Look who’s giving John McCain attention, and not disparagingly. The New York Times.

Feuding Democrats have handed Senator John McCain the gift of time. How well he uses it may determine his chance to beat them in November.

At the moment, Republicans can savor protracted warfare between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. As the Democratic rivals trade attacks, Mr. McCain, already the presumptive Republican nominee, has crept ahead of both in national polls.

But they had to get the usual gripes in there, too.

Yet Mr. McCain’s advisers recognize their long-term challenges in a remarkably threatening political environment. Voters remain weary of the Iraq war, worried about the economy and disenchanted with the lame-duck Republican president.

Let’s don’t leave out how disenchanted we all our with a lame Congress that has a lower approval rating than the president’s. All three presidential… click here to read whole article and make comments

There’s been a lot of speculation about where the former president has been lately and why we haven’t heard from him. He has been campaigning for Hillary quietly, but he’s stepping up again, in visibility and fervor. And quickly drawing reaction from the Obama campaign.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is trying to clarify comments by former President Clinton that seemed to question Barack Obama’s patriotism — comments an Obama aide likened to Joseph McCarthy.

Clinton’s campaign said the comments were being misinterpreted and quickly posted a clarification on its Web site. But retired Air Force Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak said he was disappointed by the comments and compared them to those of McCarthy, the 1950s communist-hunting senator.

Bringing the heat.

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the… click here to read whole article and make comments

The news stories are out there all over the place today that Barack Obama’s passport files were breached. For most of Friday morning, the headlines carried some version of Obama’s outrage over his personal information being accessed, and some version of Condoleeza Rice’s apology to him for that mistake.

But by mid-day, the rest of the story came out.

All three major presidential candidates have had their passport files breached, the State Department confirmed Friday.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain were informed that their files were improperly accessed not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apologized to Barack Obama for a similar violation.

Interesting, how quickly Obama seized the chance to jump on something to re-direct press attention and turn it into a personal violation.

Obama’s campaign called the breach of his records “outrageous” when the news was brought to their attention Thursday,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Or were they never allowed to close? More news articles and commentaries are looking at the scorching, angry sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the common experience in black churches in America and saying that whites just need to understand their context. Is that making an excuse to enable open-ended hostility?

This ABC News piece is provocative.

Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, espouses a philosophy known as a black liberation theology, a movement developed in the late 1960s that advocated for a more militant approach to ending racism. The theology grounds the ideas of the black power movement in Christian doctrine.

But beyond black liberation theology, scholars and his fellow ministers put Wright in an even older tradition, in which black ministers, like the biblical prophets, used their pulpits to chide the nation into moral action.

And apparently still do, we’re… click here to read whole article and make comments

Those are three subjects some people used to say they avoided in polite company. Now, they’re the center of a national debate that escapes practically no one.

We have been thrust into a divisive issue by the campaign that promised unity.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is absolutely right, as he said in his Philadelphia speech on Tuesday, that Americans are “hungry” for his “message of unity.”

But his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — and not only that, but his whole liberal-populist agenda — raises profound questions whether he is capable of delivering on it.

By choosing — and sticking with — the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual adviser, Obama has damaged his ability to heal the nation’s racial wounds. And his agenda offers nothing that will attract Republicans and end political polarization.

Mort Kondracke is not a Republican mouthpiece, nor a ‘right-wing conservative,’… click here to read whole article and make comments

- as it’s being called now - has only started these past few days.

Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America’s racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial sermons.

Similarly, Obama also has only recently given a much fuller accounting of his relationship with indicted political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a longtime friend, who his campaign once described as just one of “thousands of donors.”

Until yesterday, Obama said the only thing controversial he knew about Rev. Wright was his stand on issues relating to Africa, abortion and gay marriage.

“I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial,” Obama said at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, earlier this month.

“He has said some things that are considered controversial because he’s considered that… click here to read whole article and make comments

…much of the country is questioning Barack Obama’s judgment.

If, as suggested, one of his tasks was to…

Somehow convince the electorate that his long and close association with Rev. Wright — including donating thousands of dollars to his church — was not an egregious error in judgment bearing upon his fitness to be president.

…many commentators, and some his admirers before now, think he failed.

Obama acknowledged hearing Wright make controversial statements, although not as offensive as those played recently on television. But he never explained why he hadn’t immediately confronted Wright at that time. And his suggestion that Wright’s statements were the product of surviving as a black man in the environment of the Fifties and Sixties, that one shouldn’t be surprised to hear them in a black church, is a calumny: most black Americans of Wright’s age, however wronged they might’ve been, no… click here to read whole article and make comments

That’s what Rev. Jesse Jackson called the controversy over Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright’s history of inflammatory preaching and Obama’s speech today that addressed the tensions surrounding it.

The address presented Sen. Obama, who leads Sen. Hillary Clinton in the delegate tally for the Democratic nomination, with two important tests: show voters that he could beat back an unfolding political crisis while dispelling the notion that he shares his pastor’s views that seem to contradict his call to transcend the nation’s racial divisions. 

So what did we learn? For one thing, that it’s time to put the issue of race out there on the center of the table and take a good look at it instead of dancing around it anymore, for one agenda or another.

“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said.  “We would be making… click here to read whole article and make comments

It’s no doubt in the works right now to find out where Sen. Obama was on the day in question, whether listening to blistering attacks on America, or giving a stump speech somewhere else.

It may have been a small issue to media paying any attention back then, but at odds today is this:

Barack Obama’s attendance at a Jeremiah Wright sermon on July 22, 2007. In the sermon, Wright blamed the “white arrogance” of America’s majority for the woes of the world. Davis noted that Wright emphasized the point by referring to the United States as the “United States of White America.” According to Davis, Obama nodded in apparent agreement as these statements were made.

Other sermons will no doubt emerge. The media have known these things for a long time and kept quiet about any speculation or influence or questions of judgment. But they’re out now, and the spin… click here to read whole article and make comments

One wonders if the pro-abortion movement realizes how much they’re doing for the senator. After all, some pro-lifers have not trusted his stand on this issue.

A leading pro-abortion group says John McCain’s position against abortion the “best-kept secret in politics” and continued to attack the likely Republican nominee. NARAL president Nancy Keenan sent a fundraising letter to her group’s supporters on Wednesday and urged them to make his pro-life views more well known.

That would be good for the senator. Maybe it will solidify his standing even more.

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