The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler writes that President Bush and John McCain’s joint fund-raiser in Phoenix tomorrow will be the “first time in three months” the two will be seen together. But the McCain campaign is trying its hardest to ensure cameras don’t capture the moment:

The pair will be seen together before TV cameras only fleetingly, at the airport as Mr. Bush departs on Air Force One, and there are no plans for either to formally say anything. [...]

A senior adviser to Sen. McCain said the campaign considered the risk of having the candidate appear with the president at all but concluded there was no way to avoid it given that the event was in Sen. McCain’s home state.

A McCain adviser underscored that “the time Sen. McCain spends with the president will be limited.”

Digg It!

[Isaac]

Over at The Plank, my co-blogger Josh Patashnik has an excellent post on how politicians and pundits badly miss the mark when evaluating the importance of the vice presidential selection. Rather than obsessing over the short term political gain–which according to the available evidence may not even exist–candidates selecting running mates should focus on the fact that their choice will be closely identified with their party for decades to come.

In my mind, the most ridiculous aspect of the veepstakes frenzy is the focus on vice presidential “qualities” that will supposedly help the presidential nominee. This can be seen most humorously in John Heilemann’s New York magazine article on the “possibility” of a McCain-Bloomberg ticket. The idea is crazy enough on its own, but this quote in the essay is priceless, and perfectly captures the degree to which the issue is blown completely out of proportion: “The GOP is losing on the economy by 10 to 15 points,” says Doug Schoen, who served as Bloomberg’s pollster in his mayoral runs. “With Mike on the ticket, that gap would quickly, dramatically close.” Instead of disputing this absurd statement, Heilemann even more ridiculously adds that the “McCain–Bloomberg–Arnold Schwarzenegger troika” would put California in play for the GOP!

Anyway, let this stand as a plea for no more Veep talk until at least late July. Okay, fine, how about June 1st?

The Financial Times notes today that the “departure from office of US President George W. Bush will give a ‘very promising‘ outlook to international talks on global warming and the $64bn market in greenhouse gas emissions,” according Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top official on climate change:

“The US is very promising. All three [presidential] candidates are interested in climate change, all three want international engagement, all three favour a cap-and-trade approach [on emissions], which augurs well for the continuation of the carbon market,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty to the Kyoto protocol, in an interview with the Financial Times.

“The market in carbon was worth $64bn (40bn, £32bn) last year and is forecast to be worth $3,000bn by 2020 if the US joins it,” the Times adds. The fact that the three candidates are “willing to negotiate a new [climate change] treaty and support the setting up of an emissions market in the US –- a policy vehemently opposed by Mr Bush -– has come as a relief to carbon market investors.”

[Isaac]

First off, thanks to Matt for his hospitality. I’ll try and blog a bit about the exciting NBA playoffs, which seem to have started months ago and show no signs of ending (or, for that matter, fatigue). But Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment in this week’s New Yorker is a good place to start, because it makes the connection between Hillary Clinton’s popular vote strategy, and the HBO movie ‘Recount,’ which premiered last night and was both diverting and unexceptional.

The problem with the Clinton strategy–and I don’t mean in political terms–is not that it shows her willingness to change positions in the name of political expediency. Rather, it’s that if the popular vote had been the metric all along, Obama would have used a different strategy that did not rely so heavily on caucus states and their (generally) small populations.

The strange thing about 2000 was that it was Bush who pursued a strategy that should have netted him a popular vote win; he spent many of the campaign’s last 72 hours in states like California and New Jersey, where he ended up getting destroyed. Meanwhile, Gore was working hard to win Florida and thus an electoral vote majority, but still managed to beat out Bush by half-a-million votes.

Incidentally, is there any doubt that if the Florida recount had gone the other way, Karl Rove would have been branded as a dope for allowing his candidate to spend time outside of Florida and Pennsylvania in that last week before the polls opened?

Via Brad Delong, Stan Collender thinks the Bush administration embezzled $15 billion and nobody in the press seems to have noticed or really cared. Commenting on this report of money that can’t be properly accounted for in Iraq spending, he says “it appears as if virtually every procedure and law designed to prevent just this type of malfeasance was circumvented.”

In an editorial this morning, the New York Times chides President Bush for his resistance to the GI Bill, which he has pledged to veto:

Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. [...]

So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino quickly unleashed an attack on the editorial, claiming the editorial board “doesn’t let the facts get in the way of expressing its vitriolic opinions — no matter how misleading they may be.” Yet, Perino offered no facts of her own to substantiate her anger.

Two of the White House’s key Senate allies — Ted Stevens and John McCain — have been disingenuously spewing misinformation about the GI Bill this weekend. Stevens warned of a “mass exodus” from the military if the 21st Century GI Bill goes into law. Similarly, McCain said today that the Webb GI Bill “would hurt the military and our country very badly.”

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, these fear-mongering claims about the GI Bill have little basis in reality. A recent CBO report showed that any loss in reenlistment rates is entirely made up for by increased military recruits.

The NYT editorial correctly notes, “[A]s a long-term investment in human capital, in education and job training, there is no good argument against an expanded, generous G.I. Bill.” But that won’t stop far-right conservatives from offering bad excuses, even on Memorial Day.