... All said they were impressed with Kerry's national security credentials, but they talked more about domestic issues. Kathryn Paolilli, 46, a mother of four who voted for Bush in 2000, said her main complaint about the president is his infusion of Christianity into politics. She smiled widely and nodded when Kerry said: "I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, 'I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.' "...

... Obama's father was a goat herder in Africa who won a scholarship to study in America. He described his mother's youth in Kansas, raised by a couple who built a good life with educations they obtained through the GI Bill and a home they got with a federal loan.

"My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation," ...

The American general [Karpinski] who headed the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib personally witnessed abuses there, an Iraqi man alleged in a federal lawsuit protesting his treatment. ...

... SPEAK NOT: [The] GOP [doesn't] seem too bothered by the fact that ... Ron Reagan will address the Democratic convention tonight. They're clearly more troubled, however, by the fact that Reagan's mother, Nancy, apparently won't be speaking at theirs. It's no secret that Mrs. Reagan is dismayed by George W. Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, which holds enormous promise for future disease cures. Researchers admit the near-term potential of stem cells for Alzheimer's patients like Ronald Reagan is quite limited, but Mrs. Reagan doesn't seem to care: "I do not expect her at our convention," Republican chairman Ed Gillespie admitted in a press briefing here this morning.

But Gillespie wasn't content to leave reporters with the impression that Mrs. Reagan was boycotting the convention over stem cells. Instead, he cast her as a traumatized old widow. "Let's be a little thoughtful here," the GOP chairman lectured inquisitive reporters. "Mrs. Reagan's been through a lot this year. And whether she determines she wants to come to our convention this year is Mrs. Reagan's decision, and no one else's. ... Just keep in mind for a moment the year Mrs. Reagan has had, and be understanding."

Nancy Reagan is undoubtedly drained and in mourning. But that wasn't enough to keep her from speaking last month at the public christening of an aircraft carrier named after her husband. Sure, a national convention is a much bigger ordeal than a ceremony naming an aircraft carrier. But I have a feeling that's not what's going on here--and that Gillespie knows it.

--Michael Crowley

... One of the revelations in the 9/11 commission report was the casualness of the resort to war. On the afternoon of Sept. 11, Donald Rumsfeld spoke of attacking Saddam Hussein, and President Bush began asking about Iraq the next day. Older men blithely found a war for younger men and women to die in.

The result is the unbearable emptiness in homes like the Walters's all across America - and, even more often, in Iraq. The American victims are disproportionately from working-class families, not well represented either in White House meetings or in this newspaper's readership. It is those families of the dead and wounded who are bearing 99.9 percent of the burden of this war.
When hawks say that the Iraq war was worth the price, they should remember that that price is measured in the lives of people like Don Walters, forever young, forever heroes, forever gone. ...

... Rangel believes a draft would help deter unilateral, preemptive American action against Iraq by raising the political cost of war. A draft would also result in a more equitable class representation in the nation's military, which Rangel correctly describes as "Americans making the sacrifice for this great country."...

...Those findings are bad news for Democrats assembled in Boston for their national convention, because white evangelicals and born-again Christians far outnumber blacks and Hispanic combined. ...

... And the ‘liberals’ whose entire cause is their cult of secular humanism, find the expansion of economic liberty and democratic values anathema to their evil designs...

The latest polling results released on CNN indicates that the majority of Americans feel no more secure now than on 9/11. No wonder. Despite all the words written about the Commander in Chief’s about homeland security, America’s borders are just as porous today as they were on the day before the attack on New York’s Twin Towers: 9/10/01. .... [Ditto] on our Commander in Chief ‘s doctrine of preemption: invading and fighting the terrorists over there so that we will not have to fight them here at home? We were lead to believe that by invading Iraq and destroying its nonexistent WMD, we would strike a mighty blow right in the heart of terrorism at its root, capturing and stopping the terrorists over there in Iraq, before they strike us again at home. It should be noted that many of us did not buy in to that phony claim. Still, the question remains, “Does America now feel safer against a terrorist attack than you did on 09/10/01. The majority of Americans say, “No.” ...

... John Yoo, now a California law professor, too, has all the credentials that President Bush wants, including a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two years’ service to Attorney General John Ashcroft, and authorship of the key memos that say the President as Commander in Chief can disregard any laws, national or international, on the treatment of prisoners. As a sign of what a second Bush term holds for judicial appointments, regardless of the embarrassing revelations about Yoo’s authorship of the torture memos, the Commander in Chief just appointed Yoo to the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group.

....One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president." ...

... One year ago, conventional political wisdom held that the Democratic presidential nominee would be in trouble right now. After spending all his cash in a tough primary battle, the thinking went, the candidate would have to spend April through June scrambling to raise money for the general campaign. In the meantime, Bush's team would be free to use that three-month window to define the Democrats' front-runner through attack ads the latter couldn't afford to counter.

Things turned out differently: the attack ads flung at Senator John Kerry have not gone unanswered. In fact, in addition to Kerry's own ads, more than $15 million of political advertising has run in the past three months, most of it bashing Bush, most of it in key battleground states–without costing the Kerry campaign a dime. The ads have been created and paid for by organizations known as "527s," named for the tax-code section that defines them. These groups do not fall under Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulations, as long as they limit their activities; most significantly, they cannot support a candidate directly or coordinate their efforts with a candidate's campaign.

They can, however, accept contributions of unlimited size, from anybody. Depending on your perspective, this is either an unsavory back-door maneuver around campaign-finance reform, or an exciting new outlet for political discourse.

Either way, it's probably a big reason why John Kerry entered July in a dead heat in the polls despite the tens of millions of dollars spent on negative advertising against him–and one of the reasons why Bush's favorability ratings are at an all-time low.

The best-known of these 527s is probably the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, formed last September by the progressive California-based MoveOn.org; its most recent television ad, running in Ohio, blames George W. Bush for losing American jobs to outsourcing. The most ambitious group, however, is an interrelated trio planning to spend more than $100 million on this election: Americans Coming Together (ACT), the Media Fund, and Joint Victory Campaign 2004, all operating out of Washington, DC. Its TV and radio ads include "No Oil Company Left Behind" and "Bush and Halliburton."

They include a range of people, from the business elite (George Soros, Lewis Cullman) to the glitterati (Stephen Bing, Susie Tompkins Buell), from the well-born (Anne Getty Earhart, Alida Rockefeller Messinger, Linda Pritzker) to the self-made (Andrew Rappaport, Marcy Carsey, Agnes Varis). There's even a drug-reformer billionaire (Peter Lewis)–and an environmentalist (John A. Harris). ... [read on]