Rudy debuts as McCain surrogate.
Late Update: Oy, another McCain surrogate says Rudy blew it preparing NYC for 9/11.
Nate at FiveThirtyEight has a good analysis of the broad swath of recent polls and particularly these polls out this morning from Quinnipiac showing Barack Obama with leads in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. It’s only one poll. But this is the first poll that has shown Obama ahead in Florida against either McCain or Clinton. Most models for an Obama win don’t include Florida, though Obama’s campaign certainly seem intent on contesting it. But that’s McCain’s firewall. If he can’t win Florida, the electoral map starts to look very bleak. Even having to fight for it would put McCain in a hole.
Matt Yglesias, former TPM Associate Editor and all-around blog star, has a new foreign policy book out, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats. We caught up with him last week at The Strand bookstore here in lower Manhattan and asked him whether he thinks Democrats are ever going to get out of the fetal position when it comes to taking the fight to Republicans on their catastrophic foreign policy record …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
After catching a lot of grief for having foreign and domestic lobbyists working for and advising the candidate, the McCain campaign instituted a strict new rule barring any current lobbyist from having any role in the campaign.
Now it seems like they’ve come up with an even better idea to tamp down all the criticism: don’t tell anybody who’s advising the campaign.
We’ve just gotten a hold of “Intern’s Survival Guide” which is part of the initiation material handed out to new interns in the office of Congressman Don Young (R) when they start at the office.
Lots of fun color, as you’d expect. But we’re particularly interested in the “A-team,” who interns covering the phones were told “can talk to whomever they want” in the office.
The ‘A-Team’ appears to have been made up entirely of lobbyists, nine in all, including Rick Alcade, the lobbyist on the notorious Coconut Road earmark.
See our full report here.
Click on the page for full-sized image.
Late Update: Young’s office has now sent along the following statement, which claims that the document in question is “incredibly outdated” and “was pieced together by several former interns and not by staff.” Our understanding, however, is that the ‘guide’ was distributed by a paid member of the Young staff …
Below is our response. Attached please find the official Intern Guidelines as put together and handed out by our intern coordinator, as well as a screen capture of the properties of the document showing that this document was created in 2006 for distribution.
“Rep. Young has welcomed dozens of interns into his office over the years and finds their assistance in the office invaluable. But interns are not staff. This incredibly outdated “survival guide” was pieced together by several former interns and not by staff. This “guide” in no way reflects the official policies of Rep. Young’s office.
“It’s always interesting to see how students view their intern experience. It appears that some of what they have written is tongue in cheek, some to help relieve the daily stresses of working on Capitol Hill. At the end of the day, our goal is to ensure that all interns have the best experience possible.
“As for those listed, they include either former staffers (who represent Alaskans) or close friends and former colleagues of Rep. Young, whom he has known for many years.”
I know various wingnuts go on about how Muslims or various left-wing freaks are going to bring Sharia law to America and make us into an Islamist theocracy. But I think we may have the first case of a defendant actually asking a US federal judge to apply Sharia law, not American law, to a case.
And the defendant is Blackwater.
After his campaign flame-out, Rudy Giuliani has taken some time off. He’s rested, tanned and ready to get back into the political mix. And surprisingly enough he’s decided the Democrats big problem is they don’t focus enough on 9/11 …
At PBS’s MediaShift, Mark Glaser has a very interesting interview with Chuck Lewis, the legendary founder and longtime director of the Center for Public Integrity (who’s now launching the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University) about non-profit journalism, investigative journalism and how and whether they can survive the upheaval and chaos now churning through the media world.
Yes, there’ve been some problems. But at least we’re Exxon’s getting their oil.