Warning: You are about to see O’Reilly and Rove together. Viewer discretion advised:

Obama is personally calling Hillary’s top fundraisers in order to soothe hurt feelings — but they’re giving him an earful.

TPM Reader HW peels back the layers on Rove’s comment about Obama being “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date”:

I was watching Olbermann’s coverage of the Karl Rove comments the other night, and I’ve read other accounts, and I have this sense that too many in the media and the blogging left have missed Rove’s point. You touched on it “Uppity Watch,” but I’m not sure you unpacked it the way it needs to be.

The key to Rove’s exposition about Obama at the country club isn’t the silliness of placing an African-American at a country club because of the fact that so many country clubs largely or completely or just historically exclude African-Americans. That’s the way its been picked up by most bloggers and the media, and its obvious, but its not the importance of the comment, and I don’t believe Rove’s juxtaposition of the African-American Obama at a country club was just a clumsy attempt to paint Obama as a type of elitist contrary to his background.

The key to the statement is that in the image he is with “a beautiful date.” Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a “beautiful date” specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove’s target audience? Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?

When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama’s vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one’s daughter. If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I’d try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public’s stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don’t even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.

Philip Gourevitch: “[T]he story of Abu Ghraib was not that Iraqi prisoners were being brutally abused – that was the norm in Iraq. The story was that Americans were doing the abusing – and that they were doing it as a matter of policy.”

John McCain says he “strenuously disagree[s]” with advisor Charlie Black’s claim that another al Qaida mass casualty terrorist attack would be good news for McCain’s election prospects. But back in 2004 he said pretty much the same thing.

Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) joins the China-drilling-for-Cuban-oil bamboozlement.

Chris Matthews, for the second day in a row, makes the Obama/Osama goof:

In case you missed yesterday’s, which to his credit Matthews caught:

If there was any doubt that Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) would vote for the new FISA legislation — even if he fails to strip telecom immunity from the bill — he cleared that up in a press conference today, saying that telecom immunity does not override “the security interests of the American people.”

Here’s President Bush yesterday (how did we not see this before?!?), explaining to Philippine President Gloria Arroyo why he appreciates Filipino-Americans so much — one cooks for him at the White House (via Huffington Post):

Kate Klonick introduces us to the little-known former DOJ official who was implicated in yesterday’s inspector general report.