If you need a good web based client, I use both Google Reader(which is more like a dedicated program) and iGoogle(a portal, it only shows story titles, so you can fit more feeds on a page), Either one should provide a pleasant introduction to this essential tool which makes using the internet a lot easier.

Due to Republican John S. McCain's recent troubles mastering the teleprompter, the Senator's campaign has organized a crack team of linguists, copy-editors, and speechwriters to publish "corrections" on the internet and in emails to press following all of his appearances. The first of these speech rectifications was issued this morning...

I actually learned something from Chris Matthews today.  That doesn't happen too often; "Tweety" is someone I really don't respect and I don't watch too often.  But I had his show on today in the kitchen while I was making dinner.  It makes good background noise, I guess.  And Matthews said this:

"Is anyone planning over at the RNC?  McCain's speech, the final night of the convention, happens on NFL kickoff weekend!  Is anyone going to be watching?"

Finally, we get to reveal Bob Herbert for what he is:  an undercover conservative concern troll.  Who else but an undercover troll mole would so cleverly have spent his entire career infiltrating the left / liberal intelligentsia, only to strike with his artificial concern when his GOP masters deem it most advantageous?

It's all revealed in today's New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/opinio n/08herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Another episode of short attention span theater.

Serious Question: If Obama supplanted his own personality with that of George W. Bush, would you still support him?

I write this seeking to understand. You say it is "sad" that so many Democrats are criticizing the Democratic nominee. We live in a free and open society where we can criticize our leaders. So if it is "sad" - is it sad that:
a) Obama has driven Democrats to criticize him, or
b) that Democrats would dare to openly criticize their own nominee?

If you chose (b), is this sad because Democrats are weak? Because they are strong? Because they are too idealistic? Because we are such a dysfunctional family that we can never be happy with our own?

I think that's it - you want us to be a happy family, for once. You are exhausted from the fighting. You just want everybody to get along. You want (as a firm believer in the 1st Amendment, this word makes me gag) - unity. You want unity.

If you're in this group, can you understand how we Clinton Democrats felt in the primary when Obama and others trashed a phenomenal woman and former president, both of whom are admired around the world, one of whom is the only Democratic president to serve two terms in the last 40 years?