Hey, everyone, here is to ABC's excellent reporting.  This is just a short diary because all I want to do is to bring to light two things:

1.  ABC's excellent reporting, I will excerpt some relevant 'graphs below.

2. McCain and his campaign's amazing chutzpah accusing Obama time and again of things that he himself is guilty of.  We are only used to the media blissfully giving him a pass and continuing to use their talking points against Obama.  ABC is first, let us see if anyone else starts holding McCain's feet to the fire, as they do with Obama all the time!

I have to confess to two things right off the bat, before I get to the substance of the diary.

The first is that I did not read Arianna's "Moving to the middle is for losers".  The reason is that the title said it all and I did not agree with the premise of the title to begin with (if the premise is wrong, the conclusions have no material relevance).  I was annoyed by the utter mindlessness with which the left seemed to fall for this stupid McCampaign meme that the corporate media was priming the pump with.

The second is much more fun to confess:  I have long been a fan of Rudyard Kipling in general and his If in great particular -- I love that poem: I love its style, its substance and its sheer quiet counsel (I fancy that I live by its premise :-)

So read both (just click on the links above) and follow me over the fold to see what Al Giardano has to say about all this, oh so beautifully...

This is a very well written piece that addresses the "disappointment" many on the left feel regarding Obama.  She says far more cogently than I ever could: those who are disappointed with Obama have not been paying attention.  This is the crux of my thesis as well:  I believe people who were attracted to him based on actually listening to him, reading his works, following his career path and good works along the way, are not suddenly "disappointed" with him.  We know that he is a pragmatic, no-drama person who does not believe in taking futile stances for the sake of taking a stand (important as that may be) and will work with the best that is feasible at any given point in time.

A few choice excerpts from Gail Collins in the NYT and my own comments below...

Here we go again.  It is not sufficient that the Enviro-types sabotaged Gore in Florida because on one single issue (something to do with an air-strip) he fudged a bit.  Now the so-called liberal blogosphere must brand and tag Obama with the same right-wing talking points that the corporate media is gleefully using against him, because he weighs things differently on one single piece of legislation.  All because a couple of telecom companies might get away with cooperating with the heavy hand of the Government, at a time when even otherwise intrepid journalists such as Dan Rather confess to feeling overcome by both a misplaced sense of patriotism and fear.

Will we ever learn?  Do the purity hounds on the left actually care about the people we are supposed to be looking out for?  (Helpful hint: people whose wages have not risen in decades and people who do not even have that luxury of non-increasing wages.)

UPdate, upfront: Here is the link to the comment which has the video!

He is the reincarnation of Harry S. Truman!  Sen. Clinton, do you still think you would have been the tougher nominee against Sen. McCain?  

Every Democratic candidate needs to read this short, pungent, punch in the nose of a speech on terrorism and Rethug tactics, and use it liberally in their own stump speeches.

What is this all about?  It is my thrilled reaction to seeing Sen. Obama saying everything that I ever wanted a Democrat to ever say about terrorism: succinctly, cogently and evisceratingly (really, if the Rethugs had any real sense of patriotism or even just shame, they would stop bragging on failing the country so profoundly).

I intended to annotate some choice excerpts and simply provide the link.  But just about every paragraph is terrific and critical to the integrity of the speech, so I will simply, without much more ado, paste the speech below in its entirety, which I got from ThePage.

Mark Morford has put the finger on a nebulous thought I have had (growing in me) for several years now.  He nails the one thing that is really the very best about the Obama candidacy.  I will quote innocuous parts from his article below the fold.

But what I want you all to do before you click the link to the article at the end of the diary, is to guess what it is.  So, if you will, post your guesses in comments first and then read the article.  

(Yeah, my students hated me for this too :-)  

Here is a suggestion:

Each day, either one of the front-pagers or some other prominent member of the Kossack community, puts up a Hillary open thread.  In this open thread, all Hillary news of the day and other misdemeanors ;-) can be posted.

Other than that, all of us (non-Hillary-supporters ;-) pledge not to post any new Hillary threads.

Over the years, I have become used to lots of inane, borderline and overtly offensive oped columns in the Dallas Morning News and elsewhere.  This new one by Kathleen Parker is breathtaking in its I-dont-know-what-to-call-it-ness.  Here are a few choice excerpts from the original article (and below it is the response that I sent DMN):

Pardon me if this has been diaried already, but my search did not yield any results for "New Hampshire Diebold", so I am putting this information out.

Diebold seems to have done it again in the New Hampshire primary:

Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan v. votes tabulated by hand:

   Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
   Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

   Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
   Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least.

This is from Brad's website: http://www.bradblog.com/...

This is historic, people!   Here is his current standing:

463,610 donors and 742,504 donations!

No matter which candidate you are supporting or which party you belong to, whatever your opinion of his positions, whatever your ideological niche, this is just simply stupendous.  

This diary has been percolating in me for a long time now, probably from the first time I heard this formulation of the Obama shot-across-the-bow to his fellow candidates.  If they were as thoughtful as he was, they would have steered clear of being too noisy about "it" (funding for the war, more context below).  If they were even more thoughtful than that, they would have quietly worked with him and others in the Senate to actually bring about an end to this war, rather than carping from the side and making it a campaign issue, yet again, cynically, just like the thugs.

But as with all the stupid charges being flung at Obama, the "Obama voted for the funding" will ultimately backfire on the hurlers, if people are as thoughtful as I think they ought to be.

Two very nice endorsements for Barack Obama.  Follow me over the fold for details and excerpts.  The second endorsement is terrific overall, make sure you read both in full, though...

For about 10 years now, I have been playing a game with myself:  whenever, some crime talk came on on TV, I would immediately close my eyes and just listen to the allegations.  Then at the end of the coverage, I would form an opinion on what the race of the alleged criminal was.  When this same news item was continued in the next few news cycles I would verify my guess.  I have never been wrong so far.

Steven Weber has a column over at Huffingtonpost.com titled "What Does Al Know That We Don't?" Among many poignant passages, the one I liked best is this:

Maybe Al knows that America (to paraphrase Paddy Chayevsky) is a dying giant, that perhaps she is dead already. And the "business of government" is merely the scramble of organisms over the carcass's wan, flaking skin; any rumbles from within aren't the sounds of legislators engaged in constructive debate but the gasses issuing from the anuses of the bacteria digesting the sad corpse's putrefying innards. Are we destined to have the presidency so finally and utterly mediocritized that it no longer holds any attraction for the most qualified person in recent memory who would imbue it with the honor and prestige it -- and we -- deserve?

Weber also alludes to the topic of this diary (which was inspired by his article entirely, of course!) -- that is, turning the tables on Al using his "Answer the Call" campaign slogan. Brilliant!  This is the hook we have on him!

A wee bit more over the fold...

This diary is a compilation of my responses at MyDD on an Obama thread.  The initial diary there was a celebration of the stunning milestone (250,000+ donors and 350,000+ donations) that Obama was well on his way to achieving (now, he has!).

And sure enough, curmudgeons came on to the diary to trash Obama and rain on the parade.  I was only a lurker on MyDD till this last bit of smallness; I was progressively getting annoyed over the clock-frequency with which they tut-tut Obama on the frontpages there, and somewhat more infrequently here.  Y'day, I was pushed over the edge, I registered at MyDD (same handle) and posted these comments (separated by "======" here) on the 350k thread there: "http://mydd.com/..."

Follow me over the fold for more context and then my responses from over there...

There seems to be an enormous, but completely inappropriate (for the subject matter at hand), peevishness going around because Clinton and Obama voted the right way (together with a small minority of Dems), but waited until the last moment and did not issue statements about it beforehand.

This penchant for style over substance bothers me enormously enough to post below my response to this comment in this thread, as a separate diary.  Haven't we had enough of hotheads taking to the microphone at the first opportunity, of shooting first and asking questions later, of politicizing war?  Why are we discontented with a little thoughtful strategy?  I'd like some thoughts on this.

Follow me over the fold for the comment I posted on the other thread linked above:

This past week, I, along with ~250 others, were in a training session with Al Gore on the global warming issue.  I came back home late on Thursday night and am still trying to recover from the emotional high and calm down enough to write a rational report on it!  

It was just amazing -- I am a Professor, I talk for about 75 minutes at a time and do it 4 times a week.  He spoke from 8 am one morning to 5:45 pm that day, with two 10 minute breaks and one 1 hour break for lunch (and yet he could not finish his part of the lecture and so conducted another one hour session at 7:30 the next morning!):  that is a total of about 8 and a half hours that he was fully engaged with us.  

I am trying to say this as dispassionately as I possibly can: but his command of the scientific issues, his intelligent engagement with the audience, his passion for the issue, his absolutely amazing stamina, and above all, the spellbound and yet alert attention that he was completely given by the audience, is just unbelievable.  

Follow me over the fold for the report from the training...

Sirota's diary on Obama

It is one thing to have the hatchet job that is the MSM do hit and run pieces on elected Dems -- it is quite another to see the normally sane Mr. Sirota do a seriously shoddy job on Senator Obama.  But (it is) the comments in that thread that necessitate my second-ever diary on DailyKos.

First of all, even if Mr. Sirota's article on the HuffingtonPost had been a decently good job of press critique for their recent bandwaggoning of Senator Obama (as someone in the comments of that diary claimed), the title is just too incendiary and utterly unfair to Senator Obama.  Whatever he may or may not have achieved (and I will address this below the fold), Senator Obama's candidacy does not pose any danger to anyone whatsoever; it certainly is not ridiculous either -- as should have been realized by Mr. Sirota, Senator Obama has as much experience and achievements under his belt as JFK and Clinton did, at the times of their imminent candidacies of President.

Follow me over the fold for more on Mr. Sirota's knee-jerk reaction to Lynn Sweet's article in the Chicago SunTimes...