One problem here, while McCain likes to use this line and even features it in a new television ad in which he insinuates Barack Obama is unamerican, McCain allowed himself to be captured by the North Vietnamese and spent five years in a prison camp.

When they wanted to release him, he refused and continued to surrender himself to the enemy.

I am up to here with the rending of garments at this site.  You've heard it before.  You'll hear it again.  Now, I'm going to bed and when I get up tomorrow on THE FOURTH OF JULY ...  I want us to talk about anything else.  Anything.  Obama's VEEP choices?  Marion Hossa going to the Red Wings?  Ways to use less fossil fuels?  Will it rain again and block out the fireworks?

Please.  But, let me leave you with one thought.  First, enjoy this commentary by John McCain on FISA.  I tried to transcribe it from YouTube but there was a lot of rambling and incoherent muttering that I couldn't make out.  He was pretty hot and could hardly keep himself together, you see.  Here it is (below).

This is a truly inspired idea by Phyl!  Please show Wes some love and support by going to the blog post below (click on the headline of the post) , contributing any amount, and posting your contributions to this blog.  If you don’t have a CCN account, or don’t know how to post it, just send me your Transaction ID#, the date, Time, Payment amount (you can use "$xx.xx" instead of the amount if you want), and your first name/fullname/blogname, and I’ll happily post it for you:

There is something disconcerting about John McCain and his relationships with the women that he is married to.  John McCain treats Cindy McCain as invisible.  It’s not that I feel sympathy for Cindy McCain, it’s that it more a sign of what kind of man John McCain is that matters to me.  If you watch John McCain and Cindy McCain, he never holds her hand as they are walking side by side, no gentlemanly attention whatsoever. In this youtube video, he accidently shakes her hand and there is no response on his part for his mistake.  I’m not even going to go into the time he called her a c**t!

http://www.youtube.com/...

Once on a charter fishing boat off Miami, I noticed a discreet sign on the topdeck:

Marriages performed by the Captain are valid only for the duration of the voyage.

I assume the same protocol holds true for a campaign bus such as the "Straight Talk Express." All the journalists who have fallen in love with John McCain — to the point of being blinded to his endearing faults, contradictions, blunders, and closet Bushism — will eventually go back to their wives, and husbands, but mostly wives.

He couldn't wait more than a day to insult them. Just a day. A mere 24 hours. There was evening and there was morning, a Thurs day.

Who did McCain insult? Why, the faithful. The party faithful. The faith-full of the party. On the Wednes day, the news was revealed that a number of Christian Conservatives came out for McCain. Er, uh, I mean, they expressed their support for McCain's candidacy. They wavered, they weighed the choice, they prayed for guidance, and then they rose up with one accord to support John McCain.

How does McCain respond to their support? He makes changes to his campaign staff, and then he has the gall to speak of it as part of "a natural evolution." Evolution!

Oh, the insult of it all.  Why could he not speak of his plans as something he intelligently designed? Why? Why?

McCain wants to make this election about judgment and trust. He has called into question Obama’s trustworthiness.  McCain claims that he will "keep his word" to Americans and declares himself a person we "can trust."

Of course this is more double talk by McCain, who reminds us every day about his similarities with George Bush.

In what appears to be a serious shift in his own strategy of loving men, Gov. Charlie Crist, "single" for nearly three decades, has announced his engagement to his "girlfriend" of nine months, Carole Rome.

What do you do when you intend on being a VP candidate and you also happen to be a gay republican?  Yep.  I would take this as a sure sign that Crist has been given a strong signal that he will be McCain's VP choice.  

You can find more about the story, including details about the ring and other useless information HERE.

On a personal note, I find it disappointing that we live in a country that WILL elect a black president, but there are still such fears about being openly gay that a Republican can't come out of the closet.

Sorry for the short diary, but I mean, really what else is there to say?

    I am solidly in the camp that believes a bird in the hand (Obama) is better than another Bush. I sought to support my position by proving that FISA was just the latest cause celebre of most posters on this board to either gain attention, sidetrack Barack Obama's candidacy (only the McCain Trolls) or create dissension. Boy, was I wrong.  

    To back up my intended argument, I wanted to establish that the Daily Kos community did not really care about FISA enough to write about it until the last couple of days. So, I used the search function in the upper right-hand corner of my kos-computer-page, typing in the acronym, "FISA" and searching under the "Find" topic for "diaries" sorted by "time."  

Time tells us that McCain rolls dice and Obama counts cards.  This alone should be enough to decide between them.

I've gotten a million media requests lately to talk about Obama's "move to the center". Exhibit A for that conventional wisdom is Obama's capitulation on FISA.

As I've made clear to those reporters, there's nothing "centrist" about the FISA vote. There's nothing liberal or conservative about protecting the constitution. And given libertarians and liberals are both for keeping the Constitution out of the shredder, it's hard to pretend the issue sits on the simplistic left-right axis.

Bottom line is that Obama wants to cave on FISA not because of "moving to the center" concerns, but because they are afraid of television ads claiming Obama is inviting terrorists over for BBQ. It's the same crappy-style ads that failed miserably in the IL-14 special election (and Foster went on to vote against the FISA capitulation) and have gotten little traction this year. But the Obama campaign thinks that by capitulating, it'll "take the issue off the table", as if Republicans need any excuse to accuse Democrats of being weak on terror.

"Taking the issue off the table" led Democrats to vote for Bush's disastrous tax cuts, and most still lost that year (like Jean Carnahan and Max Cleland). It led them to vote for Bush's disastrous war, yet that didn't stop Republicans from morphing Cleland into Osama Bin Laden. And of course, no matter how they vote on FISA, Republicans will still accuse Democrats of being weak on terror. It's pretty much the only thing they've got left in their toolbox, no matter how ineffective it has become.

But in any case, Obama's FISA capitulation has nothing to do with "moving to the center", and everything with being afraid of the ads Republicans will run.

But don't expect the media to care. Their media narrative has been set. It ain't going anywhere.

The first half of today's show was about patriotism, and it was juicy. The second was about Barack Obama's shift to the center and John McCain’s Campaign Shake up.

In what has to be the most thin-skinned overreaction by a politician since Napoleon retired to St. Helena, John McCain said earlier this week that Barack Obama should "repudiate" and "cut loose" General Wesley Clark because -- in McCain's mind -- Clark had "smeared" McCain's military service.  In a nutshell, what Clark said about McCain that was so horrible begins with: "I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war.  He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in Armed Forces as a prisoner of war."  I'm assuming McCain was okay with that part, but then General Clark had the gall to suggest that McCain's experience as a fighter pilot and POW didn't necessarily qualify him to be President of the United States.

I'm going to make this short.

Karl Rove:

Mr. Obama may be overreaching by running ads in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota – states Republicans won by comfortable margins in recent years. It would require a shift of between one-sixth and over one-quarter of the vote to win any of them. Shifts that large rarely happen.

Big shifts do occur – witness West Virginia in 2000, which swung more than 20 points between 1996 (when Bill Clinton carried the state) and 2000 (when George W. Bush did) – but these require sharp contrasts on big issues, not just money. Money may be the mother's milk of politics, in Jesse Unruh's famous phrase, but when running for president, money alone can't buy a candidate love. Cash matters, but being a good candidate and right on the issues matters even more.

Hey Karl, meet your "big shift":

Rasmussen. 7/1. Likely voters. MoE 4.5% (4/6 results)

There still aren't enough polls in Montana to generate a Pollster.com composite score, but it's tight. Montana is a changing state, and with a popular Democratic governor who will romp to re-election, a state legislative body that has been adding Democrats, and two Democratic senators, including one who will also romp to reelection this year, this isn't the crimson Red state of Karl Rove's dreams. Perhaps that's why Obama will actually spend 4th of July in the state.

Butte, MT: THE OBAMA FAMILY ATTENDS FREEDOM FEST INDEPENDENCE DAY PARADE IN BUTTE

Reason's Dave Weigel speculates as to why Montana is suddenly in play:

Montana's libertarian streak makes it, I think, rocky territory for McCain. This is a state that elected a Democratic senator in 2006 who told voters "I want to repeal the PATRIOT Act." This is a state whose governor gave Homeland Security Michael Chertoff a rhetorical kick in the teeth when he opted out of REAL ID. This is, finally, a state whose Republicans gave Ron Paul a quarter of their primary and caucus votes, and where the balance of power in the state House is held by the Constitution Party. Voila: Another state falls off the Republican map, and McCain will have to scramble and spend money to save it.

And there you have Rove's "sharp contrasts on big issues". Few issues are bigger than freedom, and Democrats are (mostly, when not cowering from fear and capitulating) on the right side of the issue of "freedom".

One day with his new campaign manager and John McCain is already sinking to Rovian depths. Today, he released a new Spanish-language radio attack ad that insinuates that Barack Obama "only just discovered the Hispanic vote" and lacks "faith in God." Considering that Obama is crushing McCain among Hispanics, it's no surprise that he would go on offense, but for someone who once referred to the religious right as "agents of intolerance," it's a little surprising that the media's golden boy is now impugning Barack Obama's faith with cheap innuendo.

I didn't support Obama in the primaries.

Truth be told, I don't even like him much.  

But that doesn't matter.  He's the Democratic nominee, and I'm going to vote for him in November.  And I'm going to be enthusiastic about it.  

And this is why:

There was talk about Dems shortening the convention to three days, but now, talk is about doing "something different" on the last night. Could it be this?

What better place to accept the nomination for the most powerful job in the world? Invesco Field at Mile High, the home of the Denver Broncos, can seat 75,000 people. It's just a short walk under I-25 from the Pepsi Center and would be a part of the rumored one-mile square radius security zone.

DenConWatch has heard rumors to this effect as far back as March 2006.

Denver's bid would put most of the convention action at the Pepsi Center, with the final night at Invesco Field.

I am very suprised by that last one. Having the convention in two separate places makes the logistics much harder. You have to build all the infrastructure twice: podium, floor seating, and media facilities. I can't imagine the media will be happy about having to pay for two sets of anchorbooths, wiring, etc. Security is also a nightmare. You have to setup the whole security infrastructure in two separate places. Not to mention the security checkpoint system gets used and worked out the first 2 days, before the big days of Wednesday and Thursday. If you have the final night in a completely new place, it seems to me you're asking for trouble.

And:

However, a source has told me that Dean has been dropping hints that he would like some sort of "public event" to close the convention week, which could, logically, be the nominee acceptance speech. (It could also just be a big rally the next day).

In 2004, I learned about a little trick apparently done at all conventions -- a group would walk in, a single person would collect all their passes, go outside, and bring a new group of people. Lather, rinse, repeat. There were likely three times as many people inside the convention hall for Kerry's speech than at any other time.

So why restrict Obama's historic acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of MLK's "I have a dream" speech to the convention delegates and whoever they can smuggle in? Open that puppy up.