Today during his appearance at the Associated Press’s annual meeting, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was asked if he was “open to diverting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan” in order to catch Osama bin Laden.” McCain replied, “I would not do that unless General Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.” Watch it:

But as the Army Times points out, Petraeus has nothing to do with the decision to move troops to Afghanistan:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona may not have been paying the closest of attention last week during hearings on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. [...]

Petraeus, however, made clear last week that he has nothing to do with the decision. Testifying last week before four congressional committees, including the Senate Armed Services Committee on which McCain is the ranking Republican, Petraeus said the decision about whether troops could be shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan was not his responsibility because his portfolio is limited to the multi-national force in Iraq.

The Politico reports that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign manager, Rick Davis, a former lobbyist himself, “is quietly selling [McCain's] gameplan to the inside-the-beltway crowd,” giving presentations to major Washington lobbyists:

The previous night, Davis was giving a similar, if broader, presentation to a smaller group of the capital’s top lobbyists and p.r. gurus at Johnny’s Half Shell, a Capitol Hill watering hole.

Davis spoke to about 30 people, according to a lobbyist who attended, and described the gathering as the manager’s “first major outreach to the Washington community.”

Present were top officials from energy and utility concerns such as Nuclear Energy Institute, Edison Electric, the American Petroleum Institute, American Gas Association and Exelon. Also there were senior executives from heavyweight p.r. firms Edelman and Burson Martseller.

Earlier this year, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed a deficit-reduction plan in which he would balance the budget by 2012. “[T]hat’s my goal. … It has to be our goal, because we’re mortgaging these young people’s future,” he said in February.

Now, McCain’s advisers are abandoning this tough talk. The New York Times reports that chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the next president should not even talk about balancing the budget, adopting a “so be it” approach to the costs of the Iraq war and McCain’s corporate tax cuts:

[Holtz-Eakin] said the benefits of success in Iraq dwarfed the $150 billion annual cost. He also said that if the war and the personal and corporate tax cuts that Mr. McCain advocated added to the federal deficit and debt, so be it.

“I would like the next president not to talk about deficit reduction,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said at a symposium sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The next president should talk about what’s good for American families — education, health care at reasonable costs, pensions that are secure, opening our borders to trade. If we can take care of that, we can take care of the budget.”

Holtz-Eakin has gradually moved away from McCain’s budget plan. While originally proposing a balanced budget by 2012, Holtz-Eakin later conceded that McCain’s tax plan “will make deficits expand up front.” When asked last week about the budget , “McCain did not explain how he plans to balance the budget, but spoke generally about hoping to stimulate the economy,” the Times observed.

In reality, McCain’s tax plan costs more than $2 trillion in the first decade by doubling the Bush tax cuts, obliterating prospects of a balanced budget. As Reuters observed, McCain’s plan also leaves much unexplained, failing to explain “how he would rein in the health-care and retirement costs expected to swamp” as boomers retire, the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and interest on the $10 trillion national debt.

Observing how McCain’s budget numbers simply don’t add up, Newsweek’s Daniel Gross noted, “McCain’s fiscal program is either a joke or a fantasy.”

Now, McCain’s top economic adviser is admitting that McCain will essentially run away from the $400 billion budget deficit as president.

Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), said on Saturday of Barack Obama “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” Referring to adult African-American men as “boys” is, of course, a well-known trope of white supremacist discourse in the American south. Naturally, Davis came under criticism for being a racist. Equally naturally, Davis has now issued an apology. But As Marc Ambinder observes Davis can’t seem to apologize for what he actually did wrong:

My poor choice of words is regrettable and was in no way meant to impugn you or your integrity. I offer my sincere apology to you and ask for your forgiveness.

Though we may disagree on many issues, I know that we share the goal of a prosperous, secure future for our nation. My comment has detracted from the dialogue that we should all be having on legitimate policy differences and in no way reflects the personal and professional respect I have for you.

But nobody impugned Obama’s integrity here, the issue is that only racist white people refer to grown-up black men as “boy.” Obama and Davis are both in their fourties so it’s not even as if some much older member of congress engaged in the “poor choice of words” here. Meanwhile, it’s very difficult to infer anything about a person’s motives or general sentiments from a single incident, but it’s certainly not reassuring that Davis seems unwilling to grasp what the nature of the problem is here. You would think that a decent person who accidentally stumbled into a problem here would be more genuinely contrite.

In his New York Times column today, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks sound like Karl Marx’s “famous statement about religion.” On the Brian and the Judge radio show today, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano asked Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) if Obama is “a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case?”

“I must say that’s a good question,” replied Lieberman, before stepping back to say that he would “hesitate to say he’s a Marxist”:

NAPOLITANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.

Listen here:

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Last Wednesday, ABC News reported that, beginning in 2002, top officials in the White House specifically approved torture techniques, including waterboarding. On Friday, President Bush admitted that he, too, was aware of and approved the discussions. Yet the White House press corps has yet to ask the White House spokesmen a single question on the issue, in the three briefings held since the story broke. (Luckily, reporters had time to cover the Little League tee-ball all-star game and the President’s weekend plans to clear brush at his Crawford ranch.)

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