It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a jumble of screw-ups, fumbles and self-inflicted wounds as this Obama-McClurkin pile up. So today I spent the day trying to work my Obama contacts to see what initiatives they’re working on for this week to try to get control of or defuse the story. The top contenders seem to be …

1. Convene townhall meeting of gay rights activists and emissaries from Family Research Council.

2. Launching ‘listening tour’ of Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. (Fringe Benefit: Can visit TPM World Headquarters.)

3. Appoint blue ribbon commission on sodomy.

(ed.note: Yes, this is parody. On the other hand, given how things have been going I cannot guarantee that these won’t actually be tried.)

From the AP …

“This is the world we live in. It’s not this happy, romantic-like world where we’ll negotiate with this one, or we’ll negotiate with that one and there will be no preconditions, and we’ll invite (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad to the White House, we’ll invite Osama (bin Laden) to the White House,” Giuliani said.

“Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite them to the inauguration or the inaugural ball,” he added.

TPM Reader KB …

Why are the republican presidential candidates the only ones going after their opposite numbers in the other party?

Rudy and the gang have gleefully used Clinton, and to a lesser extent Obama and Edwards as foils and rhetorical ploys in their daily campaigning. But the Democrats running for President never name any of the Republican candidates. Obama could gain serious points by going after Rudy and his wacky team of neocon advisors. Why not do it? What does he have to lose? It would at least put Clinton on the defensive about Iran, and force her to comment on the latest Podhoretz nonsense.

It leads to a larger question: at this late date, after all that has happened in Iraq, why are the neocons not on the defensive within the context of this presidential season? Given current public opinion polling, the neocons should be hiding under a rock, and the Democratic candidates for president should be the ones who put them there.

Rudy has picked up the endorsement of Joe Allbaugh, the Bush insider who put Mike Brown in charge of FEMA and left the government to set up a consultancy to bag Iraq contracts.

Not only did Rudy fudge prostate cancer rates in his latest ad to skewer European government-sponsored health care, but apparently the technique used to treat his own cancer was developed by a European doctor, Ezra Klein reports:

So Giuliani’s case for the superiority of our “free market” health care system goes something like this: While on health insurance provided by New York state, he was treated, using a surgery developed by Europeans, for prostate cancer, a disease that most commonly afflicts those covered by the federal government’s single-payer health care system. Take that, Europe/national health insurance.

The John Murtha (D-PA) earmark machine has brought in $2 billion to his district since joining the Appropriations Committee, at least $600 million in the past four years alone.

Last Friday was the final day of Islamo-fascism Awareness Week and I’m afraid to say our coverage of the event comes to an end today too. But we’re finishing off with a special episode of TPMtv. On Friday, the final day of Islamo-fascism Awareness Week, the week’s founder, David Horowitz went to Columbia University for a triumphant speech denouncing campus jihadists even in the face of the ever-present threat of violence he faces from University undergraduates. And we were there to capture all the nonsense on film.

Definitely check out this episode. We think you’ll like it.

Watch this episode on YouTube.

I mentioned the other day that John Tanner, who heads up DOJ’s voting rights section, would be testifying today before a House Judiciary panel. Paul Kiel is blogging the hearing at TPMmuckraker.

Hillary is coy about whether she’ll vote for Mukasey for AG.

Late Update: Edwards urges vote against.

I noted a couple days ago that Rudy Giuliani appears to be one of the only politicians in US history ever to try to stay in office beyond his term, not because of any election dispute but simply because he was indispensable. This was just after 911 when Rudy decided that 911 had changed everything and that one of those things that changed was that he should leave office when his term expired.

Here are a few excerpts from a 9/26/01 press conference …

QUESTION: Mr. Mayor, can you respond (OFF-MIKE) you would like to stay on?

GIULIANI: Well, I can tell is that what I’d like to do is to maintain the unity that exists in the city. And I’ve met — I’m going to meet with the candidates and talk to them about something that we can agree on. Or I hope we can agree on a way in which to handle this tremendous crisis that we have.

And it’s something that I would hope that the candidates would take very seriously. So I’m going to talk to them and try to come up with something that unifies the city because we have a very, very strong spirit of unity right now. And I think that it’s my obligation to try to maintain it. So I can’t tell what you that is until I tell them. And I’ve met with some of them, but not all of them yet.

QUESTION: Without being the candidate?

GIULIANI: I don’t — after I finish the conversations, I will tell you if we’ve succeeded in coming up with something that unifies. I hope we do.

…

No, we should come up with an agreement now. The city is in a — is coming out of a crisis and is having to get used to living a different way. And one of the great benefits of this terrible, awful tragedy is that the city is more you unified than it ever has been before. And I want to do something that unifies the city, because I love this place. I mean, I’ve invested before this 7.75 years into trying to make the best city in the world.

And it then got devastated by this horrible attack. It’s still best city in the world, but it’s going to need a lot of help. It’s going to need a lot of assistance. It’s going to need a lot of unity. And it’s going to need politicians who think outside the box, who think outside the old way in which we used to practice politics. So that all came to me last night, that I should start thinking that way also.

…

GIULIANI: Yes, I’m not going to — that’s — here, once again, a terrible thing happened to us. And we can start think differently as a result of that. Which means we can everyone conduct our politics differently as a result of that. Or we can go back to the way we used to conduct our politics in the past.

And I think it’s a lot better if we try to conduct our politics differently now. And things that people said before, you know, they have a right to rethink things now. They have a right to rethink things in light of a horrible, awful, unimaginable thing happening.

And frankly, I started thinking about that when I was with the two different groups of families, the fire families that went down to the World Trade Center today and the first group of civilian families that went down.

The pain and suffering that comes out of this is only beginning. There’s more of it that’s going to happen. And it is enormously important that we remain unified. And therefore, I’m going to see if we can all agree on an approach that allows us to handle this in the best interest of the city.

Mayors don’t have a lot of real power. Not over life and limb and upholding or violating constitutions. But it gives you a sense of the guy’s judgment, and his own sense of indispensability versus following rules the country has followed since its founding. With all that’s happened over the last seven years, does anyone trust this guy with the constitution?

(ed.note: The full transcript is here.)