In case you're keeping tabs on the cabal of super Jews raising money for Obama, word today about another crop of former Hillary supporters who are gathering next week to bring in the bacon for Barack. (Or, you know, Kosher imitation bacon.) Edgar Bronfman Sr., Merryl Tisch (wife of Jim), Howard Milstein, and Bush crony Tom Bernstein will gather on July 2 as part of the Obama Jewish Leadership Council. [Politico]
This was supposed to be the time of Scarlett Johansson's life — happily engaged with at least two eagerly anticipated new films ahead of her and, most thrilling of all, her official status as Busty Blond Obama Campaign Cog confirmed a few weeks back when she confessed an ongoing e-mail correspondence with her fifth father and Democratic presidential nominee-to-be. "You'd imagine that someone like the senator who is constantly traveling and constantly 'on' — how can he return these personal e-mails?" she asked Politico on June 8.
"Several of Congress' most prominent Jewish members are set to go after John McCain on an issue of perceived strength," reports Sam Stein at the HuffPo. That strength? McCain's willingness to nuke anyone who looks at America (or Israel) the wrong way. They're going to pass a resolution criticizing McCain for not being tough enough on Iran. For real! The candidate who sang a happy song about starting a useless, unwinnable war with Iran is now in trouble with the Congressional Jews for being too Iran-friendly. Well, their precise argument is that McCain didn't vote to close a loophole that allows US corporations to do business with sanctioned regimes via shell companies. But the point of highlighting this is to once again stake out a foreign policy position to the right of a proud hawk. Isn't it fun when Democrats do this? Now Barack Obama will surely win Florida, Tel Aviv, and Brighton Beach. [HuffPo]
Ouch: After starlet Scarlett Johnasson, clearly crushing hard, gushed to Politico earlier this month about her lengthy email dialog with Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate felt obliged to set the record straight about his connection with ScarJo. What's their status? In A Relationship? It's Complicated? Actually, they are JUST FRIENDS OMG WTF, Obama told reporters on his plane:
Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone again! So soon after the last one. And just one week after he showed up on the front of publisher Jann Wenner's UsWeekly! In fact, if you have a magazine, you have probably put Barack Obama on the cover. It's summer, so nothing is really going on besides Batman and this Barack Obama character. Does anyone without a pair of breasts sell so many magazines? Did our prettiest president even get this much ink until he tragically died? Attached, a composite of the media maelstrom. (The Tiger Beat one, sadly, is from The Onion. It was our favorite too.)
So remember how last week Scarlett Johansson said she was totally best buds with Barack Obama and emailed him, like, all the time? Turns out it wasn't true! At least not according to the presidential candidate himself, who told reporters today he doesn't have her email address and only communicated with her via his aide, Reggie Love. [WaPo]
Anderson Cooper was talking last night about fundamentalist Christian attacks on Barack Obama with minister Al Sharpton, author Roland Martin and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. The talk turned toward religious tolerance, and suddenly Sharpton was outing CNN's prettiest anchor as, gosh, some kind of sinner? "I might think what you do, Anderson, is going to put you in hell, but I'm going to defend your right to get there," Sharpton said. Then everyone laughed, either because Sharpton made some kind of innocuous joke outing Cooper as a typical shouting-head TV news sinner, or because virulent, institutionalized homophobia is hilarious. Anderson blushed and managed to say something dignified, while maybe secretly wishing he was officially gay so he could let loose a verbal spanking that would make Keith Olbermann's "Special Comments" sound like bedtime stories The End. Clip after the jump. UPDATE: Changed a sentence to make it clear Sharpton might not have been alluding to Cooper's sexuality.
Creaky old presidential candidate John McCain can't work The Google, so it's kind of amazing he beat his young, internet-savvy rival Barack Obama to the punch in making a videogame for his campaign website. Unfortunately, McCain's game is a sad imitation of Space Invaders, a pixelated smash hit c. 1983, but with pigs in place of the aliens, since it's about how McCain shoots lasers at pork barrel politics, or something. You just know Obama's game will be better, and the Daily Show tonight imagined exactly how. "McCain, you know I love you, but you're f—-ing old," host Jon Stewart said. If the Obama camp picks up this game idea and runs with it, it could do for political videogames what "Yes We Can" did for political YouTube music videos: make them not excruciatingly boring, briefly.
Focus on the Family founder James Dobson is fighting the Obama campaign's effort to win the evangelical Christian vote. The fiercely pro-life author and speaker rebutted Obama's "fruitcake interpretation" of the Bible on his radio show today. Apparently back in 2006, Obama gave a speech to a liberal Christian group pointing out Old Testament Hebrew laws, to highlight the problem with legislating according to the Bible. In fact, that speech sounds a lot like this clip from the West Wing, the show about fictional awesome president Martin Sheen that helped so many liberals endure the first Bush term:
This month's Fortune presents two dueling covers—John McCain and Barack Obama both promising to fix the economy. It's cute! John McCain says the greatest threat to our economy is terrorism, obviously. ("Terrorism" means "secret Muslim president.") But McCain, while he doesn't understand anything about economics, has a cunning plan to fix the current crises: allow Barack Obama to win and inherit a situation so dismal that there's next-to-nothing he can do, then allow McCain's party to reap the benefits of total collapse a few generation later. Cunning! [Animal]
Members of the staffs of John McCain and Barack Obama are holding an official debate on Twitter, presumably to attract the Tech-savvy Urban Early Adopter Influencer Creatives who have been almost entirely committed to Barack Obama since before the primaries. Mike Nelson (an "outside adviser" to Obama) and Liz Mair (the RNC online communications director) are fielding questions about their candidates with 140-character answers. But as one blogger said, "Conducting a debate via Twitter seems like a depressing acknowledgment that the soundbite is now the fundamental unit of American political discourse." CNN reported on the stunt in the clip shown below (though they get the dates wrong and say moderator Ana Marie Cox started Gawker, when in fact she edited the D.C. blog Wonkette).
In this slow time of year in which there is no news—when even gossip mavens themselves are arguing that celebrity gossip is dead—could Barack Obama be the unlikely savior of the celebrity media complex? The candidate and his wife are on the cover of Us Weekly, and an insider tells us that the gambit "paid off" in terms of sales, even beating out some of the magazine's Britney Spears covers on the news stand. We also hear Obama covers have performed strongly across the board for magazines in more weighty categories. And now Versace is dedicating her new men's collection to Obama. Your next president: almost as significant as Lindsay Lohan. Click through to see five more glamorous BarackOmania covers, wow!!
Barack Obama talked to some governors about the economy Friday but all anyone really paid attention to was the weird pseudo-presidential seal on his podium. It is the eagle from the real-life presidential seal, holding arrows and an olive branch, but it says "Obama for America" on it and he replaced our country's Latin motto with "Yes We Can." So he's obviously un-patriotic, or arrogant, or something? It's going to be a big stupid issue. But even if it was just a bit of fun, we think it was clever. Because yes while everyone castigates the dude for pretending he's already the president, the news will show photos of him standing at that podium with that seal over and over again, making him look really presidential. Also it will remind people of how awesome the Ramones were. Now he'll be thrown in jail, just like they were. (An awesome YouTube video about this is after the jump.)
Tonight, spokesmonkeys from the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns will debate technology related issues on Twitter in an online event from the Personal Democracy Forum. Former Wonkette and current Time editrix Ana Marie Cox will moderate. Cox once participated in an old HotWired feature called "Brain Tennis," where debaters traded wordy emails. Now, a decade later, progress means candidates will be breaking complex policy arguments down to 140 characters or less. Kind of like the mindless soundbites on television!(Photo from Jimmy Wales)
Michelle Obama went on The View yesterday to soften her Fox News-propagated image as a whitey-hating terrorist baby mama, but the appearance is only making the cable pundits talk about her image problems more. Exhibit A: Michelle Bernard said on MSNBC's Hardball that the makeover is needed "so people aren't terrified thinking this black woman is going to be doing God-knows-what in the White House." Bernard is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, so it would be a stretch to lump this comment in with all the recent racial smears against the prospective first-lady, but it does beg the questions, some posed by an astute email tipster: Just what, exactly, could Michelle Obama do in the White House? Install a mosque? Fill it with purple leather couches and tiger-printed throw pillows? Change the tap water with malt liquor? Clip after the jump, plus a look at the cringey promo for this episode of Hardball.
The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson had a clever cover story last week on Barack Obama's hometown of Hyde Park, Chicago, a neighborhood that functions almost entirely as the extended campus of the University of Chicago, where both Obamas once drew salaries. As a zip code, it's where black meets white (just dust off Allan Bloom's old social calendar) and sixties radicalism meets free-market conservatism (Bill Ayers wanders past the Milton Friedman Institute on his way to teach kids about the coming end of the bourgeoisie). However, the reputation for right-wingery, says Ferguson, is greatly exaggerated: "Of the tens of thousands of faculty who have taught at the University of Chicago over the past half-century, perhaps as many as 65 have, at some point in their lives, voted for a Republican." Is this just part of the new GOP strategy to scandalize Obama by refashioning the hothouse of conservative academia as "Berkeley with snow"? (The Google trend chart for "Hyde Park" shows no real change in searchability, so most of America isn't hip to the Democratic nominee's controversial hood yet. Also, press mentions of the locale don't seem to be spiking.) What's the Matter with Kansas? author Thomas Frank smells a rat:
Here in America, Barack Obama spends most of his time insisting he is a non-terrorist, American-born Christian who doesn't hate white people, and who impregnated his wife only after they got married. Sad. But in Europe the Democratic presidential candidate is actually producing uhhh, what's it called — CHANGE. And HOPE. French newspaper Le Monde credited Obama with "stirring up high hopes" among French blacks, while the Times said Obama "hastened... a new black consciousness there." And today fashion writer Cathy Horyn reveals that Obama helped inspire a forthcoming issue of Italian Vogue with all-black models, including Naomi Campbell, pictured at left in a shot from the issue. The idea, executed by photographer Steven Meisel, was to highlight inequality in the fashion industry:
