From The NY Times
By Frank Rich

Stop the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion — yes, that’s Greek too — to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”

As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.

But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech — each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” — has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.

At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders — played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time — would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.

Read more Obama

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Cynthia Tucker

To: Barack Obama

From: A political junkie

Re: Unsolicited advice

Please continue to ignore the carping from panicky partisans, know-it-all pundits and Washington insiders. You clearly know more about running your unorthodox campaign than anyone else.

After all, one of your biggest selling points in this season is that you have better judgment than John McCain. Continue to rely on that judgment. If you make it as far as the Oval Office, you’ll get conflicting advice from experts every day. You’ll be the one who has to make the hard calls, and you seem completely comfortable doing that.

On Thursday night, you audaciously went counter to the notion that you should scale back on spectacle to try to blunt McCain’s sophomoric taunts about your being a “celebrity.” You accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency in front of a stomping, whistling and cheering audience of 84,000 in an outdoor stadium, after performances by genuine celebrities Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder, John Legend and will.i.am.

Your backdrop resembled the West Wing of the White House. You even had the weather gods on your side: clear, cool and dry at Invesco Field. No rain.

Read more ‘Experts’

From The Times UK
By Andrew Sullivan

There are two core aspects to fighting wars and winning campaigns: tactics and strategy. Tactics allow you to seize opportunities or maximise your underlying strengths. But strategy matters more for the long haul; without it, you can be brilliantly successful from day to day and yet lose your direction and focus as time goes by.

So far, in the short time that we have had a real general election campaign in the United States, one team has shown some brilliant and daring, if occasionally crude, tactical skills. The other has shown a willingness to forgo sudden decisions or short-term strikes in favour of long-term goals. John McCain has been the tactician and Barack Obama the strategist. McCain has been the risk-taker, Obama the cool conservative.

Last week revealed this contrast again. Obama’s strategic skills have been obvious for quite a while. He is perfectly prepared to hang back in a campaign, to allow attacks to pummel him and to lose news cycles or primaries to a media-centric opponent. Last autumn he refused to shift his message, even as Hillary Clinton’s massive double-digit lead did not budge for months. He focused on a plan based on delegates and caucuses, conceding that the Clintons controlled much of the rest. He took several blows – the Wright flap, the Texas and Ohio primaries, “bitter-gate” – but stuck to his game plan, which had always predicted a very narrow delegate win. And he won, slowly, carefully but unmistakably.

Over the past six weeks, against a Republican opponent this time, the pattern has repeated itself. In my view, Obama lost most of the weeks during July and August after his Berlin speech and before his convention. He allowed McCain to portray him as an inexperienced, celebrity narcissist, constructing a cult of personality on a welter of insubstantial rhetoric. The attacks worked, as they often do. They reached fever pitch last week as rumours of a “Greek temple” hosting the Obama godhead at Denver’s Invesco stadium were leaked to the press.

Read more Strategy

From The NY Times
By Maureen Dowd

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin.

Sheer heaven.

It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.

Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested.

Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?

Read more Vice President

From The Seattle PI
By Rich Miller

The U.S. is facing the worst financial crisis since the Depression. You would never know that from the Democrats’ platform or its Republican counterpart, or from listening to Barack Obama or John McCain.

While both candidates have bemoaned the ravages of the subprime crisis, they have yet to spell out steps for tackling it, such as using taxpayer money to shore up banks and housing.

“They fail to come to grips with the biggest danger that is going to hit the next president in his first few months in office: the crisis in the capital markets,” said David Smick, a Washington-based consultant to hedge funds and author of “The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy.”

The Democrats’ platform labels the crisis a “debacle” and promises to jump-start the economy with a $50 billion stimulus package. It says nothing about helping banks or bailing out the mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The draft of the Republicans’ plank supports “timely and carefully targeted aid to those hurt by the housing crisis” and opposes bailouts of private financial institutions. It doesn’t mention Fannie and Freddie.

Many Democrats shy away from tackling the credit crisis because of the party’s historical support for Fannie and Freddie. The Republicans, for their part, are reluctant to draw attention to a crisis that occurred on their watch.

Read more Financial Meltdown

From The LA Times
By Cory Booker, John Doerr and Ted Mitchell

In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America’s newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?

Bailey replied, “I don’t know.”

That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution — an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, “in the stimulus which it gives” to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.

Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH’s ability to stimulate innovation.

Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited.” Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

Read more Education

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

You can’t blame Karen Fletcher for deciding not to fight.

Had she lost, she faced the possibility of five years in prison. Under the plea agreement she accepted in early August, she got six months of house arrest, five years on probation and a $1,000 fine. But if the agreement allows Fletcher, of Donora, Pa., to avoid the more onerous punishment, it also allows us to avoid what surely would have been a violent collision between morality and the Constitution.

Karen Fletcher is a pornographer. And not just any old pornographer: The 56-year-old woman specializes in the rape, torture and murder of children. Indeed, children as young as infancy.

Here’s the twist: no children were hurt by — or even involved with — Fletcher’s pornography. She was prosecuted under federal obscenity statutes for writing “fiction” depicting the violent abuse of children. Fletcher has said the stories were her way of coping with sexual abuse she suffered as a child, a claim somewhat undercut by the fact that she was profiting from her work to the tune of 30 subscribers paying $10 a month to read the stories on her Web site.

All of which leaves me feeling … irresolute. On the one hand, you have a woman doing a repellent thing with no discernible social value. By all available evidence, Fletcher’s imagination is a garbage barge ripening under the sun. The world of arts and letters — the world, period — is not diminished by the loss of her work.

On the other hand, you have a writer prosecuted — in America! — for something she wrote. That demands a ruminative pause if not, indeed, a full stop.

Read more Morality

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

Earlier this summer, the inspector general of the US Justice Department reported that, under former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the department illegally picked immigration judges and other officials based on their conservative politics. The judges, like other career professionals in the department, are supposed to be chosen strictly on merit. Now it turns out that, not surprisingly, the judges chosen with a partisan filter are significantly more likely to reject immigrants’ bids for asylum. Ridding the immigration courts of this political bias should be a priority of Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The political vetting of job applicants began in 2004 and ended in 2007. The White House liaison to the department, Monica Goodling, frequently asked applicants about their political beliefs and researched their campaign contributions. During this period, the administration used political standards to pick 31 of the department’s total of over 200 immigration judges. Twenty-eight are still in their positions.

A research group at Syracuse University has studied the decisions of 16 of the 28 who have ruled in at least 100 cases. According to the Syracuse data, nine of the 16 rejected asylum bids at a rate significantly higher than other judges in the same jurisdiction, and three were more lenient.

Requiring the 28 judges to reapply for their positions is not the answer to the problem – the same civil service law that was supposed to ensure that merit was the only criterion in their hiring also protects them from firing. Mukasey has dismissed this suggestion by stating, “Two wrongs do not make a right.” He has promised a “swift and unambiguous response” if any immigration judges are found to be deciding cases “based on politics.” One solution, which would be permissible under civil service, would be to switch them to nonadjudicatory positions at the same salary levels. If the department does nothing to correct this injustice, it faces the prospect of immigrants’ attorneys seeking new hearings for clients whose asylum bids were rejected by judges chosen on political grounds.

Read more Tainted Judge

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a “hippie house,” where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with “peaceful kids” who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

Read more Raids

From Wired
By Ryan Singel

For the third time in a year, a secret spying court rejected an ACLU request to let some sunshine pierce its dark curtains of secrecy, ruling late Thursday that national security prohibits publishing even unclassified versions of court documents or allowing non-government lawyers to argue in the court.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was reacting to an ACLU petition in July to be part of the court’s review of new wiretapping powers handed to the Administration by Congress in July. Under the new law — known as the FISC Amendments Act — the nation’s spies can order companies like AT&T and Google to help the government drop dragnets into domestic internet and phone facilities to capture all communications suspected to involve at least one foreigner.

Previously, the law said that such wiretaps had to be approved on an individual basis if done inside the United States, while more lax rules held sway if the government wiretapped such communications outside the United States. That legality did not stop the Bush Administration, which began a secret spying program after 9/11 that included targeting these kinds of communications.

The ACLU argued that the new law expanded the government’s powers so broadly that the court needed to make exceptions to its ultra-secret hearings that never allow any opposition.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge Marya McLaughin dismissed those pleas, saying (.pdf) that there was no right for the public to know about the workings of the court.

Read more Secret Spying