John McCain is the soul of magnanimity.

A.J. Rossmiller on meritocracy in education.

Either I'm missing something, or this doesn't make a lick o' sense:

In Erie, Pa., Mr. Obama criticizing a comment Mr. McCain made Thursday on Bloomberg Television. In the interview, Mr. McCain conceded that people were facing "very challenging times" but went on to say that "there’s been great progress economically" during the Bush administration.

"John McCain went on television and said that there has been great progress economically over the last seven and a half years," Mr. Obama told the audience. "John McCain thinks our economy has made great progress under George W. Bush."

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, called Mr. Obama’s remarks "recklessly dishonest."

Huh?

Update: Josh Marshall wondered the same thing.

The New York Times half-realizes that ["critics say"] John McCain is a big, big liar.

The Washington Independent's Mike Lillis:

OK -- so the price of gas is at an all-time high, and everyone agrees that much of the reason is that demand for gas is at an all-time high. So what's the solution to this dilemma?

Well, if you're Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) it's easy: You propose legislation, as he did yesterday, to scrap the federal gas tax for the entire summer. (The idea did well on cable news.) That would encourage greater consumption, leading to even greater demand, leading to higher pri -- Wait a minute! Wouldn't that have precisely the opposite effect to that we want?

In McCain's defense, the economy is not really his strong point.

Hillary Clinton, on "activists":

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

Seriously: if this keeps up, she's going to end up endorsing McCain in the general, and that's just going to be embarrassing for everyone.

(Via AMERICAblog, Daily Kos.)

John Edwards on the Colbert Report:



(Clinton and Obama both put in an appearance, too, but weren't as funny.)

I was going to pseudo-liveblog* last night's debate, but the reviews are so abysmal that I'm honestly not sure I have the stomach to even watch it. To wit:

• AMERICAblog: "the worst debate ever." (John Aravosis also posts a list very similar to this one.)
  
• Kos: Gibson and Stephanopoulos are "idiots." (Kos also links to Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell, who calls the debate "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate this year.")
  
• Hunter: "After the first forty minutes of last night's Democratic debate, it was clear we were watching something historic. Not historic in a good way, mind you, but historic in the sense of being something so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths."
  
• MyDD's Todd Beeton: "tabloid hour."
  
• TAPPED's Sam Boyd: "You know who lost? America."
  
• Josh Marshall: "genuinely awful." (Marshall also wondered, "What happened to the League of Women Voters? Can we give the debates back to them?")
  
• Attytood: a "televised train wreck" that "disgraced [the] profession of journalism."
  
• Jon Stewart: "The first hour of last night's debate was a sixty-minute master class in questions that elevate out-of-context remarks and trivial insipid miscues into subjects of national discourse... which is my job."
  
• Oh, and some guy named "Barack Obama" or something: "It took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people."
  
• Also, the people behind that great john.he.is video from a couple of months ago made an ABC News parody that's worth watching (via AMERICAblog).

There are plenty more where those came from, but I think you get the idea. (Apparently the only person with access to a keyboard who actually liked the thing was David Brooks.)

So, point is: no way I'm watching that. Sorry, loyal readers (ha!); you'll just have to stick with Wonkette [Part I, Part II].

* - Tape-delay-blog, if you will.

Other Deep Thought (in the manner of that last Deep Thought)

When you sit back and think about it, our energy system -- cars that burn oil; electricity generation that burns coal -- is pretty laughably obsolete.

Deep Thought (in the manner of Atrios)

James Spader and the writers of Boston Legal should take a sabbatical from television and hire themselves out to members of the plaintiff's bar.

The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere.

(Thank you, TAPPED.)

Finally got around to watching this behemoth of a Frontline last night, and I'd very highly recommend it. (You can even watch it online, if you're willing to sit in front of your computer for four hours.) It runs from just after September 11th until just before the surge (or what Condoleezza Rice called the "Clear, Hold, Build" strategy, when she proposed it in 2005), and it's fascinating. In case you don't have time to sit through it, though, I've assembled a Cliff's Notes version below:

These people...	...came off as...
Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Jay Garner	reasonably competent, but out of the loop
Condi Rice, George Tenet, Tommy Franks	semi-willing pawns
Philip Zelikow	having a comically deep voice
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz	scary; crazy (like a fox?)
Cofer Black, Ahmed Chalabi	crazy (like a crazy person)
L. Paul Bremer	borderline developmentally disabled
George W. Bush	a terrible, terrible speaker; not a very good president*

Good times.

* - Had to get his own box, because he is the president. Do not assume that means he didn't fit into any of the other categories.