They released this on Saturday. Did they re-release it?

I seriously think they're trying to turn this into swift boat material. The media will probably help out.

Obama campaign? Get ready to rumble, and do not underestimate the power of this line of thinking.

Can someone please call McCain and his surrogates liars--live on air? I'm so tired of this bullshit...

And they are going to push this because they have to try and get back on OFFENSE.

This is going to backfire just as spectacularly as the Baghdad Market Stroll did, I betcha.

This iwill backfire only if the media does its job. And that's not going to happen.

Did y'all see the piece in the LA Times about "liberal bias"? It's a must read.

The media favors Obama in the same way that I look like Michelle Pfeiffer

Okay, now it's time to push back - on both McCain's lies and the media's willingness to parrot them.

Send Hagel out to do it. There will be no good response for McCain, because he'll have to think twice before attacking a fellow Republican.

Time to call this what it is. A lie.

It is always tricky to decided how much to respond to things like this. The McCain campaign may not be able to turn this into much unless Obama responds hard. Better perhaps to leave any further response to surrogates. Obama really does need to get his focus on the economy -- and, I would argue, issue some ads putting McCain on the defense on health policy, taxes, and Social Security. The McCain people are going to try to keep foreign policy constantly roiling, and it is going to be tricky to both respond adequately and shift the drame to the economic issues most Americans want to hear about. This is doubly hard because media reporters do not find bread and butter issues glamourous.

Theda S.

I swear I can see the gears and the levers moving in the minds (loosely termed) of the media: MSNBC has already reported the actual facts. It will take about a day before the story turns the other way, to the facts - I am willing to bet money on it. Because it is a ready-made controversy the media can play with for days.

It's not that most of them are biased - Fox is of course - it's that they are lazy mofos and they are not journalists - they are entertainers with empty fucking heads.

To those who think the Durant situation is analogous with the Porter smear email - there is a distinction that the McNuts camp is muddying purposely for their benefit.

Mike Durant is retired military - he was a member of the Army's "Night Stalkers" aviation unit and was shot down and held hostage during the Somalia crisis in 1993.

http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/who.asp

Of course, those who haven't read "Black Hawk Down" or have any knowledge of our Post Cold War military operations wouldn't know that. They look at this and think he's still in the service. This is on purpose.

Why this charade is being permitted to fester is beyond me. Barry, David Plouffe, get your heads out of your ass and send out the dogs on this s#!t - and be sure to mention DOD putting the kibosh on it because nobody else will. Giddyap!

jack cafferty will be fired up today.............

Friends, this transparent BS is far from a "swiftboat"-caliber attack. At most, it's a desperate attempt to generate a distraction. Even Republicans are admitting as much; they're on record in WaPo saying that this add is little more than "lashing out" because McCain feels cornered.

After looking befuddled all last week, McCain is now off fundraising, while Obama pivots from foreign policy to the issue people actually care about -- the economy -- and kicks that assault off by meeting with everyone from Volcker, to Buffett, to the treasury secretaries for the last two administrations. A roster like that, including prominent Republicans and Democrats, is going to strongly reinforce his brand -- i.e, a pragmatist who brings people together from both parties in order to solve problems and chart a new course.

Obama is making McCain *and* Bush look like amateurs -- like stumbling, equivocating, hedging, BS-peddling amateurs. And the right knows it. Bill Kristol's column in the NYT today is hilariously desperate.

Btw and fwiw: McCain liesdand the MSM rewarded him by reporting the lie as if it were at least as likely to be true as Obama's response. You don't have to be a disciple of B.F. Skinner to find the fact that he followed up with another lie unsurprising.

In the very least, at least the McCain camp is making these attacks and not hiding behind "an uncontrollable 527" that McCain could then try to distance himself from. So any blowback will be on the McCain Campaign.

McCain's campaign is throwing out the rope to use to hang itself, but the media is trying as hard as it can to pretend it doesn't know how to tie a knot.

I'm waiting for some real journalism. I'm hoping Keith Olbermann makes a special comment out of this, it is needed.

With all due respect to CWO Durant, the visit was supposed to be at Landstuhl, not Ramstein.

Landstuhl and Ramstein are about 30 minutes from each other. Ramstein is a huge Air Force base with tons of security. Lanstuhl is a small Army station.

Why isn't John McCain visiting wounded troops today? Does he have something better to do? What could possibly be better than visiting wounded troops? I hear he had a meeting with top donors last night in Sedona - couldn't that time have been better served visiting wounded troops? Hell he takes weekends off from campaigning - he should spend weekends visiting the troops. He could take Cindy's private jet over so that wouldn't be a campaign issue and be back by Monday. What's the hold-up?

wow andrea spoke the truth about the ad AGAIN , i might have to send her flowers ok ok that's a lil too much....

In mid 2007, Senator Reid noted that McCain missed 10 of the past 14 votes on Iraq. However, here is a summary of a dozen votes (two that he missed and ten that he voted against) with respect to Iraq, funding for veterans or for troops, including equipment and armor. I have also included other snippets related to the time period when the vote occurred.

September 2007: McCain voted against the Webb amendment calling for adequate troop rest between deployments. At the time, nearly 65% of people polled in a CNN poll indicted that "things are going either moderately badly or very badly in Iraq.

July 2007: McCain voted against a plan to drawdown troop levels in Iraq. At the time, an ABC poll found that 63% thought the invasion was not worth it, and a CBS News poll found that 72% of respondents wanted troops out within 2 years.

March 2007: McCain was too busy to vote on a bill that would require the start of a drawdown in troop levels within 120 days with a goal of withdrawing nearly all combat troops within one year. Around this time, an NBC News poll found that 55% of respondents indicated that the US goal of achieving victory in Iraq is not possible. This number has not moved significantly since then.

February 2007: For such a strong supporter of the escalation, McCain didn’t even bother to show up and vote against a resolution condemning it. However, at the time a CNN poll found that only 16% of respondents wanted to send more troops to Iraq (that number has since declined to around 10%), while 60% said that some or all should be withdrawn. This number has since gone up to around 70%.

June 2006: McCain voted against a resolution that Bush start withdrawing troops but with no timeline to do so.

May 2006: McCain voted against an amendment that would provide $20 million to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for health care facilities.

April 2006: McCain was one of only 13 Senators to vote against $430,000,000 for the Department of Veteran Affairs for Medical Services for outpatient care and treatment for veterans.

March 2006: McCain voted against increasing Veterans medical services funding by $1.5 billion in FY 2007 to be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.

March 2004: McCain once again voted for abusive tax loopholes over veterans when he voted against creating a reserve fund to allow for an increase in Veterans' medical care by $1.8 billion by eliminating abusive tax loopholes. Jeez, McCain really loves those tax loopholes for corporations, since he voted for them over our veterans' needs.

October 2003: McCain voted to table an amendment by Senator Dodd that called for an additional $322,000,000 for safety equipment for United States forces in Iraq and to reduce the amount provided for reconstruction in Iraq by $322,000,000.

April 2003: McCain urged other Senate members to table a vote (which never passed) to provide more than $1 billion for National Guard and Reserve equipment in Iraq related to a shortage of helmets, tents, bullet-proof inserts, and tactical vests.

August 2001: McCain voted against increasing the amount available for medical care for veterans by $650,000,000. To his credit, he also voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which he now supports making permanent, despite the dire financial condition this country is in, and despite the fact that he indicated in 2001 that these tax cuts unfairly benefited the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/9559

We are already onto new news cycle. Economy, wow, surprise. Here is a excerpt from top headlines on Yahoo. And note, Carly is an economic advisor. Ask any HP person, that means run the other way!!

****Hitting the campaign trail again after a weeklong foreign trip, Obama travels to Washington to meet with a star-studded panel that includes billionaire investor Warren Buffett, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

The McCain campaign countered with a conference call in which top economic adviser Carly Fiorina told reporters the Arizona senator has been "quietly talking" with economists and policymakers, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, over the past year.****

It is in the nature of timetables that they are arbitrary.

Come on - you can't prove a proposition trying to use the nature of something against it.

Ok - look - all that is going on here is the end of this war and that's why the hawks are screeching - they know that the only way the public will stand for letting them get involved in one war after another is if we win. We now have lost two because they were mistakes.

There was never a defined goal in Iraq. Without a goal - how the fuck are you supposed to know what "winning" means? How do you know when you win if you don't know what it is you are fighting for?

The hawks know this - that's why they push so fucking hard for what they imagine will be some kind of definitive parade inducing victory in the face of every single bit of evidence to the contrary. Because these are fucking discretionary wars - electives, if you will - they were not necessary to our defense or our survival or our way of life.

We've been here and most Americans know that. A lot of them will accept this shit if we win - like Bush I made it seem we had. Short and sweet and gee, aren't we wonderful? Wave a couple of flags and go home.

but a quagmire, like Vietnam and now like Iraq - Americans hate this shit. We look bad- we're losing. Americans want the fuck out. We've made that extremely clear.

the first ad got him the press exposure he longed for during eurobama. so he figgad he'd remix it and get more press.

now, about the fact NYT has been taking mccain to task for his lobbyist connections and the obama camp has not noticed or responded to that, that's insane.