John McCain wasn't really in a "cone of silence" last night during Obama's questioning as Pastor Rick Warren stated

Last night, Pastor Rick Warren told us that Obama and McCain would be asked the same exact questions. Since Obama was going first, Pastor Rick Warren also told us that McCain was in a "cone of silence" so he wouldn't hear the questions and answers.

Now, Nate Silver asks if Pastor Rick Warren was actually telling us the truth. (Nate runs the blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, and is one of the smartest people I've met in a long time.)

As Nate informs us, the facts are coming out and apparently McCain was not in a "cone of silence." He was in his motorcade heading to the megachurch.

I have to say, watching that thing last night, I thought John McCain was pretty quick with his answer to the first question about the three wisest people to whom he'd turn to for advice. Very quick actually. So quick, I remember thinking that it seemed like he knew that question in advance. (Transcript can be found here.)

Pastor Rick Warren had the best intentions and probably believed McCain was in the "cone of silence." But, that's not what happened. And, while Rick Warren probably wants to believe John McCain, it's essential to remember that McCain's campaign is run by the Karl Rove crew. Those people cheat and lie -- and they can't be trusted. According to CNN:

Warren told CNN Sunday evening, “we flat out asked him” if he heard any of the questions. The McCain campaign “confirmed that McCain did not hear or see any of the broadcast” in the motorcade or after he arrived, Ross said.

When asked if McCain overheard anything, Charlie Black, a McCain adviser who was with him at the time, told CNN: "We were in motorcade until 5:30 p.m. ET; then a holding room in another building with no TV."

The "McCain campaign" confirmed? And Charlie Black said no TV? Right. Parse those responses. Maybe McCain didn't hear it himself. Maybe. But, did anyone on the campaign tell McCain what was being broadcast? This is very shady.

Pastor Rick Warren may trust the McCain campaign and Charlie Black. No one else should. Read More......

McCain cites fake urban-legend as example of terrorism in Iraq

That's nice. Nothing like finding foreign enemies based on false information. I've said it before and I'll say it again: John McCain is not the same man he was in 2000. He's no longer quite as with it as he was back then. Now he gets a lot of obvious facts wrong. And it's troubling. It's no wonder his campaign no longer gives the media the access to McCain they did before. It looks like they're afraid the media won't like what it sees. Read More......

Sean Hannity's buddy says McCain's wealth comes from organized crime

Bummer. And from Jerome Corsi, a source exalted by FOX's Sean Hannity, no less (he's also the guy who wrote the anti-Obama book that's being hailed on the right). I mean, if Sean Hannity thinks this guy is credible, then who am I to judge when Sean Hannity's credible source says that McCain made his money off of organized crime. That's the mafia, folks. Scary. No wonder McCain has such a temper. Read More......

Obama fights back: Blame economic woes on "John McCain's president, George W. Bush."

McCain = Bush. It's not that complicated:

A day after Barack Obama and John McCain exchanged an embrace during a faith forum at a California megachurch, Obama called the U.S. economy a disaster thanks to "John McCain's president, George W. Bush," and chided his Republican rival's campaign team for trying to make him look unpatriotic and weak.

"John McCain's President, George Bush." Perfect.

The punditry will be in a tizzy over this perceived attack on McCain by Obama. But, all he did was link McCain to Bush -- and those two are inextricably linked. It's almost going to be fun to see how the Republicans attack Obama for tying McCain to Bush.

Obama wasn't finished with McCain:

But Sunday, after praising the Arizona senator as a "genuine American patriot," the Democratic presidential hopeful got back to business — methodically tearing into McCain's health care, tax and energy policies and criticizing his advisers.

"McCain says 'Here's my plan, I'm going to drill here, drill now which is something he only came up with two months ago when he started looking at polling," Obama said of McCain's energy policy.

The GOP hopeful has become a vocal proponent of offshore oil drilling as a way to ease U.S. dependence on foreign oil and has criticized Obama for failing to embrace it as a way to help bring down oil prices. Obama noted that McCain had long opposed lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling.

The Illinois senator also criticized McCain's advisers as "the same old folks that brought you George W. Bush. The same team." He noted many had been lobbyists in Washington before McCain asked them to sever all lobbying ties.

The same team that brought you Bush wants to give you McCain. It's like that Karl Rove-led team trying for a third Bush term. Wow. What a great message.

Now, if only Obama's very well paid media consultants could figure out how to make decent ads linking McCain to Bush, we might be getting somewhere. That brain trust, led by Jim Margolis of GMMB, has been pumping out pretty generic, boring ads -- how they make Obama look generic and boring is beyond me. (According to the NY Times during the primaries, "The Obama campaign, for example, paid $85 million to GMMB, a media consulting firm. But $69 million of that was used to buy advertising time, which means that much of the money paid to GMMB ended up at local television and radio stations.") That's a pretty damn good haul. Can anyone remember one of Obama's ads from the primaries? The Obama media consultants all need to study CartwrightDale's superb ad on YouTube. That clip is the best thing I've seen yet -- and CartwrightDale wasn't paid millions to do it.

Now that Obama is linking Bush to McCain, keep it up. Make this part of every speech. Every Obama campaign staffer and surrogate needs to say George Bush's name over and over and over. Don't every say "This administration" or "This President." Say the name George Bush and tie him to McCain.

Bush = McCain = Bush. Never miss a chance to link Bush to McCain. Ever. That's what this campaign is about. Read More......

McCain, I'm pro-life, damn it

McCain says "human rights" imbue at conception. That's interesting, so you mean civil rights laws should be retroactive to birth? Of course, McCain doesn't believe in any civil rights for gay people, though he's willing to take their sex money for at least a few days until the heat go to be too much. In any case, it's pretty clear that McCain is pandering here. I don't think McCain gives a damn about abortion either way, that's why he said he'd consider a pro-choice VP. He just doesn't care, regardless of what he says on pretty much any issue other than defense. And that should trouble people. It's exactly what happened with the first Bush presidency - he cared about foreign policy, and that was it. And we all suffered as a result.

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McCain campaign has ties to Al Qaeda, so says Mary Matalin's buddy

How sad. The Republicans have embraced a crazy person and now his past ramblings are coming back to haunt them. This is the guy who authored the anti-Obama book. The guy who Dick Cheney's aide, Mary Matalin, says is a great great great guy. So, it seems that in addition to spewing slime about Obama, he also accused the McCain campaign of having ties to Al Qaeda a few months ago. Nice. So now every time the media shows this guy, every time a Republican at the convention flashes a copy of the anti-Obama book, the media will be forced to mention, in all fairness, that the book's author also says that McCain has Al Qaeda ties. Once again, the Republicans forget about that little thing called the Internets. Read More......

Frank Rich: Other than his time in Vietnam, McCain's record ain't too pretty

Amazing column by Frank Rich today. This is a very tough one to excerpt:

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Several Bush administration officials show up to remind us that he's still the president. We'll see Condi and Gates trying to explain Georgia -- and Dana Perino is on FOX, probably just doing an audition.

Speaking of auditions, there are a slew of V.P. potentials on the shows. By the end of this week, we'll know at least who Obama has chosen. On the Dem. side, you got Daschle, Bayh, Kaine and Richardson. On the GOP side: Romney, Pawlenty, Jindal, Cantor and Ridge. The theocrats are in a frenzy because McCain has said he'd consider a pro-choice vice president...that includes Ridge and Romney (and Lieberman).

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — Defense Secretary Robert Gates; former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.; former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.

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NBC's "Meet the Press" — Rice; Govs. Bobby Jindal, R-La., and Tim Kaine, D-Va.

___

CNN's "Late Edition" — Gates; Reps. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M.; Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Rice; former Gov. Tom Ridge, R-Pa.; Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Could be interesting. Read More......

Open Thread

A sports oriented open thread...which basically never happens here at AMERICAblog. So, congrats to Michael Phelps for winning his record-breaking eighth gold medal. He truly seemed humbled during the post-race interview.

I have to give a shout out to Dara Torres for winning two silver medals tonight. She's 41.

Not like we all haven't seen lots of images from the Olympics, but I got the pics emailed tonight from a friend in Beijing. They were taken after the relay on Tuesday when Phelps got his second medal:

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