Barack Obama privately met with religious leaders in Chicago today. His spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters on the campaign plane today:

Reaching out to the faith community is a priority for Barack Obama and will be a priority under an Obama Administration. This is one of several meetings he will have over the coming months with religious leaders....He's done it before. He'll do it again.

He did it in South Carolina, here's his mailer(pdf).

As for who was present at the meeting, it was a combination Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants and Catholics. Among them: [More...]

Libertarian candidate for President Bob Barr has written his first post at Huffington Post. He says he was wrong about the war on drugs. He now realizes it has been a failure.

I'll admit it, just five years ago I was "Public Enemy Number 1" in the eyes of the Libertarian Party. In my 2002 congressional race for Georgia's Seventh District, the Libertarian Party ran scathing attack ads against my stand on Medical Marijuana.

....For years, I served as a federal prosecutor and member of the House of Representatives defending the federal pursuit of the drug prohibition.

Today, I can reflect on my efforts and see no progress in stopping the widespread use of drugs. I'll even argue that America's drug problem is larger today than it was when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase, "War on Drugs," in 1972.

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Shermanesque:

Asked on NPR's "All Things Considered" if he is auditioning to be Obama's running mate, [Ohio Governor Ted] Strickland said, "Absolutely not. If drafted I will not run, nominated I will not accept and if elected I will not serve.

By Big Tent Democrat

I'm not into post-mortems and haven't and won't be writing any about Hillary's campaign. As I said Saturday, I'm moving forward, just like she asked us to. But I like this part of Richard Cohen's column today in the Washington Post and thought I'd share it:

I often had more problems with her critics than I did with her. Some of them, clearly, needed to be medicated.

Now, though, an eerie silence has settled over the land. With Hillary Clinton out of the race, thousands of computer keyboards have been stilled, dozens of books have been abandoned in mid-chapter, and enormously influential bloggers, most of them unknown to me, have vanished from the Web. Some anti-Hillary obsessives (see the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) must be feeling the sickening vertigo once experienced by Vaughn Meader, whose entire show business career was based on impersonating John F. Kennedy and who, in essence, died when Kennedy did.

It's over, ladies and gentlemen. Hillary Clinton lost. And so did you.

The hateful attacks that have appeared in comments at TalkLeft have slowed down. My intolerance for those who continue to post them has risen. I'm erasing these users rather than deleting their comments one by one. Life is too short to be consumed by irrational hate.

(Comments now closed.)

At a press conference today, Sen. Barack Obama said he will not ask Jim Johnson to step down from his VP selection committee despite his ties to Countrywide Mortgage. Obama said he will not vet the vetters.

Obama: "These are not folks who are working for me."

For the past decade, John McCain has been the Media Darling of Washington. Paradoxically, I believe a lot of his trouble with the GOP base stemmed in large part from his carefully cultivated Media status as a "maverick," even though the record demonstrates that he was no maverick at all.

Now the Media Darling is Barack Obama and McCain's potential path to victory depends, imo, in part, on picking a fight with the Media. He certainly can not win on the issues and thus he needs to negatively brand Obama. With the Media unwilling to do to Obama what it did to Bill Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton, McCain must now abandon his old Media constituency and strike at both Obama and the Media. Turkana points to this Politico piece that discusses the McCain execution of this strategy:

What do Barack Obama and the Democrats have to offer young evangelicals and Catholics? We'll soon find out. Obama is launching the Joshua Generation Project to bring more of them on board with his campaign.

The name is based on the biblical story of how Joshua's generation led the Israelites into the Promised Land. A source close to the Obama campaign tells The Brody File the following:

"The Joshua Generation project will be the Obama campaign's outreach to young people of faith. There's unprecedented energy and excitement for Obama among young evangelicals and Catholics. The Joshua Generation project will tap into that excitement and provide young people of faith opportunities to stand up for their values and move the campaign forward."

Why would evangelicals and Catholics support a pro-choice candidate? Is he planning on modifying his position? Are his campaign speeches going to incorporate religion even more than they have in the past?

Where is this headed? [More...]

Erin Rosa at Colorado Independent reports that the prison guards union sent out a questionnaire to the candidates asking what they would do to address the critical underfunding and understaffing of federal prisons.

The federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a budget crisis, and correctional officers working in the nation's prisons are concerned that understaffing is jeopardizing the safety of inmates and employees. But despite these issues, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's campaign has so far declined to answer a questionnaire about bureau funding and staffing woes, according to a government employees union.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents approximately 15,000 federal correctional officers in Colorado and across the nation, recently sent out a three-question survey to McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama asking for their views on understaffing and funding of prisons.

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Kevin Drum writes:

OBAMA vs. McCAIN....Gallup's latest Obama-McCain tracking poll shows exactly what you'd expect: now that Obama is firmly the Democratic candidate, he's making up considerable ground. There will be more ups and downs, especially around the conventions, but I'll bet that Obama never has much less than a five point lead for the rest of the campaign.

(Emphasis supplied.) I'll take that bet - IF Obama does not pick Hillary Clinton as his VP. I would expect an Obama drop the day, if it comes, Obama does not choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.

See, for those who do not get it, I am not arguing that Hillary Clinton is entitled to be VP, I am arguing that it is in Obama's best interest to choose her as it will insure his victory in November.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Greg Sargent notes this from Barack Obama:

By the way, I'm going to be partnering with Elizabeth Edwards, we're going to be figuring all this out."

As Greg writes:

The key political context here, of course, is that back in April, Elizabeth revealed that Obama's health care plan wasn't her favorite [she expressly preferred Hillary Clinton's plan]. Enlisting her as a public voice on health care could obviously help with the Obama camp's outreach to women and help win over skeptics in general.

I have no opinion on the merits of the respective health care plans, but it is an interesting move to the LEFT by Obama (now in GE mode) and to a unified position on health care in the Democratic Party. Very interesting.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only.

The old John McCain abhorred intolerance:

In 2000, when he was running against Mr. Bush for the Republican nomination, Mr. McCain castigated Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”

The new John McCain embraces intolerance:

The campaign has been peppering over 600 socially conservative grass-roots and national leaders with regular e-mail messages — highlighting, for example, Mr. McCain’s statement criticizing a May 15 decision by the California Supreme Court overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, or his recent speech on his judicial philosophy. ... Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers, recently sat down with a dozen prominent evangelical leaders in Washington, where he emphasized, among other things, Mr. McCain’s consistent anti-abortion voting record.

Who says McCain is against change? He changes all the time. John McCain: the candidate who wants to return America to the 19th Century.

First wife issues are nothing new. Lots of politicians have them. But John McCain, who will face some trouble from a segment of voters over his current wife Cindy's past prescription drug troubles, cannot be pleased today to see his first wife and mother of his three oldest children in the news.

Surprisingly, Carol McCain is defending him, even though he left her after his return from Vietnam and re-emergence as a war hero. Carol charitably says he was having a sort of "midlife crisis." Many others say it was because she had been horribly disfigured in a car accident and gained a lot of weight. [More...]