John McCain's son Jimmy is a 19-year-old with a 71-year-old father and a 48-year-old brother. That must be pretty weird.

"Army Worried by Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq," says the New York Times. "You've got to be kidding me," say tens of thousands of PTSD-riddled soldiers.

I'll tell you: this Martin Luther King fellow... I think he's going places.

(On the Emmanuel Cleaver scale of mediocrity, you've gotta figure MLK is at least an 11.)

(Or, to paraphrase John McCain, "Martin Luther who-now?")

Tolerance is on the march!

• Example 1: Lou Dobbs doesn't like it when these lilly-livered, cotton-picki- erm... bla- uhh... politicians try to tell him how to talk about race.
• Example 2: CIA Directory Michael Hayden is worried that al-Qaeda may be trying to recruit people who look, you know... unsuspicious:

  Hayden: [They] are bringing operatives into that region for training, operatives that, a phrase I would use, Tim, wouldn't attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles with you when you're coming back from overseas.
  Russert: Look, look... look Western?
  Hayden: Look Western, who, who... who would be able to come into this country with--again, without attracting the kind of attention that others might.

  Hayden's chief of staff then proceeded to set fire to the building before Hayden could add, "And by 'others,' I mean 'the coloreds,' Tim."

A list of John McCain's finer moments, courtesy of Wonkette.

Here's a quick point that I've been thinking about for a while: what's the deal with conservative talking heads defaulting to "Mrs. Clinton" rather than "Sen. Clinton"? Is it just an attempt to reinforce the connection between Hillary and Bill? Or is it something creepier (for example, an attempt to subtly remind people that she's a lady [or, God forbid, a wife])? I suspect it's the former (mostly because I'm unwilling to ascribe such an uncomfortable level of misogyny to people who seem relatively rational [if giant and conservative]), but it does give a person pause.

From a Reuters story about the Bertie Ahern resignation:

Over the last six months Ahern has repeatedly been called back to answer questions over payments he received from friends and businessmen in the 1990s when he did not have a bank account despite being finance minister.

Now, maybe that's some sort of a misunderstanding (there are a couple of typos earlier in the article, so it was clearly rushed to press), but if it's not... what the hell? How do you not have a bank account?

Foot fault.


(Or whatever those are called in bowling.)

The Clinton campaign is playing with fire.

The New York senator’s presidential campaign ended February with $38 million in the bank, according to a report filed last week with the Federal Election Commission, but only $16 million of that can be spent on her battle with Obama.

The rest can be spent only in the general election, if she makes it that far, and must be returned if she doesn’t. If she had paid off the $8.7 million in unpaid bills she reported as debt and had not loaned her campaign $5 million, the cash she would have had available at the end of last month to spend on television ads and other upfront expenses would have been less than $2 million.

[Emphasis added to draw attention to the fact that the Clinton camp is a deadbeat.] They never should have been approved for that sub-prime mortgage.

So it's now pretty clear that McCain has violated campaign finance laws, to the point that even CNN has noticed (-ish*). To quote the Boston Globe (via AMERICAblog):

The senator from Arizona has spent $58.4 million on his Republican primary effort. Those who have committed to public financing can spend no more than $54 million on their primary bid.

McCain's lawyers contend that the spending cap no longer applies. The senator was certified to enter the matching-funds program last year when he was starved for cash. But once he started to win, he decided to hold off. On Feb. 6, after his Super Tuesday victories, he wrote to the Federal Election Commission to announce he would withdraw. His lawyers said that gave him freedom to spend as much as he wanted.

But David Mason, chairman of the commission, wrote to McCain's campaign last month to alert him that the commission had not yet granted that withdrawal request, and that the commission would first have to vote on the matter.

I'm a bit too cynical to believe any of this'll actually end up hurting McCain, but by all rights it should be devastating (he wrote the law!). At Firedoglake, you can sign onto a complaint, to be delivered to the FEC on Monday. They're just a few hundred signatures short of their goal of 30,000.

[A good summary of the original loan is here; a note about the FEC complaint filed a month ago by the DNC is here.]

* - Maybe they reported it more extensively elsewhere, but I wouldn't want to give them too much credit based on the clip I just linked to, since that clip wasn't so much "look what McCain has done" as "look what those wacky liberals are saying McCain has done."

The trailer for "Recession: The Movie." Quite well done.

(Via AMERICAblog.)