Here’s a rather bizarre little snippet from Bermuda’s Royal Gazette newspaper …

US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has pledged to protect Bermuda’s international businesses if he is successful in his White House bid. The Arizona Senator, who spent three days on the Island this week meeting business and political leaders, said he understood the concerns of the insurance and reinsurance sectors about draft legislation proposing a clampdown on US business operations in so-called tax havens.

I understand the US political market has not been working out to well. But he’s campaigning in Bermuda? To help protect their tax haven status?

From Pew …

Sen. Hillary Clinton is by far the most popular presidential candidate among her own party’s voters, but has among the lowest overall favorable ratings of the leading candidates. In sharp contrast, the front-running Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, evokes relatively modest enthusiasm from the GOP base, but is as broadly popular with all voters as any candidate in either party.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Aug. 1-18 among 3,002 adults, finds that 55% of voters who offer an opinion of Clinton express a favorable view of her, while 45% have an unfavorable opinion. Other leading presidential candidates, including Clinton’s Democratic rival Barack Obama (64%), have much higher overall favorability ratings.

Yet Clinton is highly popular with her own Democratic base. Nearly nine-in-ten Democratic voters (88%) who offered an opinion of Clinton express a positive view – with 38% saying they have a very favorable opinion. That is the highest percentage that any of the seven 2008 candidates tested – Democrats or Republicans – receives from their parties’ voters.

Giuliani finds himself in a very different position than Clinton. His overall favorability rating is 10 points greater than Clinton’s (65%). But he lags behind Clinton – and his GOP rival Fred Thompson – in popularity among his own party’s voters: 84% of Republican voters have a positive impression of Giuliani, but just 21% say they have a very favorable opinion.

Fox News signs on to plan to help the GOP steal electoral votes in California.

I’ve spoken to a number of people and thought a lot about President Bush’s recent round of analogies about the Iraq War — the latest of course being to the Korean and Vietnam Wars (see video of the key passages from the president’s speech yesterday). To get a grasp on an argument, to support it or take it apart, requires that it have some grounding in reality or actual fact. But like so much else that comes out of the White House (and has in recent years) what we have here are arguments which either completely disregard most of the relevant facts or just as often build points on the basis of ridiculous strawman arguments.

Like for instance, all those war critics who think that if only US troops would leave Iraq, all the killing would stop.

Have you met these people? You can find people who think the Earth is flat. Heck, you can even find people who don’t believe in evolution. Most of them seem to be running for president as Republicans. But I don’t think I know anyone who thinks all would be swell in Iraq if only US troops would leave. Indeed, the premise of most current criticism of the war is that we’re occupying a country that is in the midst of a slow-motion civil war and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it and that we should stop trying.

All that aside though what I find most telling about the current round of arguments is the president’s increasingly explicit use of ‘stab in the back’ rhetoric as the new basis of his policy.

Our troops are seeing the progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they’re gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here’s my answer: We’ll support our troops, we’ll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

I guess ‘pull[ing] the rug’ is a kinder, gentler Americanized version of ‘stab in the back’. But the core message is the same. There are the troops on the one hand and their domestic enemies at home. And who will win? Andrew Sullivan has a good post on this today. Also look at Jon Chait’s piece in The New Republic on Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard.

Militarism and proto-fascist thinking isn’t just something to be studied about the 1920s and 1930s. You can see it today as a growing part of our political discourse, even as the support for it in absolute terms diminishes. It is all of a piece. You cannot separate the bogus war for democracy abroad from the war against democracy and the rule of law at home.

Edwards ratchets up attacks on Clintons with speech targeting “corporate Democrats.” That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

If you’re trying to get the U.S. to support you in a parliamentary scheme to topple Iraq’s prime minister, it helps to have a high-powered GOP lobbying firm on your side.

Roger Stone makes the case for Rudy.

So just to bring everyone up to date, Roger Stone, GOP dirty trickster, has denied making the threatening phone call to Pops Spitzer. He has also apparently been fired from his job representing New York State Republicans in their investigation of alleged dirty tricks done on behalf of Gov. Spitzer (D), which seems reasonable enough when you think about it.

So what of Stone’s accusation that the owner of his apartment building, who is also a Spitzer contributor, arranged for Spitzer operatives to break into Stone’s New York City apartment, use his phone and impersonate his voice, in order to set him up to look like he made the call?

In this morning’s Times, State Senator George Winner (R), who chairs the committee now investigating Spitzer and his deputies, suggested that Stone’s improbable claims might in fact be true and that the technology Stone refers to does in fact exist. In an interview with the Times, “Mr. Winner also noted that technology is available that makes it possible to mimic another person’s phone number on a caller identification machine.”

So we’re now trying to find out whether Sen. Winner believes Stone may have been the victim of a break-in by Sptizer forces and whether he plans to have his committee investigate the alleged break in.

We’ll bring you our findings shortly.

Late Update: One of the NYT’s blogs has a run-down of earlier literary interpretations of Mr. Stone and his career of dirty tricks, bamboozlement and sundry antics. Fun morsel: at 19 Stone was apparently the youngest of the Watergate dirty-tricksters.

On Tuesday House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent out a request for information to 19 different government agencies, all of which apparently took part in a sprawling scheme by Karl Rove to use agency officials and resources to help Republican politicians win elections, a possible violation of the Hatch Act. In today’s episode of TPMtv we take a look back at some of the past testimony by government officials about these political briefings to try to figure out how such a surefire scheme yielded such poor results in the 2006 elections, and just how much work Henry Waxman has ahead of him.

This is a post of remembrance for my father who died one year ago today. You can learn more about him here.