Katie Couric asked John McCain a great question the other day on CBS: You claim you know how to win wars? Which wars have you won?

Watch it here:




I asked the press to put this very question to John McCain about ten days ago, albeit in a little bit more colorful language. You can watch that here. There is no good answer for this because John McCain is taking credit for many things he had no part in or was only minimally involved with. He is way overplaying his so-called national security credentials.

Some might think I'm going a bit too far in pointing this out, but we should also remember John McCain crashed five different planes in his time in the service. He also finished 894th in his Annapolis class of 899. God bless him for serving anyway, but it's hard to take that record and brag about how you have won all these wars.

John McCain has a service record he can be proud of, that anyone could be proud of. His resistance at the POW camps was down right heroic. But when you put yourself out there as the man who knows military strategy and winning wars, we have to look at your record and see what's really in there.

And when you look, there is not some secret stash of wars that John McCain led troops into and won because of his national security know-how. There just isn't and when he pretends there is, it looks like forced braggadocio. If he sticks with his actual service record, he would have something everyone could agree was a big asset for him. He served with tremendous courage and honor. He doesn't also have to claim to be Dwight D. Eisenhower. Leave well enough alone.

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Of all the dumb and hateful things Michael Savage has ever said, it turns out the one that has gotten him in the most trouble is the one he made about autistic kids the other day. That's because he was, as usual, totally ignorant and mean-spirited in attacking people's children. Listen to it here:




As a result of this outburst, some stations, including a station group in Mississippi, have dropped his show. Some advertisers, including AFLAC, have pulled ads from his program. So, now Michael "Weiner" Savage is in full backpedal mode. All of a sudden he's not such a tough guy. And, of course, he blames Media Matters for quoting him. How dare they run audio of his radio show, don't they know he's crazy and you can't listen to a word he says?

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Does John McCain prepare for any of his interviews? First Joy Behar clowned him and then Ellen DeGeneres took him to school and now Meredith Vieira bats him around. Or as the kids would say, she pwned him (I still don't know why we substitute the "p" for the "o" in that word, but it does sound a little cooler that way).

Someone tell John McCain he needs to wake up before these interviews -- or come up with policies that he can actually defend. Watch him get dismantled by Vieira here:

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Who would have thought that Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg would begin the racial healing in this country? But I think they did start down that path. They had an interesting discussion about race on The View. Watch it here and then let's talk about how we get to a common understanding between black and white folks in this country:




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Whenever we do a week in review, there's always going to be something that's not safe for work or for kids. This week is no exception. So, watch this with caution:





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George W. Bush is a historic embarrassment that will forever stain the legacy of American democracy. Listen to short clips from his press conference yesterday and see if you can make it through a couple of minutes without averting your eyes:




I always come back to the same point because it is the one that makes the biggest difference. The press failed us. This man was always stupid -- and glaringly so. The press needed to tell the American people that the emperor had no clothes on. Instead they spent so many years covering his ass. That's how this imbecile was elected a second time. It was great failing of the press, while they thought they were being "neutral." Your job isn't to be neutral, it's to be objective.

A neutral sports reporter would be laughed out of the press box. The Cowboys beat the Giants 42-10. The neutral reporter says they both played fine. The objective reporter says the Cowboys kicked ass and the Giants sucked. Report the score!

A neutral reporter says John McCain and Barack Obama are both fine candidates who represent a change from George W. Bush. An objective reporters says that John McCain's policy proposals are nearly identical to George W. Bush's. They agree on at least 95% of the issues.

You don't have to say John McCain sucks, that's an opinion. But you do have to say that he is nearly a carbon copy of Bush. That's a fact. If you don't report that, then you are not doing your job of informing the American people. That's how we get incompetent presidents like George W. Bush -- because the press was too scared to report the obvious truth.

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More accurately, Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) clowned himself. But he did such a poor job, even Wolf Blitzer had to challenge him and show that his argument made no sense. First, watch how Gov. Sanford mumbles, bumbles and stumbles through this interview:





Now, as to the real point -- there is no difference between John McCain and George Bush on economic issues. John McCain agrees with 98% of the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

They fundamentally don't believe in government regulation. That is a radical position (a sensible position is that we need some regulation, enough to check the excesses of an unfettered market without over-regulating industry). When it comes to financial institutions taking great risks for short-term pay-offs and then dumping their mess on the American taxpayer if it goes wrong, we need more regulation to make sure they can't do this.

If they want to take all this risk and then when they get burned, we don't bail them out, then fine. But if it's going to be my money that bails them out, I'm not going to sign-off on excessive risk for excessive short-term profits when we have to deal with the long-term pain. This is highway robbery. It's also socialism for the rich.

If you're a middle-class working family, Republicans throw bootstraps at you and say you need to pick yourself up off the ground. They offer no government assistance under the guise of the free market. But if the top banks get in trouble, the free market is out the window and here comes government welfare to save the day for rich folks.

Funny how that works. Unless you're insanely wealthy or directly benefit from these anti-free market practices of the Bush administration (no-bid contracts to favored military suppliers is another example), you'd be crazy to vote for another Republican.

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You don't believe that tough, macho, war-hero John McCain can be scared of a little old librarian? Then watch this:





What I'm most concerned about is that we have started to accept these things as normal. As if we never had any rights in the first place. When we don't stand up for the Carol Krecks of the world, Dick Cheney wins. We have to guard our liberties jealously. Patriots died to get us those rights.

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UPDATE -- In the video above you see the security guard saying it was the Secret Service who asked Kreck to leave. The Secret Service vehemently denied they had anything to do with it today. Using the Secret Service name to do your dirty work -- classy!

Yesterday, the United States government agreed to give up some of our fundamental and unalienable rights because they were scared of Osama bin Laden. That is pathetic. We handed the Fourth Amendment over to Al Qaeda and changed our way of life because our leaders are afraid of a bunch of ragtag terrorists.

Democrats went along with this Republican plan, including Barack Obama, because they are used to the politics of weakness. They would have won and protected our freedoms if they had instead engaged in the politics of strength. How could they have done this? Watch below and you will see:





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Has Obama actually moved to the center since the beginning of the general election (he claims he hasn't)? And is that a bad idea? Find out here:




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Who can take these guys seriously anymore? No Fox News "reporter" or "news anchor" should ever be hired in a real news station anymore. You don't agree, then watch this:



They've become a self-parody. "Fair and balanced" has become a synonym for "we do the exact opposite of what we claim."

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It has now come to light that the detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan started when the Bush administration ordered our interrogators to use a document called: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

This was a 1957 document that showed how the Chinese Communists tortured people -- in order to get false confessions! The only thing we changed was that we dropped the title of the document. Otherwise it is exactly the same. We have been using communist torture tactics that are designed to get false confessions. Meanwhile, The Bush administration has been calling it "enhanced interrogations" and saying we got "valuable intelligence" from it.

More details on the story here:




If you want to read the story of how we came to use this document for our own interrogations, you can click here. This is deplorable. Will anyone ever suffer the consequences for ordering this illegal torture? Will the press question John McCain on why he voted to allow the CIA to continue doing this? I wouldn't bank on it.

But if we do this, and no one ever gets punished for it, can we really say that America doesn't torture anymore?

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In this article on Huffington Post, you can see that an Obama campaign insider seems to be laying the groundwork for moving to the right on Iraq. Here's the relevant quote:

Speaking on background, a source in the Obama campaign admitted to a certain frustration with the current narrative of their candidate "moving to the center" on issues where the Illinois Democrat has always staked out moderate ground. When talking about a gradual pullout from Iraq during the primary season, for example, Obama took some abuse from the "immediate withdrawal" crowd for his repeated mantra that "we should be just as careful getting out" of Iraq as we were "careless getting in." (And indeed, as represented by the "Responsible Plan" website, that kind of talk is firmly in the mainstream of activist anti-Iraq war sentiment anyway.) In the aftermath of Obama's FISA repositioning, the Obama campaign's fear, however, is that every subsequent moderate noise will be interpreted as a cynical centrist tack.

I'm worried this sounds like a campaign floating the idea that they might move their position on Iraq. They seem to be trying to prepare the ground that Obama has always been for gradual withdrawal from Iraq. Here's the thing, almost no one is for immediate withdrawal. That's a straw man argument. So, why are they now bringing up this gradual withdrawal point? I think bending on his 16 month timeline for withdrawal during the general election campaign is a terrible idea. I explain why below:





There is a difference between moving to the center and moving to the right. There is a difference between making tough choices about Iraq once you get into office and flip-flopping in the middle of the campaign. There is a difference between being moderate and being weak. Changing your position on such a central issue would be taken as a tremendous sign of weakness. They better not even be thinking about it.

Obama didn't come this far by running a traditional campaign. Why would you switch now and go back to running the same old conventional losing campaign that Democrats have run for so long? Appeasing the right brings you no political friends. It just brings you justified scorn from both sides. Go with what brought you here, not some cheap old political tricks.

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Everyone has been lambasting General Wesley Clark today over his comments about John McCain, including Barack Obama who rejected his comments. But has anyone watched the comments? Not only does General Clark not disparage John McCain's war record, he calls him his "hero" for how courageous he was in his service.

The only point General Clark is making is that this does not translate to having experience in executive responsibility. That point is not only uncontroversial, it is indisputable. Is everyone who got shot out of a plane or spent time in a POW camp qualified to be President of the United States? Of course, not.

Does that experience and how he handled it speak to John McCain's courage? Absolutely. His service to the country? No doubt. But does it speak to whether he has the national security or foreign policy experience necessary to be president? Absolutely not.

Watch General Clark's comments here and judge for yourself whether he said something outrageous or perfectly rational:




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The Republicans did an internal accounting to see what they were doing wrong in Congressional races (because they got mauled in the 2006 elections and the special election since). The results are amusing. We explain them in the short video below:



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