The conservative firebrand who represented North Carolina in the Senate for five terms until his retirement in 2003 passed away early this morning.

More here.

Says TPM Reader BH …

I agree with the points of your “Please, please, reporters with brains” entry, but I think you might need to be included in the group of reporters/bloggers/etc. that is following the McCain script. As usual, there will basically be two responses to this story – both favorable to McCain. The first will be the hoards of dutiful reporters parroting whatever interpretation McCain feeds them. The second will be the righteously indignant Obama defenders with all their nuanced facts decrying his innocence. So, what we get is a strong and offensive position versus a correct, but overly cerebral and defensive argument. Strategy versus tactics? Come on – the wingnuts must laugh their asses off every time they see this script play out.

Why cede the offensive position? The offensive rebuttal is to first completely ignore the way McCain framed the position and then just flip it around – “why does McCain so desperately want to convince the public that his Iraq policy is just like Obama’s?” Because the public long ago figured out that he was stuck carrying Bush’s turd and McCain damn well knows his campaign is swirling the drain along with it. What’s more to be said than “John McCain would LOVE to convince the public that he and Obama don’t differ in their Iraq policy – why is that? Because McCain and Bush got us into this Iraq nightmare and the public knows that Obama will get us out.” Repeat after me – McCain and Bush got us into this Iraq nightmare and Obama will get us out. Repeat. Repeat.

While the barbeques are getting underway and the fireworks are being prepared, a Happy 4th of July from TPM. Organize and vote. Do it for your country.

Associated Press officially endorses McCain.

(ed.note: Well, pretty much.)

Late Update: Some recent fun AP-McCain moments (during the courtship phase) …

McCain’s moderators, the AP’s Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, greeted McCain with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. “We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we’ve decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride,” Sidoti explained. “We even brought you your favorite treat.”

McCain opened the offering. “Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” he said.

Sidoti passed him a cup. “A little coffee with a little cream and a little sugar,” she said.

When I read Jennifer Loven’s AP piece on Obama, which I flagged in the post below, it made my eyes bleed so bad I hardly knew where to start in cataloguing the awfulness. But TPM Reader CO points out a good place to start.

We’ve seen many examples over the last couple days of reporters egregiously lapping up the McCain camp’s nonsensical spin about Obama flip-flopping on Iraq. But some reporters can get spun so thoroughly that they actually retrospectively rearrange the facts of the campaign to accommodate the McCain camp’s spin. Change the facts to suit the spin, as it were.

So here you have Jennifer Loven, a veteran journalist with one of the plum spots in the profession writing this sentence (emphasis added) …

His problem is that his change in emphasis to flexibility from a hard-nosed end-the-war stance — including his recent position that withdrawing combat troops could take as long as 16 months — will now be heard loud and clear by an anti-war camp that may have ignored it before.

Sort of depends on the meaning of ‘recent’ because I think I’ve heard the 16 months line for some time. And, sure enough, from October 2007 …

There is no military solution in Iraq, and there never was. I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately. I will remove one or two brigades a month, and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months.

If I’m not mistaken he has said this numerous times since.

Please. There’s always, repositioning by both sides gearing up for the general. So let’s note those. And I guess there’s no stopping gullible reporters from getting jonesed up by each sides’ spinners to find subtle shifts where there aren’t any. But let’s not get so bamboozled that we actually start making stuff up. Okay?

The late Sen. William Proxmire saved his Golden Fleece Award for federal government boondoggles but he might have made an exception for GOP direct mail firm BMW Direct — which takes obscure Republican candidates and turns them into money-making machines for itself …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

For a few new projects we’re going to be working on, we’re looking for some good freelance researchers/writers. So if you’re a freelancer or have a job that allows you to do some freelancing, and you’ve ever been interested in working with TPM, send us an email with the subject headline “TPM Research,” with an introduction and resume.

To be clear, this not for a full-time job (though it could lead to one) and at the moment it’s not for a specific project. But we’d like to have people’s names on file to reach out to to help on particular stories.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are set to do a round of big-money fundraisers this coming week for Obama’s campaign and the DNC. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.

Yesterday we flagged the AP’s Jennifer Loven’s ‘analysis’ piece flogging the McCain/RNC spin on Obama’s run to the center. Well, as every crack communication operation knows, message repetition is the key to success. And so today we have another ‘analysis’ piece, this time by the AP’s Steven Hurst. And it’s practically the same piece. Hurst and Loven actually both use the identical quote from RNC spinmeister Alex Conant.

Says Conant: “”There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience.”

The identical quote appears in both pieces. If the pieces weren’t bylined I think I might have assumed one was a rewrite of the other. But they actually appear to be two completely original articles, just mouthing the identical McCain/RNC line.

It seems like we might have a case of persistent Solomonism at the AP, even though the master himself is now two jobs on. This is really going to bear watching.

A new ad from a pro-Iraq War group declares that gains from the surge are “change we can believe in.” That and other political news in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.