McCain and the GOP are trying to paint Obama as a flip-flopper on gun control after his statements on the Heller decision last week. In fact, he's been quite consistent on his position, which is that communities have different needs with regard to gun control and therefore they should have the right to regulate as they need to locally, a position not strictly at odds with the decision.

Obama's statement on Heller, which struck down the DC handgun ban as unconstitutional, was pragmatic and mostly OK as far as it goes:

If I really wanted Bush's third term I'd vote for John McCain, not Barack Obama.

Balkin:

[T]he Obama campaign sent a lukewarm endorsement of the measure [FISA compromise bill]: As to the key reforms of FISA, the bill is an acceptable compromise, not perfect but the best one can do under the situation. As to the retroactive immunity for telecom companies, Obama says he will work to change that in the Senate.

What gives? Why did Obama stay silent for so long, and why did he finally offer such a muted response to the bill?

The answer is simple:

Barrack Obama plans to be the next President of the United States. Once he becomes President, he will be in the same position as George W. Bush: he wants all the power he needs to protect the country. . .

Given these facts, why in the world would Obama oppose the current FISA compromise bill? If it's done on Bush's watch, he doesn't have to worry about wasting political capital on it in the next year. Perhaps it gives a bit too much power to the executive. But he plans to be the executive, and he can institute internal checks within the Executive Branch that can keep it from violating civil liberties as he understands them. And not to put too fine a point on it, once he becomes president, he will likely see civil liberties issues from a different perspective anyway.

So, in short, from Obama's perspective, what's not to like?

Most Americans don't realize that the FISA compromise comes in two parts. The first part greatly alters FISA by expanding the executive's ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before. It essentially gives congressional blessing to some but not all of what the executive was doing under President Bush. President Obama will like having Congress authorize these new powers. He'll like it just fine. People aren't paying as much attention to this part of the bill. But they should, because it will define the law of surveillance going forward. It is where your civil liberties will be defined for the next decade.

Greenwald:

It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt -- who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers -- condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

Where's that change we can believe in, Senator Obama? When I supported you in the primaries I wasn't supporting a smarter, slicker politician who could perfect George Bush's lawbreaking. I was supporting someone who I believed would uphold the law and the civil liberties guaranteed me in the Constitution.

What you have going for you is millions and millions of people who believe you'll curb the abuses of the Bush years and put the country back on track. A good part of that involves returning to the rule of law, accountability, and safeguards against the abuse of power by the executive branch. You're relying on us as much as we're relying on you. So I'd suggest it's not a good time for you to go pissing us off - "the people who built this movement from the bottom up."

The speech Obama gave today for Father's Day has a good message, not just for fathers, or for African-Americans, but for all Americans. In short, he said that it's time to raise expectations, to rekindle the value of empathy, and to believe we can actually do the things that higher expectations and empathy tell us need to be done.

The Clinton campaign likes to talk about how the Florida and Michigan delegations should be seated at full strength because we have to "count every vote." Hillary Clinton's express appeal to the emotional experience of voter disenfranchisement in Bush-Gore Florida 2000 is meant to short-circuit thinking about the issue. After all, who would want to argue that we shouldn't count every vote?

In fact, Florida and Michigan are almost certain to have their delegations seated at the convention in some fashion. Clinton is pushing for it; Obama has said he is committed to having it happen as well. The question is what value will each vote from these states end up having relative to the delegate count that is the metric of the nomination contest.

Florida and Michigan are likely to have their delegations seated at the convention with their delegates' votes being valued at half instead of full strength, as the regulations that everyone knew about and agreed to ahead of time call for. If this is done, Florida and Michigan will be punished for their unsanctioned primaries not by disenfranchising their voters but by recalculating the value of their votes per delegate.

A reporter for Al Jazeera travelled to rural Kentucky and found voters are not ready to vote for a black candidate, in the primaries or in the fall. The downtrodden people of the region fear competition with a fellow economic underclass plus retribution for historical wrongs.

In a speech to hundreds of her supporters at a retirement home today in Boca Raton, Florida, Hillary Clinton invoked the electoral scandal of Florida in 2000 as part of her last-ditch quest to win the Democratic nomination. (The votes in Florida and Michigan were disqualified because both states violated DNC rules by moving their primary contests to the head of the schedule without permission from the national party organization.)

Senator Clinton said today:

"We believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will. We believe it today just as we believed it back in 2000 when, right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren't counted and a candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner," Clinton told a crowd at retirement home in Boca Raton. "The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear: if any votes aren't counted, the will of the people isn't realized and our democracy is diminished."

If he's going to win in November, especially with the kinds of margins that will give him a free hand over obstructionist Republicans, Barack Obama needs Hillary Clinton - not as his VP, but to campaign for him with all the ferocity and resilience she's shown campaigning for herself.

As the Financial Times notes:

Many senior Democrats say Mrs Clinton owes Mr Obama a generous exit in order to make up for the fact that she has handed the Republicans plenty of material for attacks against him....

The fact that Mr McCain has been sticking closely to Mrs Clinton's criticisms of Mr Obama - at times paraphrasing her words - has led some Democrats to accuse Mrs Clinton of running a Republican-style campaign against Mr Obama...

In his victory speech after winning the North Carolina Democratic primary last night, Barack Obama was laying out his broad themes for the general election.

Per John at Americablog, Slate has just published a piece on a new bio of Bill Clinton.

Short version: he's still wildly philandering, he doesn't know how to use a computer or even email, and he cheats at golf.

What this all has to do with whether Hillary would be a good president or not I don't know, but as John says:

"I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people." That's what John McCain said about the tenuous connection between Barack Obama and 1960's radical Bill Ayers.

While Obama's connection to Ayers consists of little more than living in the same neighborhood as the now college professor, serving on the board of a well-regarded Chicago charitable foundation (Obama 1993-2004, Ayers 1998-2001), and receiving a $200 donation to his Senate campaign, John McCain has much more substantial ties to a convicted -- and unrepentant -- violence-advocating radical.

This convicted felon spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in a burglary aimed at subverting the Constitution. That felon is G. Gordon Liddy, and the burglary was the 1972 Watergate burglary. Will McCain repudiate and apologize for ever having anything to do with this unrepentant extremist?

John McCain has been trying to scare voters by telling lies about the health care plans being floated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Today the NYT nails him for it, as well as for his hypocrisy in calling for accuracy on the campaign trail while at the same time making assertions over and over again about his opponents that he knows are not true.

Senator John McCain has been repeatedly suggesting that his Democratic rivals are proposing a single-payer, or even a nationalized health care system along the lines of those in countries like Canada and Britain.

The suggestion is incorrect. While both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are calling for universal health care and an expanded role for government, they stop well short of calling for a single-payer plan....

There are some who are not fond of Barack Obama because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of his philosophy of change. They mistake his late-Alinsky-based non-ideological change methodology for "triangulation" and mistake his call for "unity" for some kind of capitulation to right-wing ideologues. They mistake his call for pragmatic citizen-based united action for a Lieberman-like cozying up to the political enemy in the seats of power. This is a fundamental misperception that could not be further from the truth.

Those who hold these mistaken ideas are expecting him to follow a paradigm different from the one he has been working within for social change for over twenty years, first as a community organizer within the Alinsky-inspired network and later as a teacher of Alinsky's methods of grassroots activism and citizen empowerment to achieve pragmatic social betterment:

As Alinsky says:

Hillary Clinton's campaign is still spinning myths about the situation in Michigan and Florida. She's blaming Barack Obama for opposing flawed revote plans and using the impasse to keep the illusion of her own viability alive.

Until mid-March, Senator Clinton was supremely uninterested in the idea of revotes in both states, insisting that the delegates "elected" in the disqualified primaries in those states should be seated as is. Only after it became too late for the practical planning needed to set up successful and legitimate revotes did she start enthusiastically backing them, using the opportunity to attack her opponent for "blocking" the revotes.

Let's look at some facts, shall we?