An absolute must-read article in tomorrow's Times.

McCain ties Obama to Hamas in fundraising letter.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds calls Sen. Obama "recklessly dishonest" for quoting McCain's own words at a rally in Erie.

Make your own judgment.

What Obama said ...

"John McCain went on television and said that there has been quote "great progress economically over the last seven and a half years," Obama told a Pennsylvania crowd. "John McCain thinks our economy has made great progress under George W. Bush. Now, how could somebody who has been traveling across this country, somebody who came to Erie, PA, say we've made great progress?"

What McCain said ...

Interviewer: I'm going to ask you a version of the Ronald Reagan question. You think if Americans were asked, are you better off today than you were before George Bush took office more than seven years ago, what answer would they give?

SEN. MCCAIN: Certainly, in this time, we are in very challenging times. We all recognize that. Families are sitting around the kitchen table this evening and figuring out whether they're going to be able to keep their home or not. They're figuring out whether they're - why it is that suddenly and recently someone in their family or their neighbor has lost their job. There's no doubt that we are in enormous difficulties.

I think if you look at the overall record and millions of jobs have been created, et cetera, et cetera, you could make an argument that there's been great progress economically over that period of time. But that's no comfort. That's no comfort to families now that are facing these tremendous economic challenges.

The McCain message is that if you don't spin McCain's statements for him you're recklessly dishonest.

Late Update: ABC actually swallowed this one from the McCain Camp hook, line and sinker. It's a tour de force of special pleading, and not even by the McCain campaign but by ABC. You've got to read it.

From TPM Reader JS ...

Much as I, too, would like to read Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus, I'm not sure it is a good idea. You need 60 votes to get something done in the Senate, and the Republicans will be in maximally obstructionist mode come January. I'm pretty sure we will have at least 54-55 Democrats, and am cautiously optimistic we will be up to 57-58. 60 is very unlikely. Not impossible, but we would have to run the table to get it.

That still means that we have to pick up 3-4 Republicans for each piece of legislation. (You can't always count on Salazar or the Nelson boys.) If we keep Holy Joe in the caucus, that's one less vote we would have to scrap for. And that could make an enormous
difference.

The deal: He could still vote any way he wanted on the floor, but would have to vote caucus on cloture to keep his chairmanship. It won't cost the Ds much. It should be a Democratic administration for the next four years, and Joe is only head of Government Oversight.

Prominent Clinton backer circulates how-to for Republicans sliming Obama in the fall over Weather Underground.

For the first this month, Hillary has slipped ahead of Obama in the Gallup daily tracking poll -- by one point.

Ed Kilgore: Face it. Lieberman's not a Democrat.

Hopefully once the Dems pad their majority in the senate this November, he'll be expelled from the congressional party. He's gone well past the point of simply not being acceptable as a Democrat. He's doing and saying things that would make him disgusting as a Republican. He's way beyond the pale.

You've probably seen today the news that Bob Reich, political economist, author and former Clinton Labor Secretary, has endorsed Barack Obama. That's an honorable and important endorsement. But I want to correct the misimpression some people seem to have that Bob's endorsement is a defection or that Bob is a Clinton loyalist of any sort.

He's not. I don't have any deep insights into the relationship between Bob and the Clintons but since the late 90s he has been in what I would call polite opposition to the Clintons in the context of Democratic politics. Some of this was signaled in his 1998 memoir, Locked in the Cabinet. And just as much in his decision in 1999 to endorse Bill Bradley over Al Gore for the 2000 nomination.

Now the Clintons and Gores have their own issues. But at the time that endorsement was seen, I believe rightly, as part of his desire to turn the page from the Clinton years.

This is such a fraught time in Democratic politics. That it's easy to have one's meaning be misunderstood when noting even such a minor point as this. So to be clear, this is not a negative reflection on Obama or Clinton and certainly not Reich who I know and like. It is just to make the small point that this is not a case of someone close to the Clintons politically deciding to jump ship and go with Obama. If anything I would have been very surprised to see him endorsing Hillary.

What if Hillary Clinton released her income tax records showing relatively unremarkable (by senate standards, where almost everyone is fairly wealthy) income and said that Bill files separately and he's a private person so he wouldn't be releasing his?

I do not think she'd get a very easy ride from the press since Bill now makes all the money and it's against his sources of income that any potential conflicts of interest or sources of embarrassment would likely arise.

So why does John McCain get to pull the same stunt with his wife? I was thinking of this when I saw McCain's tax return release today since I know McCain is actually an extremely wealthy man. His wife is reportedly worth more than $100 million because she is the heir to her father's beer distributorship, which played a key role in McCain's political rise. And if you note down on his disclosure page it states that "In the interest of protecting the privacy of her children, Mrs. McCain will not be releasing her personal tax returns."

Over the last four days the Gallup tracking poll has charted Obama's lead declining from 11 to 8 to 7 to 3.

We just received a press release from the Obama campaign announcing that former Sens. Nunn (D) and Boren (D) have come out in support of Sen. Obama. This continues to be one of the most striking features of this campaign -- the tendency of politicians who do or did make their careers on the votes of people from small towns and rural areas to come out for Obama.

It's been going on for three months.

I've always been highly skeptical of Hillary Clinton's argument that she's a stronger candidate in rural areas and red states. But the pols who know these areas best seem to be even more confident she's wrong than I am.

I was mulling over the ABC debate this morning and the moderators' claim that knocking Obama with a more or less uninterrupted stream of Swift Boat gotchas was justified by focusing the debate on 'electability'. And it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant.

Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates.

It's an expansive rationale under which Gibson and Stephanopoulos may have failed their civic responsibility by not pressing the point of whether Obama is a hereditary Muslim or his mother had a predilection for dark-skinned socialists.

As I've noted it's pretty nauseating and disillusioning that Sen. Clinton has now also convinced herself that she's providing a service by mounting her own Swift Boat campaign. But she is after all running a campaign.

In any case, at this stage it's not even clear the GOP slimesters ever have to come on the field. Journalists recognize their obligation to seek out potential Swift Boat tactics and do the job for them.

The EPA floats a new "public confusion" exception to complying with congressional subpoenas.

The Iraq War is a debacle whose outcome is in doubt, according to a report from the Pentagon's National Defense University.

From TPM Reader JA ...

The post on Nash McCabe reminded me of a couple earlier debates, the MoveOn Town Hall events, where citizen questions were alternated with questions from Eli Pariser, all on one topic that had been selected by member vote. The second was the YKos debate, which also featured citizen questions.

In both cases, citizens asked questions that weren't obvious or oriented toward sound bytes. They were the kinds of questions that would not, for whatever reason, be asked by these tv moderators. Moreover, these were their questions. In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues.

So it's not just bad that they sought out someone to ask the question, but that they did it in order to avoid asking the question themselves because, you know, it's sort of embarrassing. It's not about content; it's about TV content and TV optics. There's no way for Gibson to ask that without looking petty and stupid. So they used this woman.

I think McCabe's question stands out more than the citizen question for Hillary on Bosnia because the moderators spent so much time going at him with other gotcha question. But I think the above applies equally to Hillary's question. The point of using a voter was that Gibson would have been embarrassed, and rightly so, to have asked that question himself.

Remember that woman from the debate last night who the moderators showed videotape of asking whether Barack Obama "believes in the flag"? Her name is Nash McCabe.

I remember thinking it was sort of odd to have a couple one-off uses of ordinary voter questions when it didn't really seem like it was part of the format. But I was too distracted by the general inanity of the debate to focus on this issue too closely.

Well, it turns out TPM Reader JL did give it some thought. And he came up with something very interesting (see JL's post at the DrexelDems blog). He did a little googling and found out Nash is pretty popular with the traveling press now in Pennsylvania. It turns out McCabe was featured in an April 4th story in the Times which begins like this ...

Ask whom she might vote for in the coming presidential primary election and Nash McCabe, 52, seems almost relieved to be able to unpack the dossier she has been collecting in her head.

It is not about whom she likes, but more a bill of particulars about why she cannot vote for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

"How can I vote for a president who won't wear a flag pin?" Mrs. McCabe, a recently unemployed clerk typist, said in a booth at the Valley Dairy luncheonette in this quiet, small city in western Pennsylvania.

Mr. Obama has said patriotism is about ideas, not flag pins.

"I watch him on TV," Mrs. McCabe said. "I keep looking for that lapel pin."

Now, it does seem like McCabe is not a fan of Sen. Obama's. And I think we can assume that it's not a coincidence that McCabe managed to show up featured in the Times and also as the sole outside questioner in the ABC debate. Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let's send a camera crew and film her slamming Obama to his face. It'll be great in the debate.

Now, as JL noted in his email to TPM, I'm not sure precisely what's any less ethical about finding Nash at random to come on and slam Obama about whether he believes in the flag versus seeing her in the Times and saying, 'Wow, this woman clearly has it in for Obama. Wouldn't that make for great TV giving her a chance to crap on Obama's head in front of a nationwide audience?

I think there's something wrong with it. And part of it is that you usually assume that these citizen questions come from people who are at least partly conflicted about their support if not undecided. But it does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn't just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to far, but was basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.

(ed.note: Remember, there was also Tom Rooney from Pittsburgh who said he'd been a Clinton supporter up until the Bosnia flap and asked what she could say to get back his vote. In that case, this was at least someone who'd been a Clinton supporter at one point and suggested he could be again. But it's still basically, "Hillary, can you apologize to me for being a liar?" Not exactly a question. Anyone have more details on Rooney?)

Late Update: Turns out McClatchy is on this case and has plenty of details about how ABC tracked McCabe down.

Ed Kilgore discusses whether making the debate about 'electability' washes as an explanation or excuse for what happened in Philly last night.

Theda Skocpol offers her recollection of that Camp David powwow in the mid-90s where Hillary reportedly said "screw 'em" about Southern whites who were voting Republican.