Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, laying out his vision of an inextricably interconnected world working together to meet common challenges such as global warming, nuclear weapons, and extremes of economic inequality and the religious fanaticism and terrorism it breeds:
John McCain meanwhile spoke at the Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio ("the best of the wurst!"), a hastily arranged substitute for the oil rig where he'd planned to speak on the need for offshore oil drilling and its safety for Florida's beaches, a venue that had to be cancelled not just because of an onrushing hurricane but also because of an oil spill.
[A] veteran MD-80 flight mechanic described the onboard irregularity to PopularMechanics.com as potentially "extremely dangerous." ...
[T]he plane had exhibited "controllability issues" after encountering turbulence following takeoff, and the pilot apparently had difficulty managing the pitch of the aircraft—that is, the extent to which the nose of the aircraft is pointed up or down. Pitch is critically important to aviation safety, as it determines the speed of the aircraft and its rate of climb or descent.
Examination of the aircraft on the ground revealed that turbulence had caused an emergency slide located in the plane's tail section to deploy in flight. The inflated slide then apparently pressed against hydraulic lines leading to actuators that move the elevator at the top of the aircraft's T-shaped tail...
LAREDO, Texas - Day after day, Mexican trucks line up as far as the eye can see for entry to the U.S. at the World Trade Bridge, carrying everything from raw tomatoes, broccoli and fresh basil to frozen seafood. They also bring in salmonella, listeria, restricted pesticides and other food poisons.
Customs and Border Protection officers take less than a minute per truck to determine which products enter the U.S. and find their way into grocery stores and restaurants...
The real quandary for Obama is that he has to win the "low-information voters" in November in order to win the election, but he needs the "high-information voters" now in order to field his grassroots operations leading up to November. Low-information voters are never going to understand FISA. It is a subject that takes time and energy to master. Low-information voters look at FISA and only see the ability or inability of the government to investigate potential terrorists. Yet a large number of high-information voters in both the left and right wing of politics understand that this is much more than an issue about national security -- it's an issue of balancing national security and individual rights. At the same time, most low-information voters only understand that FISA relates to national security. In other words, low-information voters are susceptible to fear mongering on this issue...
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The chart was made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, but its source was not. It was from a 1957 article by Air Force sociologist Alfred D. Biderman, and the techniques are now all too familiar to us.
McCain and the GOP are trying to paint Obama as a flip-flopper on gun control after his statements on the Heller decision last week. In fact, he's been quite consistent on his position, which is that communities have different needs with regard to gun control and therefore they should have the right to regulate as they need to locally, a position not strictly at odds with the decision.
Obama's statement on Heller, which struck down the DC handgun ban as unconstitutional, was pragmatic and mostly OK as far as it goes:
Barack Obama is riding the leading edge of a Democratic wave, benefiting from a potential -- although by no means certain -- cyclical shift in the partisanship of American voters which could last at least through 2016, if managed carefully.
CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.
The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.
[T]he Obama campaign sent a lukewarm endorsement of the measure [FISA compromise bill]: As to the key reforms of FISA, the bill is an acceptable compromise, not perfect but the best one can do under the situation. As to the retroactive immunity for telecom companies, Obama says he will work to change that in the Senate.
What gives? Why did Obama stay silent for so long, and why did he finally offer such a muted response to the bill?
The speech Obama gave today for Father's Day has a good message, not just for fathers, or for African-Americans, but for all Americans. In short, he said that it's time to raise expectations, to rekindle the value of empathy, and to believe we can actually do the things that higher expectations and empathy tell us need to be done.
The Clinton campaign likes to talk about how the Florida and Michigan delegations should be seated at full strength because we have to "count every vote." Hillary Clinton's express appeal to the emotional experience of voter disenfranchisement in Bush-Gore Florida 2000 is meant to short-circuit thinking about the issue. After all, who would want to argue that we shouldn't count every vote?
In fact, Florida and Michigan are almost certain to have their delegations seated at the convention in some fashion. Clinton is pushing for it; Obama has said he is committed to having it happen as well. The question is what value will each vote from these states end up having relative to the delegate count that is the metric of the nomination contest.
Florida and Michigan are likely to have their delegations seated at the convention with their delegates' votes being valued at half instead of full strength, as the regulations that everyone knew about and agreed to ahead of time call for. If this is done, Florida and Michigan will be punished for their unsanctioned primaries not by disenfranchising their voters but by recalculating the value of their votes per delegate.
A reporter for Al Jazeera travelled to rural Kentucky and found voters are not ready to vote for a black candidate, in the primaries or in the fall. The downtrodden people of the region fear competition with a fellow economic underclass plus retribution for historical wrongs.
In a speech to hundreds of her supporters at a retirement home today in Boca Raton, Florida, Hillary Clinton invoked the electoral scandal of Florida in 2000 as part of her last-ditch quest to win the Democratic nomination. (The votes in Florida and Michigan were disqualified because both states violated DNC rules by moving their primary contests to the head of the schedule without permission from the national party organization.)
"We believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will. We believe it today just as we believed it back in 2000 when, right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren't counted and a candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner," Clinton told a crowd at retirement home in Boca Raton. "The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear: if any votes aren't counted, the will of the people isn't realized and our democracy is diminished."
If he's going to win in November, especially with the kinds of margins that will give him a free hand over obstructionist Republicans, Barack Obama needs Hillary Clinton - not as his VP, but to campaign for him with all the ferocity and resilience she's shown campaigning for herself.
Many senior Democrats say Mrs Clinton owes Mr Obama a generous exit in order to make up for the fact that she has handed the Republicans plenty of material for attacks against him....
The fact that Mr McCain has been sticking closely to Mrs Clinton’s criticisms of Mr Obama – at times paraphrasing her words – has led some Democrats to accuse Mrs Clinton of running a Republican-style campaign against Mr Obama...
In his victory speech after winning the North Carolina Democratic primary last night, Barack Obama was laying out his broad themes for the general election.
"'Hillary has shown a Nixonian resilience and she's morphing into Scoop Jackson. She's entering the culture war as a general.... She's fighting the left and she's capturing the center. She's denounced MoveOn.org. She's become the Lieberman of the Democratic party. The left hates her and treats her like Lieberman. Today, Obama is distancing himself from Wright and Hillary is getting in touch with O'Reilly. The culture war has come to the Democratic party.'"
