There he goes again

Factcheck.org is a non-partisan site that, unsurprisingly, checks some of the favorite "facts" that political figures like to spout. They've criticized quite a few of Barack Obama's statements, but lately they've gotten REALLY exasperated with McCain:

In what has become an ongoing theme, the McCain-Palin campaign has released yet
another ad that makes false claims about Barack Obama's tax plan.

More specifically:

- The ad claims Obama will raise taxes on electricity. He hasn't proposed
any such tax. Obama does support a cap-and-trade policy that would raise the
costs of electricity, but so does McCain.

- It falsely claims he would tax
home heating oil. Actually, Obama proposed a rebate of up to $1,000 per family
to defray increased heating oil costs, funded by what he calls a windfall
profits tax on oil companies.

- The ad claims that Obama will tax "life savings." In fact, he would
increase capital gains and dividends taxes only for couples earning more than
$250,000 per year, or singles making $200,000. For the rest, taxes on
investments would remain unchanged.

It was also pretty funny last week when Factcheck attacked one of McCain's ads for...distorting one of Factcheck's very own reports:

McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding

While McCain continues to lie about Obama's tax plan, his positions (if you can call them that) on the financial crisis are astonishingly incoherent, his attacks shockingly hypocritical.

I don't think he comes close to understanding the financial crisis, but his lurching back and forth over the past couple weeks has just been staggering. First he's against regulation, now he's for it. First he's against bailouts, then he was for them, and now he seems to be against them again. Then he called for the head of the SEC to be fired, something the President has no power to do, and something even conservatives don't support; the general reaction to this great idea was "WTF?"

Hell, he doesn't even understand what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are (nor does Palin), but he knows enough to smear Obama for having an extremely tenuous relationship with one of their former chief executives, even while his own campaign manager, Rick Davis, was getting greased with millions of lobbyist dollars from Fannie and Freddie, among other extensive connections between the McCain campaign and the two mortgage giants.

When confronted with some of the bullshit, campaign strategist Steve Schmidt really blew his top, full of all kinds of self-righteous rage about the media calling McCain a liar and "being in the tank" for Obama, which Joe Klein views as a "jump the shark" moment. Fuck the shark, this is a jump the stratosphere moment. I think that's my brains oozing out of my ears...

As always, TPM has a good rundown of McCain's disastrous week:



Oh, and to top it off, Paul Krugman discovered an editorial in which John McCain said the following:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would providemore choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Ouch. You lose, sir!

Can't wait for the debates; Obama can really bust this thing open if he plays his cards right.