RALSTON: I guess what the American people want to know though Senator, is what is the real difference between you and John McCain. You are running this ad tying him to the industry saying that he has taken all of these contributions, but as you well know there is a story out today about how you supported the Dick Cheney bill and he opposed it. That bill gave subsidies to the oil and gas companies, John McCain opposed the bill saying those are tax breaks for those companies, Barack Obama favored it.

SEN. OBAMA: Hold on a second Jon, I thought I was talking to you instead of debating John McCain, but I am happy to let you serve as his proxy. The fact of the matter is that I supported that energy bill saying at the time that those tax breaks were wrong but also recognizing that this was the largest investment in alternative energy in history. And that it was important for us, for the solar industry to get off the ground in places like Nevada, for to get wind kicked off the ground, that that was something that we had to do and I immediately said during that time and subsequently that we should strip out those tax breaks for oil companies. I would point out that in December of last year, we had a vote to strip out those tax breaks for oil companies, there was one Senator that did not vote on that measure, and that was John McCain

and

And a big part of the reason I don't support gas-tax vacation, off-shore drilling, etc...
     - The gas tax also supplies my bread and butter

With you, who needs enemies? Good gawd!

The question of whether John McCain and Republicans have ever used racially-coded language aside (surely, but often deliberate, and how often unaware even to themselves?), the one thing that comes across to me is the ridiculously abstract identity of the racially-baited audience in the video. The video goes seamlessly from McCain's campaign, to rightwing net groups, the Clinton's, New Yorker, NY Times photographers, etc., etc. All words and images subjected to the "dog whistle" analysis exist without the context of an audience - words and images are essentially and authoritatively racist, not contextually and meaningfully racist.

In its totality, the audience collapses into some kind of null space in which political and class and racial identities disappear, and the audience for the "dog whistle" is Democratic and Republican, rich and poor, white and black. There is no historical or social content. The speaker - Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, NY Times, New Yorker  - moves effortlessly from accusation to accusation without deeper contextual analysis to understand who the audiences - southern white elites, northern white laborers, primary Democrats (there all the same), the nation's newspaper's readers, and bourgeois periodical readers - are for the allegedly racists utterances.

For me, this is why BTD's rebuke of Josh Marshall and formerly A-list bloggers is important. The accusations of racism against Bill Clinton or Geraldine Ferraro in the primaries complicated the  question of when and where dog whistles are being deliberately used by the McCain campaign. The numerous charges (smears) of "dog whistling" from Obama's official and unofficial supporters took place in a vacuum - in which the presence and identity of the audience is of no consideration. As a result, the left blogosphere's "barking moonbats"  have actually enabled FNB politics with their "shrieking hypersensitivity" during the past 7 months (paraphrasing Perlstein). In the minds of such bloggers, the racist has become such an abstract figure that we are all racists now, and every utterance in any situation is abstractly racist.

I want to scream at them, all of them: GROW THE
 F #$%## up.    Barnicle and Gregory cannot contain their glee at the prospect of trashing the Clintons.  And Maddow sneers at the mention of Hillary's name.  Their vendetta against the Clintons continues and it p*sses me off.
I WANT THEM TO BE TAKEN to TASK for their misogyny, their obnoxiousness and stupidity.  

link

"Here is a man who grew up in a broken home whose father left at a young age and who was raised by a single mother," said David R. Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has previously served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. "It's an admirable story of rising from rags to riches, one that resonates. In many ways he's a modern Horatio Alger.

"Now the McCain campaign wants to create a dramatically different narrative," Gergen continued. "They want you to see him as a man who went to fancy schools; who has had the beneficiary of an elite life, and is increasingly removed from the mainstream of normal American life. They want to create someone who is 'The Other.' That's what they did for John Kerry. They succeeded in turning his medals of honor in Vietnam into a liability.

Sad. I used to think Gergen was part of the reality-based community. Here, Gergen is peddling a fantasy-biography of Obama while the McCain campaign actually is telling something closer to the truth--unless EVERY person raised by a step-parent and parent was raised "by a single mother."

Word is that a poll in Wisconsin is on the way.  It has been months since one was done.  But first, the pollsters had to ask how we feel about Favre.

Could/would the military officers on the jury dare to acquit entirely anyone connected with OBL?

OK now. If BushBoy is charged with war crimes or crimes against humanity for his actions to invade Iraq, will his drivers be subject to arrest and trial? The pilots of Air Force One? Rest of the crew?  Cheney's crews? Rummy's office cleaners? Ad infinitum?

The voters for supporting him? (I have evidence on blogs that I never supported Bush! Really!)

Artist Steve Powers has opened the new "Waterboard Thrill Ride" at Coney Island in New York. "It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam -- in this case there's SpongeBob SquarePants saying, `It don't Gitmo better!'" The New York Times describes the experience:

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit's nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

Powers's "initial idea was for real people to undergo real waterboarding, right there in real time" but "his wife was among the first to point out that that might be a tad over the line." However, he claims "the purpose of his art isn't to tell people what to think, just to get them thinking in the first place."

AND

Today, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Brian Benczkowski to serve as his chief of staff. TPMMuckracker reminds readers that Benczkowski served as one of the Justice Department's torture apologists, arguing that if torture is conducted to prevent an attack "rather than for the purpose of humiliation," it doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions' ban on "outrages upon personal dignity" and thus is likely acceptable:

"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public. [...]

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that "to rise to the level of an outrage" and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct "must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned."

Last month, Mukasey declared that people who perpetrated torture "cannot and should not be prosecuted" or even investigated.