I cant wait for the debates

Any chance that video of the presser will be up soon?

I didn't see the press conference, but I look forward to seeing snippets of it later tonight.

It must have gone well, because Mark Halperin's take is: "Desert is hot; Obama stays cool".

That's pretty flattering, considering the source.

Well, I'm a happy boy. I may have to change my damn photo, except that it's my logo, too.

This has to go down as the week that John McCain lost the election. I know he never had much of a chance to begin with, but I don't see how he can possibly recover from this.

No need to worry about Obama wasting precious resources and time trying to ignite bridges that are illusions!!!

Now, if he would just respect the founding father's concept of the absolute separation of church and state I can then die in piece.

hmmmmm......take illusion, call it a bridge, then spend the next 8 years trying to burn it never thinking illusions aren't flamable.....

.....and they are saying Bush is concerned about his legacy? It's right there, staring him in the face.

This a spectacular trip. His calmness, poise, substance, judgement and comport are breathtaking. I must admit Barack exceeded my expectations.

How can someone not see how ready he's to be the POTUS, more than anyone else in a long long time.

I'd love to show it to every person in America who thinks Obama lacks foreign policy expertise.

Sigh, how often have I wished that every voting American would sit down and listen to Sen. Obama answer questions of just about any topic, particularly the stupid C-in-C and "listening to commanders" memes -- he is just amazing.

Personally, if I were one of the media-w*ores parroting the inane McCamp's "surge-success" talking point, I would have to hang myself after one of his truly cutting responses. He is just amazing at smacking down lunacy without gnashing his teeth or anything!

Politically, in terms of winning the election, this is probably the right note for BO to strike. Still, I hope he isn't taking the Global War On Terror as seriously as he makes it sound. The fact is, we are NOT beset by enemies on every side, certainly not by enemies who are organized and funded and clever enough to carry off attacks on our soil in the face of reasonable (repeat: reasonable) security measures at home. I pray that when BO is president we can reel in the huge expenditures this so-called war is costing us and start to take care of other things that really matter. All the while, of course, remaining vigilant -- as opposed to wildly paranoid, which is what we've been the last seven years.

Compare this to McCain's muddled interview on GMA yesterday when he appeared groggy and clueless about geography (Iraq's border with Pakistan). All he could do was spout the same old tired Bush platitudes of "victory" and "defeat", with "defeat" meaning anything that Bush didn't propose, then claiming he understands what Iraqis want better than they do.
Obama's tour is accomplishing exactly what it was meant to do: show that Obama has the temperament and thoughtfulness to be president.
The only gaffes have been from McCain.
Meanwhile, an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by Steven Calabresi, a McCain advisor, states that Obama isn't old enough for the job. It presents examples of other presidents under age 50- Teddy Roosevelt, JFK -who made decisions that later were wrong. It conveniently ignores mistakes made by elderly presidents like Reagan who napped through his second term as radicals like Oliver North took over his foreign policy.
Maybe the age card is all they have left.

Hello everyone, first time posting on a political blog. TPM is one of a handful of sites I rely on daily to keep my insultated from NeoCon garbage since darkness fell upon the land in January of 2001...

Anyhoo - There are a few things I have noticed about this trip, and the campaign in general:

1. I haven't seen anyone pick up on this yet, but John McCain is referring to Obama's trip as 'Political Theater', yet wasn't it McCain who goaded Obama to go to Iraq just a couple of months ago??? Now that he is there, and Obama is clearly standing on his own re: Foreign Policy and GWOT (TM), McCain just sounds ridiculous. Is it just me, or is that what others sense as well?

2. As the article states, Obama is using the language of W and the gang, but in an actually intelligible argument. If AQ & the Taliban (you know, the ones that actually attacked us) are now controlling 1 or 2 provinces in Afghanistan, all within the last year, doesn't that call for an urgency to get forces on the ground where they are needed?

I'm no great military mind, but to siphon off even a few brigades from Iraq to Afghanistan to combat the threat there sounds like what Obama is talking about, so we might actually be able to:

1. Maintain gains in Iraq
2. Beat back the Taliban and AQ

Since Obama is the first to bring this up recently, W and McCain are seriously being perceived as back-peddling to catch up.

And don't get me started on the whole Iran (we're talking, not negotiating) thing.

Josh and Greg (and all), Thanks for letting me put in my $ .02

Ken in New Hampshire

What I don't get is the notion Greg perpetuates here that when a Democrat speaks about going after terrorists in Afghanistan, that it's somehow adopting Republican language. Simply recognizing that the country was attacked and that we must accordingly pursue the attackers and ensure that they and their sympathizers do not strike again (or, more realistically, that at least we have made it as difficult for them to do so as possible) is not Republican rhetoric, it's not Democratic rhetoric, it's just basic common sense. If you look at Obama's speech in 2002, his case for not going to war was based on exactly this sort of reasoning. The only Republican language I detect here is the term "War on Terror," an admittedly dumb term. But even there, I don't see too much of a big deal. The one place on the planet where it makes sense to combat Al Qaeda with a standing military, as opposed to smart police work busting small cells in urban areas, is along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. GOP stupidity lies in the fact that they insist on applying this model EVERYWHERE ELSE, resulting in disastrous decisions like going to war in Iraq.

The answer I liked was about the Pakistan boarder where he pivoted and said, and I'm paraphrasing, we may have to engage India in direct talks in order to calm Pakistani fears and have them re-focus on the Afghan/tribal side.

I thought to myself as I listened, this is incredibly smart. Look at the whole picture and don't put "mission" blinders on as "The Bush" always does. See the forest and the trees at the same time.

In some earlier post (maybe on another site) someone compared Obama's strategy to playing chess -- thinking four or five moves again.

I would say that he's already checkmated McShame.

Ken in NH -- greetings from Maine and welcome to the world of Chomsky-reading, Volvo-driving, America-bashing malcontents (or whatever we're supposed to be this week).

Personally I kind of miss the days when we were non-working African-American layabouts.

Katie Couric's going to keep up the bash Obama route:

"Says she plans to press Obama on his opposition to the surge, despite evidence it has been “extremely effective.”

I don't see any more oxygen for the GOP until their convention, and what little is left will require tanks and hoses. Obama returns from a triumphant trip, and the narrative turns to his veep, followed by the Olympics, followed by the Dem convention. What will state polls look like then?

There are simply no opportunities left to steer the narrative back. McCain did not use his presumptive nominee status wisely. And please let him choose Mittens! Or even better: "Bobby" Jindahl!

The polls in MI, OH, NH, and FL...too much wandering around, these numbers, and Obama is setting himself in Presidential stone. His pattern during the primaries repeats, and the tide turns.

http://www.amazon.com/After-Bush-Continuity-American-Foreign/dp/0521880041/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216742838&sr=8-1

After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Hardcover)

This is a rare and brilliant book: beautifully and clearly written, punctiliously researched, and with a clear and important message: that, once elected, American presidents have far more in common with one another than is usually believed, especially by their partisan supporters.

Obama needs to listen to Juan Cole and not send more troops to A-stan.

How many people on this forum believe the United States should agree to increase monatary aid to the Palestinians?

Obama said this: "You know, the Palestinians are divided between Fatah and Hamas."
How do you deal with a people whose loyalties are divided between two groups of terrorists? Why do you even talk to them? You liberal San Francisco Obama lovers got any answers? You love the Arabs who hate America. Cat got your tongue?

Do you San Francisco type liberals denounce this:

http://www.slate.com/id/2195684/?GT1=38001

A Textbook Case of Intolerance
Changing the world one schoolbook at a time.
By Anne Applebaum
Posted Monday, July 21, 2008, at 8:01 PM ET

Saudi textbooks
Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice tests, the bane of any fourth grader's existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report put out by the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom last week, it seems that Saudi Arabians find them useful, too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question that appears in a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, Monotheism and Jurisprudence, in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish "true" from "false" belief in god:

Q. Is belief true in the following instances:
a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.

The correct answer, of course, is c). According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn't enough just to worship god or just to love other believers—it is important to hate unbelievers as well. By the same token, b) is also wrong. Even a man who worships god cannot be said to have "true belief" if he loves unbelievers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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"Unbelievers," in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who sticks around in Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught that "Jews and Christians are enemies of believers." They will also be taught that Jews conspire to "gain sole control of the world," that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day "the rocks or the trees" will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.

These passages, it should be noted, are from new, "revised" Saudi textbooks. Following a similar analysis of earlier versions of these same textbooks in 2006, American diplomats immediately approached their Saudi counterparts about the more disturbing passages, and the Saudis agreed to conduct a "comprehensive revision … to weed out disparaging remarks towards religious groups."

The promised revision—hailed, at the time, as a great diplomatic success—was supposed to be finished by the beginning of the 2008-09 school year and was accompanied by a Saudi PR campaign. Among other things, the Saudis sponsored an interfaith dialogue last week, one that all participants hailed as a great breakthrough—despite the fact that the actual meetings took place in Spain as it would be too embarrassing for Saudi Arabia to host Christian and Jewish religious leaders on its own soil. But although the beginning of the 2008-09 school year is nearly upon us, the only textbook revisions have been superficial, and the most disturbing part of the message—that faithful Muslims should hate Jews and Christians—remains.

Normally, the contents of another country's textbooks would be of no interest to us. Indeed, I've no doubt that there are plenty of U.S. textbooks that contain insane, incorrect, or otherwise unacceptable information. Saudi school textbooks are a special case, however. They are written and produced by the Saudi government and subsequently distributed, free of cost, to Saudi-sponsored schools as far afield as Lagos, Nigeria, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Americans are not the only ones who worry about their influence. In Britain, a small political storm began last year when British mosques were found to be distributing Saudi books that called on Muslims to kill all apostates.

Still, even if U.S. diplomacy is a legitimate response to this peculiarly insidious form of propaganda, it clearly isn't a sufficient response. Far more significant, and surely more effective, would be a unified response from the rest of the world's Muslims, the vast majority of whom do not share Saudi views and do, occasionally, say so. The Hudson Insitute report cites a few of them, outside as well as inside Saudi Arabia. It would be useful, for us but especially for them, if they would say so more often and more loudly.

Of course, we are not a Muslim nation, and Americans cannot, by themselves, orchestrate a meaningful Muslim response to Saudi extremism. But we do have a large Muslim population, we do have friends in the moderate Muslim world, and we do have some money, much of which is wasted, to spend on public diplomacy. We also have two presidential candidates who are arguing hard this week about the best ways to combat terrorism, the best way to deploy guns and aid, the best uses of American military power.

Here is a novel idea for both of them: Make sure that children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Islamic schools all around the world have decent fourth-grade textbooks. It might save a lot of trouble later on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/world/middleeast/22mideast.html

AMMAN, Jordan — For what feels like forever, Israelis and their Arab neighbors have been hopelessly deadlocked on how to resolve the Palestinian crisis. But there is one point they may now agree on: If elected president, Senator Barack Obama will not fundamentally recalibrate America’s relationship with Israel, or the Arab world.