Author: Jonathan Schwarz

John McCain is having a townhall-by-telephone for Virginians tonight at 7:00 pm ET. Anyone with a Virginia area code—and maybe people with unidentified area codes—should be able to call in and possibly ask him a question. As far as I know questions aren’t screened, and everyone has an equal chance of being called on.

Here’s how it works:

Dial: 1-877-850-4146
Passcode: 84831

These are a few questions I’d try to ask if I were from Virginia:

1. Iraqi leaders are now saying they want a timeline for the withdrawal of US troops. If you become president, and the elected Iraqi government has decided it wants all US troops to leave by a certain date, will you commit here and now to following their wishes?

2. Phil Gramm, one of your top economic advisors and your close political friend, said yesterday we are having are “mental recession” and that we’ve become a “nation of whiners.” You’ve just said Mr. Gramm doesn’t speak for you on this. If he doesn’t speak for you on the economy, why is he one of your top economic advisors?

3. You’ve just said about Social Security that “it’s terrible to ask people to pay in to a system that they won’t receive benefits from.” Do you know that, according to the Social Security Administration’s projections, even if the trust fund is exhausted in forty years, recipients will STILL get higher benefits than retired people today get? [If YES: Then why are you claiming young people today will never get any benefits?] [If NO: Why are you talking about Social Security if you don’t understand anything about how it works?]

4. You’ve said that you have a strategy to capture Osama bin Laden, but it’s something that can only be done in secret by the president. Instead of waiting to be president yourself, why haven’t you just told President Bush what your strategy is?

(UPDATE: I was completely wrong about this; see here for proof McCain literally has no idea how Social Security works. Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz for pointing this out.)

Here’s John McCain yesterday, rambling on about Social Security:

MCCAIN: Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.

Of course, Social Security has always worked by “paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers.” Thus, many people—including Dean Baker, Bob Somerby and Matthew Yglesias—are saying McCain was calling Social Security itself “a disgrace.”

However, if you read the quote in context, it’s clear McCain meant the disgrace isn’t the basic mechanism of Social Security, but that today’s young workers are paying taxes for which they may not get their promised benefits.

The rest of McCain’s Social Security bloviations are an incredible farrago of deceit you could spend the next 100 years unraveling. But on this minor point, he actually is being treated unfairly by people who’ve let the situation get the best of them, cognitively-speaking.

ALSO: I guarantee conservatives will obsess about McCain being horribly mistreated by liberals here, and it will become yet another example of how monsters perceive themselves as martyrs.

AND: This type of behavior on my part is how I keep winning.

Check out Health Care for America NOW, a new $40 million campaign being launched today. Member organizations include the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Moveon and lots of other people. They seem to understand that electing “nicer” people to office doesn’t make much difference without a social movement pressuring them. If we ever get universal health care in this country, it will be because of something like this.

I would never deny the importance of the FISA stuff, etc. And it’s possible to do lots of things at once. But health care should get BY FAR the most effort and attention from progressives, online and elsewhere.

You can join HCAN here. And this is their first ad:

I highly recommend David Sirota’s new book The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. Many progressive political books, and just about all conservative political books, are crap and not worth the paper they’re printed on. That’s because politics is as simple as tic tac toe, and there’s never anything new to say about it. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adam in 1813,

To me then it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the establishment of governments to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our country, that these will continue through all future times…everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few…nothing new can be added by you or me to what has been said by others, and will be said in every age.

But what can be done is serious, high quality reporting on what exactly is happening in the times we’re living in. Almost no one ever tries this because it’s hard work. But Sirota does in The Uprising—it’s full of useful and encouraging information about what regular people are doing all over the country to deal with the extremely serious problems we face.

This week Sirota is at TPM Cafe to talk about it. Check it out.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of children is unconstitutional. Barack Obama immediately said he disagreed with the decision.

Barry Crimmins explains his perspective here:

Does it really matter? The decision has been made and won’t soon be reversed and so Obama’s views don’t particularly matter. Even if the Supremes had ruled the other way, the worst case scenario would only involve the execution of some vicious rapists of children, right? No one else would be affected. No one, that is, except for the raped children and they’d be all for the state-sponsored elimination of these human jackals, wouldn’t they?

I can’t speak on this issue as a raped child. I can only speak as an adult who was raped as a child and I oppose capital punishment for those who rape children. I was much younger than 12 when I was assaulted so in theory, my rapist could have been sent to the death chamber by Sen. Obama’s rules…

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn’t grown into a cruel and heartless man.

The rest.

Thank you, Barry Crimmins. (And thank you, internet, for allowing people to communicate with each other about things that matter.)