Is Hillary going to attempt to win the nomination in Denver next week? I doubt it, but...

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A very, very bad move was made by Obama yesterday. The Obama campaign is running an advertisement that links John McCain to Jack Abramoff. The charge is facetious, but that's not the issue. (McCain has accepted money from Focus on the Family, which Abramoff at one time did lobby for. McCain is associated with Ralph Reed, FoF's leader. I'm not supportive of many of FoF's goals--these include no online gambling--but FoF was burned by Abramoff, too. Abramoff secretly lobbied against a bill that would have made online gambling illegal a few years ago, when FoF wanted it to be illegal.) McCain until yesterday never brought up the issue directly about Bill Ayers and other "mainstream" individuals that Obama considers friends and mentors.

Now he can, and apparently will. Bill Ayers planted bombs and attempted to blow up the Pentagon and the Capitol. Obama considers Ayers a friend. That will not go over well at all with independent voters (nor most Americans, for that matter). Those ads will come, and there's plenty more besides Ayers. This will play out for weeks during the campaign, and is a disaster for the Obama campaign. Remember Willie Horton? It's that big.

Michael Tomasky of the Guardian thinks the ad is "lame." Again, I think he misses the point. Which will Joe Sixpack care more about:

- That a Presidential candidate is friends with individuals who wanted to blow up US buildings; these individual are unrepentant about that.
- That a Presidential candidate is backed by someone who also employed a lobbyist who was later found to have committed crimes (and where that same Presidential candidate did work to get him arrested).

Obama is now attacking McCain for the number of homes he owns. Given that Obama's mansion in Chicago was acquired dubiously through the help of convicted felon Rezko, the saying about "glass houses" is very much on point.

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Meanwhile, we find that the Democratic National Committee (and Obama) have been accusing the Republicans of either going to race-bait or that they have made racial attacks. Yet I haven't seen any evidence of that, though we have seen a Democratic candidate for Congress attack another Democrat for being Jewish and white while running in a predominantly black district. (The race-attacking candidate lost in the primary.)

But once again we have the DNC using a similar tactic. Ed Morrissey notes that the DNC is attacking Eric Cantor (R-VA) for the crime of...being Jewish. Eric Cantor's fact page on Democrats.org notes the following: "Both Abramoff and Cantor are Jewish...'At a January 2003 fundraiser for Cantor, who had just become chief deputy whip, Abramoff unveiled the Eric Cantor sandwich, ‘a tuna-based stacker,’ which, lamentably, was ‘not quite [the] power lunch befitting’ the only Jewish Republican in the House. Hence a request by Cantor … to switch his eponymous sandwich to roast beef on challah, ‘a deli special that exudes Jewish power.'" Yes, these are quotes from other newspapers but the same charges could be made without the religious overtone. And as Morrissey notes, "Remember all the cries of “racism” when the subject of Jeremiah Wright finally aired?"

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Some good news on the global warming cooling front. There's a new blog that's well worth reading called "Global Warming Politics." (It's not new, but I just found it). It does not, alas, appear to have an RSS feed. Here's a recent post called Cognitive Dissonance that everyone should read.

Meanwhile, the National Climatic Data Center produced a report called Global Climate Change Impact in the United States. The report has been pulled, and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) will first publish the underlying documents showing the alleged facts allowing for the conclusions to be made, have scientific discussions on these "facts," and then issue a report based on the facts. The original document is more of an advocacy document. The NCDC falls under NOAA.

As I'll note, for the last few years the earth has been cooling, not warming. And there are still no sunspots. Sooner or later (likely later, because it will upset so many on the political left) consensus will dump global warming into the same trash heap as the "new ice age that's coming" of the early 1970s.

Like most of the hit pieces from the very, very left, the charge that McCain copied Alexander Solzhenitsyn's story of a guard drawing a cross is false. In this case, it's false because Solzhenitsyn's biographer notes that it never happened to Solzhenitsyn. Oops....

schmengie noted last night that if you include leans, McCain is ahead in the electoral college race. The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama ahead by only two points in registered voters. And 48% of those surveyed believe that Obama lacks the experience needed to be president (versus 44% who think he has the experience). This factor will only get worse for Obama.

And it dictates who he will choose as Vice President. He can't pick someone with a ton more experience in leadership positions--the question will be asked "Why isn't [Biden/Bayh/Hillary] the candidate? [S]he has more experience than Obama." That means Obama's best choice is to pick someone who won't show off the candidate but can add something to the campaign. That leaves Richardson (who has held second-tier positions) as his best choice. However, the rumor is that the selection will be Virginia Governor Kaine...who has almost as little experience as Obama. And Kaine has no foreign policy experience.

If Kaine is the choice and if a foreign policy issue comes up between now and Election Day (e.g. another Russian invasion of Georgia) McCain will win in a blowout. And experience is an issue. Investor's Business Daily noted, "To any honest observer, the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama have been evident all along. What we saw last weekend was Obama's shallowness juxtaposed with McCain's depth, the product of his extraordinary life experience."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal correctly notes that,

Of course, if Obama were to accuse McCain of picking his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition, everyone would laugh, because it obviously is not true. By contrast, there is quite a bit of evidence that Obama has placed political expediency above national security (for an excellent example, see our item yesterday on his shifting explanations for his original opposition to the liberation of Iraq).

There is also beginning to be a storm about Obama's voting against an Illinois bill that would have protected infants who were born alive though they were attempted to be aborted. The Washington Post is noting that Obama opposed this legislation, and he opposed Republican efforts to add in wording that noted that the bill would not have had any legal impact on the availability of abortions. Right to Lifers are painting Obama as a zealot. Right wing blogs call Obama a liar. (And here.)

I'm certain that Obama doesn't consider himself a liar. It's far simpler--the lobbyists for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that were against the legislation told Obama to vote no, so he did. He didn't consider any other consequences. Today he is trying to deny why he voted against the legislation. All Obama promises have an expiration date, and the public is learning that as Obama attempts to come up with some reason why he voted against that bill.

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Changing topics, a Mexican scientist is predicting that the Earth is about to enter another "Little Ice Age." Dr. Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the UNAM made the prediction and noted that though he thinks that cooling will start in 2010 it may have already begun.