Hmmm...the NYT reports that an Iraqi government spokesman is claiming Maliki was mistranslated. The spokesman, whose statement was distributed by the U.S. military, does not cite any specific mistranslation, however.

Update II: Dr. Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, issued a statement saying Mr. Maliki’s statement had been “as not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq,” but it did not address a specific error. It did soften his support for Mr. Obama’s plan and implied a more tentative approach to withdrawing troops. More of the statement, which came from the U.S. military’s Central Command press office:

I'm still thinking this through, but my gut tells me that today's news raises the following question:

"If John McCain has been wrong about the big questions in Iraq from start to finish, what possible reason is there to elect him president?"

I just surfaced for air after a long video editing session on this new McCain & Iraq video and fortunately, debrazza had the goods on one of the funniest lines ever in a Marc Ambinder post titled "Al-Maliki's Announcement: A Big Deal":

So how will the McCain campaign respond?

(Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're fucked." No response yet from the McCain campaign, although here's what McCain said the last time Maliki mentioned withdrawal: "Since we are succeeding, then I am convinced, as I have said before, we can withdraw and withdraw with honor, not according to a set timetable. And I’m confident that is what Prime Minister Maliki is talking about, since he has told me that for many meetings we’'ve had."

Will Maliki retract his words?

debrazza thinks the unnamed strategist is Karl Rove. Sounds like it to me too. (Edit: A commenter suggests it could be Mike Murphy -- that actually makes even more sense. But I'd say with near certainty that it's one of those two.)

Update: The McCain campaign's response is to flat-out lie: "John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today."

As a reminder, al-Maliki said: "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Looks like I may have been right. Here's Kathryn Jean-Lopez, over at NRO's The Corner:

I Confess reading the Phil Gramm "steps down" headline, my natural reaction was: "what was a conservative guy like you doing in a place like the McCain campaign anyway?"

Hopefully all the conservatives who've rallied (yes, that verb denotes a little too much action to be right here) to McCain won't have to step aside before November comes.

I'm plugging away at this new video project and finding some pretty good footage out there. Here's a rough edit of some of the clips I might use of John McCain at the Republican National Convention in 2004, talking about Iraq and Bush. His little riff at the end is particularly jarring.

I'm almost at a loss for words about Liz "Donuts for McCain" Sidoti's utterly and hilariously idiotic analysis of the political impact of Iraq timetable issue on the presidential campaign. I mean, this is one of the the four or five stupidest things you may have the pleasure of reading during the entire campaign. Sidoti's thesis:

A new U.S.-Iraqi agreement raising the possibility of a withdrawal timeline...could undercut one of the Democrat's signature issues — opposition to the war — as he prepares for a high-stakes trip to the region.

Der Spiegel: "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports US presidential candidate Barack Obama's plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months."

Jake Tapper:

The White House this afternoon accidentally sent to its extensive distribution list a Reuters story headlined "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan - magazine."

NYT's Zeleny and AP's Toosi report Iraq is next up, confirming John McCain's ill-advised statement earlier on Friday that Barack Obama would be in Iraq this weekend. Interestingly, although both reports discussed in some detail the lengths to which the trip was cloaked in secrecy, neither noted that McCain had broken the embargo. Outside of the original report from Reuters, the only news organizations that I've seen discuss the issue are TPM and Politico, at Ben Smith's blog.

I'm working on a video about John McCain and Iraq that I hope to post on Monday or Tuesday. As part of making the video, I've been going scouring about, looking for clips and I thought I'd share a few of them with you.

These are mostly of Bush from October, 2002 talking about John McCain's support for the Iraq War Resolution. There's also a clip of McCain praising Bush in October, 2002 -- just after Joe Lieberman did. (This was that infamous Rose Garden announcement of a deal on the AUMF.) There's also a clip from mid-2004 of Bush campaigning with McCain against Kerry.

If you have any favorite video clips of McCain that you think I should consider for the video, please post links to them in the comments here, or send me an e-mail. No guarantees that I can use it, but I'm the more material I have to work with, the better!

It's hard to imagine that John McCain intended to compromise the safety of Barack Obama when he said he thought Barack would land in Iraq either today or tomorrow, but that's besides the point. The issue is that this is something McCain should have known not to say.

John McCain is up on the air with a new attack ad against Barack Obama closing with his new signature line: "Country First."

But is that really a slogan we can believe in? After all, McCain himself has admitted on several occasions to having put his own personal ambitions above what he knew was right.

From Bush's press conference on Tuesday:

Q Gas prices are now approaching $5 a gallon in some parts of the country. Offshore oil exploration is obviously a long-term approach. What is the short-term advice for Americans? What can you do now to help them?

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, there is a psychology in the oil market that basically says, supplies are going to stay stagnant while demand rises. And that's reflected somewhat in the price of crude oil. Gasoline prices are reflected -- the amount of a gasoline price at the pump is reflected in the price of crude oil. And therefore, it seems like it makes sense to me to say to the world that we're going to use new technologies to explore for oil and gas in the United States -- offshore oil, ANWR, oil shale projects -- to help change the psychology, to send a clear message that the supplies of oil will increase.

Anchorage Daily News:

Republican Gov. Sarah Palin said she was not giving up hope that McCain, if elected, might end up reversing his position and support oil drilling in ANWR. Palin said she's encouraged that McCain changed his position to support offshore drilling.

She's got reason to be optimistic. McCain has in fact signaled a willingness to change positions on ANWR (though he subsequently denied that he'd be willing to flop):

If John McCain is worried about sending a message that he'd be President McTrigger Happy, he needs dump surrogates like Bud Day (of Swift Vet fame) who say things like "the Muslims have said either we kneel or they're going to kill us."

"A general time horizon" for American withdrawal from Iraq sure sounds an awful lot like movement towards Barack Obama's position:

You can't make this up... NBC's John Yang reports President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have agreed that a new agreement setting the parameters for US-Iraqi relations after the current UN mandate expires at the end of the year should include non-binding language--"a general time horizon" and not "an arbitrary date"--about the withdrawal of US troops.

Just imagine what he'll be able to do when he's actually in the White House...

Update: Sullivan tweaks Michael Goldfarb. "A prediction: the McCain and Obama positions on Iraq will be as minimal as McCain can make them by November."

Novak:

After Sen. John McCain publicly repudiated his close friend and adviser Phil Gramm's comments about a "nation of whiners" and a "mental recession," the two old political comrades patched up their relationship.

Gramm apologized to McCain for his remarks that gave Democrats an opening against the Republican presidential candidate and provided several days of ammunition for blogs, cable television and radio talk shows. McCain told Gramm not to worry about the expected pitfalls of a campaign surrogate. Gramm will continue as an adviser and surrogate.

Doubletalk much?

John McCain gets his stoopid smear on with The Kansas City Star's Dave Helling. (h/t: TPM)

The Czech Republic.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is worried that McCain will pick Mike Huckabee to paper over his problem with evangelicals. Her concern? Huckabee isn't conservative enough. I guess that banning birth control pills thing isn't enough for her. Anyway, I share her concerns, but for entirely different reasons: I think Huckabee gives McCain his best chance of winning. So I'm totally, 100% behind Mitt Romney for veep. Go Willard!

The Republican Party has no shame, nor apparently a sense of decency. Now its the Washington State GOP, the latest pro-McCain organization to attack Michelle Obama for having said she's proud of America.

Not surprisingly, I think it's a stupid, ineffective ad. The funniest part is that they have at least two shots of the American flag flapping in the wind with the stars on the right hand side of the flag. Hmm...I wonder why they think the stars ought to be on the right instead of the left where most Americans put them?

Anyway, if there is a substantive point here, it's that you could make the same dumb attack on John McCain himself. He has variously said that he didn't love the country until he was 31 years old and on the campaign trail last month said it was "tough" to be proud of America.

A few weeks ago, I put some of his comments together into a satirical movie trailer called "The Glass House of McCain." Here's a new and updated version of that video, intended to illustrate the absurdity of the GOP's line of attack:

With Barack Obama's upcoming trip overseas, the contrast between him and John McCain on foreign policy will be a key campaign issue. Perhaps the clearest difference between the two is that Barack Obama asserts his judgment is superior to McCain's, and John McCain counters that his experience better suits him for the job. The problem for McCain, of course, is that his experience helps make Barack Obama's case: he has plenty of experience making bad judgments.

I know none that is news to any of you, but here's a few quotes from McCain in the run-up to the Iraq War, some of which you might not have seen. I'm gathering them for a video I'm planning on putting up next week about McCain and Iraq, and thought you might find them interesting.

''For as long as Saddam Hussein is in power in Baghdad, he will seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. We have no doubt that these deadly weapons are intended for use against the United States and its allies. Consequently, we believe we must directly confront Saddam, sooner rather than later.''
-- John McCain, December 5, 2001

Update: I've posted the video (below the fold).

I have been avoiding cable news (other than Countdown) on a religious basis for at least the last few weeks. For some reason, I put on David Gregory's show this afternoon, and Rachel Maddow notwithstanding, all I can say is: what a mistake.

In particular, Jay Carney put on a tour de stupid (or was it a tour de false?), prattling on about how Barack Obama has gotten such an easy ride from the media and how McCain has gotten the short end of the stick. The high comedy was that not fifteen minutes after making such a laughable claim, he spewed forth nonsense about how John McCain was appalled by Bush's rush to war against Iraq.

Carney's evidence? McCain recounting to him a meeting with Bush that took place in March, 2002. In that meeting, Bush supposedly said something along the lines of 'we're taking out' Saddam. McCain says he was appalled by Bush's cavalier, trigger happy attitude. Although Carney acknowledged McCain eventually supported the war, the image he portrayed was one of a reluctant warrior.

But as Joe Sudbay recently pointed out, in January, 2002, McCain was hot to trot against Saddam.

Tiny dog has been yapping nonstop for six years:

Rasmussen has a new poll of my birthstate, North Carolina, showing John McCain at 48% and Barack Obama at 45%. According to Pollster.com, the current polling average there is McCain 47%, Obama 44.6%. Part of the reason for that closeness is one outlier poll from Zogby Interactive showing Barack with a 9 point lead, however. At 538, which weights the accuracy of pollsters, Nate Silver sees a slightly wider McCain lead -- 4 points -- and projects a 4.6% win.

You won't be surprised that I use this occasion to make an observation about John Edwards. Recall that one of the biggest knocks on Edwards is that he didn't help Kerry win North Carolina. Although that's true, it's also true that North Carolina was probably closer than it would otherwise have been had Edwards not been on the ticket.

In 2004, Kerry-Edwards actually lost NC by 12.4%, but in 2000, Gore-Lieberman lost NC by 12.8%. Now 0.4% does not seem like a very big improvement, and it's not. But consider that in every other southern state, Kerry-Edwards lost on average by 14.9%. Meanwhile, in those same states Gore-Lieberman lost on average by 10.6%. So while in the other southern states, Kerry-Edwards lost ground relative to Gore-Lieberman by an average of 4.3%, they actually picked up 0.4% in North Carolina.

That all doesn't mean Edwards should be the veep, but it does suggest that he might actually be a bit more help in North Carolina than people think.

Earlier, I compared the average donation size of John McCain's public finance loophole fundraising to the average donation size of Barack Obama's campaign fundraising -- $5,754 for McCain and $68 for Obama.

This isn't entirely an apples-to-apples comparison, of course. It's a little tricky doing an apples-to-apples because not all the data is available to do one, but I decided to take an estimate.

My goal here is to estimate the average donation size for the combined total of McCain's official campaign fundraising and his public finance loophole (RNC) fundraising, and to do the same with Obama's official campaign fundraising and his DNC rundraising.

Today, Al Gore issued a clear, simple, and precise challenge to America: 100% zero-carbon electricity in the next decade. If there ever was a time to issue such a bold challenge, it is now. Never before has it been clear to more people just how important it is for us to not only achieve energy independence, but also to end our reliance on the technologies which cause global warming.

There was a time when Gore's challenge would have been roundly attacked as an assault on America's way of life. That was when environmental concerns were used as a wedge, and even a challenge to one's patriotism. There's no doubt the Sean Hannitys of the world will try to do it again, saying Al Gore is a crazy liberal and wants to take away everything that makes America great. But the truth is that the Hannitys of the world are the ones who threaten our way of living.

We cannot continue to live as we do if we continue to rely on carbon-fuels from across the world. In this sense, what Al Gore is proposing is actually just about as conservative as it gets: if we want to to maintain our way of life, if we want to sustain the traditions that have made America what it is, then we're going to have to figure out a different way to generate the energy that powers our society.

It might not be glamorous, it might just be a boring technical problem, but it really is the only way for us to continue living as we do now. It's time that conservatives understand that we're not pursuing some crazy vision that will require people to turn out their lights after 8pm at night, or to set their air conditioners at 95 degrees. We're just trying to find a sustainable way to keep on doing the same things we're doing now. It doesn't get any more conservative than that.

Next week will be all about Barack Obama's overseas trip. From what I can tell, it seems that the trip will have two components -- one part of it will be a five-nation swing through England, France, Germany, Jordan, and Israel, and the other part will be a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq.

He'll be accompanied by Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed on the Afghanistan and Iraq part of his trip, but there has been literally no mention of it in recent coverage, presumably because of security concerns. (I'm not reporting anything that hasn't been written about already -- so don't worry about me creating a risk!)

The big news is that at some point next week, all three network news broadcasts will originate from stops along the trip. I presume they will be each broadcast from different points on the trip, but I don't know.

There's already a bit of cluck-clucking from the McCain campaign about whether it's fair that Obama's trip is receiving all this attention, but as Steve Benen points out, you get what you ask for. They are partially responsible for elevating the stature of the trip by focusing on it on an almost daily basis.

And as NBC's First Read argues, would the McCain campaign really have wanted the same level of scrutiny paid to McCain's trip in March? If they had, his Sunni-Shia gaffe-a-thon would have hurt his candidacy far more than it actually did.

The fact is that there's a real risk with this trip for Barack -- and if it goes well, he will deserve every bit of favorable coverage it receives.

Normally, I'd put something like this (via Kos diarist DJShay) in "Stuff I should have blogged," but Rachel Maddow is so awesome that the news that MSNBC chief Phil Griffin thinks she should have her own show gets a post of its own. (Unfortunately, Griffin doesn't say when. "At some point," he says. To which I say: "Now, dammit!")

One other thing to note: as you can see, the "Stuff I should have blogged" thingy (for want of a better word) is now back on the home page. I've been trying to figure out a way to get it out of the sidebar area which I think gets too crowded, so I've settled (at least for now) on a tabbed interface for "Stuff" and also headlines.

Barack Obama, that's who.

The interesting thing about Barack's $52 million fundraising haul in June is that the average donation was $68.

Meanwhile, the average donation to John McCain's $62.5 million Victory Committee fundraising campaign has been $5,754.

Who's the elitist now?

The McCain camp had an interesting response to Planned Parenthood's new ad on requiring insurers who cover Viagra to also cover birth control:

These types of misleading partisan attacks won’t help women who are desperately in need of quality health care. John McCain’s plan will provide all Americans with choice and competition in health insurance, putting patients in charge of their own care instead of Washington bureaucrats.

Notice the statement didn't mention birth control at all? It's not an accident -- birth control really is a tough topic for McCain.

Apparently Dean rocked an interview on MSNBC earlier today. I'm posting it before watching it -- you can blame Daily Kos diarist LarisaW if it sucks!

How much must the Mariners suck when so far the highlight of their season (at least for me) has been their recent announcement that season ticket holders can sell tickets electronically with a new system that integrates Stubhub and Ticketmaster?

The Mariners' winning percentage is now .389. That's the bad news. The good news is .389 is actually a lot better than it was one month ago when it was .343. (They are now 20 games back instead of 17.5, however.)

Can we afford another president who thinks it's smart to be dumb?

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