In last week’s Democratic debate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said he was told by an Army captain that his platoon’s resources in Afghanistan were shortchanged because of the Iraq war. Seeking to turn Obama’s remarks into a political attack, Sen. John Warner (R-VA) immediately questioned the authenticity of the statement. But ABC News contacted the Army captain, who backed up Obama’s story. And now the New York Times reports that soldiers in Afghanistan are still strapped for resources:

And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”

Jon Soltz and VetVoice have more.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is fond of presenting himself as a true enemy of Washington, D.C’s lobbying culture, claiming that he’s “the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.” But as the Washington Post noted yesterday, McCain’s political organization is actually built on the backs of lobbyists who play a central role in his quest for higher office.

Charlie Black, who serves as McCain’s chief political adviser, “is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.” Though he is currently playing a prominent role in the McCain campaign, Black “is still being paid by his firm.”

On Friday, Black told the National Journal that he doesn’t think his continued lobbying is a problem for the anti-lobbying image of his “client,” John McCain:

Well, it’s perfectly fine as long as I am able to make the distinction between giving advice to McCain and representing clients. It’s the same principle as when you have multiple clients and you handle them all differently. You don’t talk to one client about what you do for the other. In my volunteer role with McCain, I consider him a client.

Some of Black’s other clients currently “have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which” his “client,” John McCain is a member. As TPM’s Greg Sargent noted yesterday, Black “does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus.”

It’s hard to imagine that Black’s seat on the bus has been bad for business. Firedoglake has more on his lobbying history here.

Tons of interesting stuff in Patrick Healy’s article on Hillary Clinton supporters reconciling themselves to probable defeat. This bit lurking near the end is, if true, pretty telling:

In interviews with 15 aides and advisers to Mrs. Clinton, not a single one expressed any regrets that they were not working for Mr. Obama. Indeed, some aides said they were baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton.

Whether or not you think the more “seasoned” candidate ought to win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer who could be genuinely “baffled” by experience not proving to be a winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work. Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn’t win the nomination?

Both former attorney general John Ashcroft and New Jersey U.S. attorney Chris Christie have refused to testify before the House Judiciary subcommittee about a lucrative federal monitoring contact Christie awarded Ashcroft. Yesterday, however, the committee revealed that it has scheduled a hearing on Feb. 26 to vote on a motion to subpoena Ashcroft.

“Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Peal Jam have contributed tunes to the anti-war soundtrack for a documentary about a U.S. soldier paralyzed in Iraq. The 30-song, two-disc album ‘Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran’ will be released March 18 via Warner Music’s Sire Records label. All proceeds from the sale of the album will benefit Iraq Veterans Against the War.”

Given that I’ve never heard of anyone who believes that political parties face zero-sum choices between base-mobilization and persuasion strategies, nor have I ever heard of anyone who denies that both are part of political success, I’m a bit puzzled as to why The Democratic Strategist would bother to host a “debate” on this issue in which we’ll discover that liberals and centrists alike agree that both are important and both sides just claim that adopting policies they prefer on the merits is also the key to electoral success. That said, it is worth pointing out that DLC honcho Al From is trying to trick you with this chart:

From would clearly like you to believe that the combination of increased margin and higher turnout among self-identified Democrats in 2006 relative to 2004 was a smaller factor in the Democratic Party’s superior election outcome than was the even larger increase in margin combined with lower turnout among self-identified independents. If you check the math, though, you’ll see that this isn’t true.

In 2004, 37 percent of the electorate were Democrats, and Kerry got 89 percent of their votes. Thus 32.9 percent of the electorate was Dems voting Dem. Independents were 26 percent of the electorate and 49 percent of them voted for Kerry, so 12.7 percent of the electorate was indies voting Dem. In 2006, 38 percent of the electorate were Democrats, and 93 percent of them voted Democratic. Thus 35.3 percent of the electorate was Democrats voting Democratic, an improved performance of 2.4 percentage points. Independents were 26 percent of the electorate, and 57 percent of them voted Democratic, making 14.8 percent of the electorate indies voting Democratic, an improved performance of 1.1 percentage points.

In short, contrary to From’s chart, it’s simply false to say that “the difference” between 2004 was that “centrist voters with loose party attachments voted Democratic in much higher numbers.” The Democrats improved their performance among both groups, but the combination of turnout and vote-share factors clearly indicates that improved performance among self-IDed Dems was a more important factor than was improved performance among self-IDed Republicans. What’s more, note that the numbers I used were identical to the exit polls From is using in his chart. But he presents the numbers in a such a way (using the change in margin of victory rather than showing actual vote shares) as to make it difficult to do a quick calculation of the change in performance.

I don’t personally have a huge dog in this fight. As everyone agrees, both groups are important and it’s not an either/or choice. But it’s nice to have reviews of exit poll be done accurately.

Today in the Washington Post, Joseph Margulies and George Brent Mickum — defense attorneys for Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah — describe the prisoner’s mental insanity after being held by the United States for years:

Regardless of whether he was “insane” to begin with, he has gone through quite an ordeal since his arrest in Pakistan in March 2002. Shuttled through CIA “black sites” around the world, he was subjected to a sustained course of interrogation designed to instill what a CIA training manual euphemistically calls “debility, dependence and dread.” Zubaydah’s world became freezing rooms alternating with sweltering cells. Screaming noise replaced by endless silence. Blinding light followed by dark, underground chambers. Hours confined in contorted positions. And, as we recently learned, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding. We do not know what remains of his mind, and we will probably never know what he experienced.

They added that “if we cannot learn the facts and share them with others, the truth is only what the administration reports it to be.”