Category: politics

News of US politics

Sidley and Austin – Terrorism Central

Seth Anderson0 comment

John McLame breaks another campaign promise: this time his declaration that spouses should not be a topic of discussion. Way to keep it classy, John. The smear is even more ridiculous than the William Ayers smear, there are lots and lots of lawyers who have worked at Sidley & Austin, probably some who even work (or have worked) for John McCain. Sidley & Austin has been around for a long, long time

The McCain campaign is now broadening their attack on Obama’s past association with William Ayers to include Michelle Obama — even though McCain has repeatedly said spouses should be off limits during the campaign.

The attack? Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’ wife and fellow former Weatherman, went to work in 1984 for the major Chicago-based national law firm of Sidley & Austin, and three years later, Michelle joined the mega-firm as well.

That’s the entire attack. We wish we were joking. But we aren’t.

In launching this latest, McCain is ditching yet another formerly-claimed principle as he faces the growing likelihood of defeat. In a statement back in June, the McCain campaign said: “Senator McCain agrees with Senator Obama that spouses should not be an issue in this campaign, and he has stated that position frequently.”

…

Keep in mind that this wasn’t any surrogate speaking off the cuff. He was on a call organized by the McCain campaign, and he was apparently reading from a prepared statement, which would of course have been vetted by McCain aides. And so another once-cherished McCain principle gets junked in the service of self-parody.

[From TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | McCain Campaign Now Attacks Michelle Obama Over Ayers]

Lame, lame McCain. Campaigning on the issues affecting our nation is not part of McCain’s agenda. So why does he want to be president then?

The Palins un-American activities

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Talbot writes:

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

[From The Palins’ un-American activities | Salon ]

On September 2nd, I wrote about the same incident1

Simply imagine the uproar if an associate of Barack Obama voiced such an opinion of the United States – the gnashing of teeth could be heard as far away as the moon.

and concluded:

Simply imagine if somebody, like a preacher at the church Obama attended, for instance2, claimed to hate America and despise the American flag. You wouldn’t even hear of any more hurricane news, the coverage would be so vigorous. However, since Sarah Palin is a Republican, such connections are not worthy of much discussion.

Somebody's Girlfriend in front of the fire

At least Talbot linked to me. Err, well, no, he just had the same thought as me, several weeks later. Such confluences happen, occasionally.

Footnotes:
  1. Joe Vogler and his incendiary quotes regarding his white hot hatred of the United States [↩]
  2. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, remember him? [↩]

Economic Snake Oil

Seth Anderson0 comment

Thomas Frank notes the inherent cynicism contained within Republican politicians. Republicans of the last few decades got elected by running against Big Gomnet1, and once elected, proceed to gut, damage and otherwise destroy the mechanisms of the very bureaucracy they were supposed to be in charge of. Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, the current fiscal mess, these are all direct results of electing anti-government Republicans.

now we are supposed to vote for more conservative Republicans because we learned from the last bunch of conservative Republicans that government just doesn’t work.

That is the advice of Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee, in last week’s debate with her Democratic counterpart, discussing the dread prospect of universal health care: “Unless you’re pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don’t think that it’s going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds.”

Conservative misrule, prompted by conservative disdain for government, proves that government cannot be trusted — and that the only answer is to elect another round of government-denouncing conservatives.

“Cynicism” seems too small a word for this circular kind of political fraud. One reaches instead for images of grosser malevolence. It’s like suggesting that the best way to recover from pneumonia is to stand in the rain for three hours. It’s like arguing that the way to solve nuclear proliferation is by handing out weapons-grade plutonium to everyone who asks for it.

[From The GOP Peddles Economic Snake Oil – WSJ.com]

Snake oil, in other words, pure malevolent snake oil, containing mercury, BPA, perchlorate, and who knows what else.

Footnotes:
  1. also known as Big Government, or worse [↩]

Great Lame Hope

Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking of McCain’s past, check out this recent post from billmon:

McCain’s primary talent has always been his ability persuade simple-minded people (i.e. his media cheerleading claque) that he is flipping or flopping as a matter of great personal principle and at great possible cost to his political career – even as he has used his various flips and flops to climb the greased pole and become the presidential nominee of his party.

I’ll leave out McCain’s early career as a professional ex-POW and passionate enemy of Vietnamese Communism (to be replaced, later, by a noble, magnanimous belief in reconciliation — at about the same time the GOP business lobby decided that diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam would actually be really cool.) I’ll also leave out McCain’s financially expedient (and therefore politically expedient) divorce and remarriage to a wealthy beer heiress. No one knows the human heart, etc. I wasn’t following politics in those days anyway.

But I was around, and following congressional politics rather closely (by which I mean professionally) when McCain first popped up on the political radar screen in 1986 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. In exchange for various regulatory favors, Keating, a wealthy and politically, um, generous, S&L executive, turned himself into the special friend of a bipartisan group of sleazebag Senators, with five in particular, including McCain, reaping most of the benefits. By modern standards (i.e. Jack Abramoff’s and Ted Steven’s standards) it was actually pretty tame stuff, but it was considered a big deal at the time.)

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain “brand,” because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media (“Senator admits guilt” outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.)

Now, if you go back and look, you’ll see that if Keating didn’t comp McCain as generously and vigorously as he did the other four, it was probably because McCain was a very junior senator at the time, with relatively little influence to peddle. But it wasn’t because Honest John was shy about accepting the favors that were offered him. If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won’t find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain’s fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he’d already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain’s media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them – after the world had already found out he took them. But that’s precisely what McCain did. He’s never looked back since.

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn’t hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

[Continue reading Daily Kos: The Great White Hope]

No wonder McLame was so visibly angry in both debates, he knows in his heart of hearts that the election has already slipped away, but he is still going through the motions anyway.

McCain and Gordon Liddy

swanksalot0 comment

Talk about criminal associations! Gordon Liddy is a convicted criminal, and domestic terrorist, and a close friend of John McCain.

McCain has been friends with another violent political extremist: Gordon Liddy.

Liddy, who worked for President Nixon’s campaign, was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for multiple crimes in burglarizing the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate building–part of a broader plot to steal the 1972 election through sabotage, illegal spying and other dirty tricks. He even planned the murder of a journalist, though that idea was overruled. Bombings? He proposed the firebombing of a liberal think tank.

Liddy, now a conservative radio host, has never expressed regret for this attempt to subvert the Constitution. Nor has he developed any respect for the law. After the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, he endorsed the shooting of federal agents: “Kill the sons of bitches.”

Yet none of this bothers McCain. Liddy has contributed thousands of dollars to his campaigns, held a fundraiser for McCain at his home and hosted the senator on his radio show, where McCain said, “I’m proud of you.” Exactly which part of Liddy’s record is McCain proud of?

[From Steve Chapman | Chicago Tribune | Blog]

So if you are eight years old, you have to exercise better judgement than when you are actively running for President? Double standard much?

McCain proposes to Destroy Health Care

Seth Anderson0 comment

We’ve discussed McCain’s devious plan to destroy the American Healthcare system, and replace it with a wink; Paul Krugman sketches what the end result would turn out to be quite clearly:

Any Porthole in a Storm

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

[From Paul Krugman – Health Care Destruction – NYTimes.com]

Those who can afford it already won’t be affected, much, by this plan, but the rest of us will be screwed. Note: I did the math for myself, and I would come out about even, at the moment. But, my rates went up 14%1 this year, and about the same last year2, and presumedly would increase again next year. So the McCain healthcare tax credit would soon be insuffecient for paying for my plan, and my deductible is quite high already.

Footnotes:
  1. my tweet: Because of “inflationary trends in health care”, my health insurance premium went up 14%. Whippee. [↩]
  2. too lazy to look back [↩]

Pal Around McCain

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Speaking of pallin’ around with terrorists, Harold Meyerson notes the well-known financial terrorist Phil Gramm is quite close to McCain. Kissin’ close, if fact.

But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates’ associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain’s own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street’s man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm’s piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm’s relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm’s short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain’s current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America “a nation of whiners.”

[From Harold Meyerson – A Pal Around McCain – washingtonpost.com]

Will Obama mention Phil Gramm in the debate tonight? Keating is one thing, but Gramm is still closer, albeit just as corrupt.

Long Strange Trip of Bill Ayers

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Fascinating1 article published in the Chicago Reader, circa 1990, about the man John McCain is trying his best to link to Barack Obama.

Haymarket Riot memorial, old version.
[The Haymarket Riot Memorial plaque that was placed at the Haymarket Riot location, 147 N. Desplaines, Chicago, IL 60661, after Bill Ayers (link to his blog) blew up the memorial to policemen. Now replaced by yet another memorial]

The students are already seated, quiet and polite in perfectly aligned rows of chairs, when Bill Ayers walks into the classroom.

It’s a Monday-evening political-science class at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a class devoted to the study of the “impact of the 60s on the 90s.”

“We’re very lucky to have Bill Ayers here,” says Victoria Cooper-Musselman, the instructor. “Bill was an active player in the 60s. You read about him in all the books.”

Ayers smiles, a boyish grin, and steps to the podium. He’s 45, but doesn’t look much older than most of the students. He wears his curly blond hair over his ears, with a rattail down the back. His T-shirt reads: “America is like a melting pot: The people at the bottom get burned and the scum floats to the top.”
He wears shorts.

“To me it’s funny that the 60s are studied,” Ayers begins. “I get rolled in like a Civil War veteran. I feel strange.”

The students laugh. As he continues, they fall quiet. His voice is raspy, sexy, a little mesmerizing. He’s completely at ease.

The story he tells, a condensed version of his life, is a tale of extremes. He wasn’t just any all-American, suburban-bred boy; his father, Thomas Ayers, ran Commonwealth Edison. And he didn’t just rebel; he was a leader of the Weathermen, the most radical of all 1960s revolutionaries, who among other things bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol and sprung Timothy Leary from jail.

For three years Ayers’s wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted criminals. They spent nearly 11 years as fugitives, living on the run “underground.”

“We were anarchists,” he tells the class. “We were willing to get thrown out of school. We were willing to go to jail. I make no apologies. There comes a time in your life when you face a moral challenge. You have to ask yourself: ‘Will I bow to conformity and accede to the world as it is, or will I take a stand?'”

These days, he takes his stands aboveground. He’s an assistant professor of education at UIC. He works in the university’s elementary teacher education program. His specialty is school improvement. He’s written one book on early childhood education, and he’s writing another about teaching. He publishes regularly in scholarly journals. Each year he trains dozens of would-be teachers for private, public, and parochial schools.

[Click to read more from Reader Archive–Extract: 1990/901109/The Long, Strange Trip of Bill Ayers He wasn’t just any suburban-bred all-American boy; his father ran Commonwealth Edison. And he didn’t just rebel; he was a leader of the Weathermen, the group that bombed the Pentagon and sprung LSD guru Timothy Leary from jail. Now he’s an assistant professor of education at UIC and an influential thinker in the school reform movement. And yes, he would do it all again]

Personally, the McCain smear is so weak to be laughable. I mean come on, Obama was 8 when Ayers was on the lam. Not every politician is Billy Pilgrim, able to look into the past of everyone they meet like the past was a Chinese New Year parade float. Now, McCain’s guilt by association trick actually works quite well on connections between McCain and Keating – actually as some wag put it, the McCain Keating connection is more of a “guilt by guilt” association.

(h/t Whet Moser via Twitter)

Footnotes:
  1. albeit horribly formatted [↩]

Keating Economics

Seth Anderson3 Comments

In case you hadn’t already watched this elsewhere

The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain’s attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee launched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal — the first such Senator to receive a major party nomination for president.

At the heart of the scandal was Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which took advantage of deregulation in the 1980s to make risky investments with its depositors’ money. McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with federal regulators tasked with preventing banking fraud, and championed legislation to delay regulation of the savings and loan industry — actions that allowed Keating to continue his fraud at an incredible cost to taxpayers.

When the savings and loan industry collapsed, Keating’s failed company put taxpayers on the hook for $3.4 billion and more than 20,000 Americans lost their savings. John McCain was reprimanded by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, but the ultimate cost of the crisis to American taxpayers reached more than $120 billion.

The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today’s credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules. And in both cases, John McCain’s judgment and values have placed him on the wrong side of history.

[Click to continue reading Keating Economics]

Higher resolution QuickTime version available for download [148 Megs]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g72BuIvMbWY

Debate 2 Notes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Joey the Shark vs. the Caribou Barbie.

The agreed-to debate format was skewed heavily in favor for Sarah Palin; she didn’t have to answer any question she didn’t have an answer to, and the faux-moderator, Gwen Ifill, didn’t mind. Ifill might as well had been a preprogrammed machine, reciting question discussed by the candidates twenty weeks ago for all the relevant response Ifill’s questions obtained.

Palin lied, and evaded more than half of the questions, maybe even 80% of the questions asked were answered instead with Republican talking points from her note cards. I’m pretty sure Palin would be totally lost being President, let us all actively work to stop that from happening.

Palin seems to be under the assumption that John McCain was instrumental in winning some war. I’m not sure which war that was. Vietnam? Nope, Iraq? Nope. Maybe she meant McCain knew how to win against the media, except that wouldn’t be factual.

Sudan bill actually was derailed by Sarah Palin, so she shouldn’t be claiming credit for passing divesture.

Sarah Palin’s Administration Was Complicit In Killing Sudan Divestment Bills In Committee. On February 9, 2008, Governor Sarah Palin’s appointed Deputy Commissioner of Revenue spoke to the Alaska House State Affairs Committee on bipartisan HB 287, which would require the state to divest from Sudan. He agreed with another speaker who said divestment was ‘not the right tool.’ On April 1, Commissioner of Revenue paid lip service to SB 227 in the Alaska Senate State Affairs Committee, saying that the bill “should be amended…in the Finance Committee” and said that the Department of Revenue was “working with the Department of Law… to actually take certain actions with regard to divestiture that would still be compliant with the state investment laws.” The Legislature adjourned Sine Die on April 13. [Minutes Of The 25th Alaska Legislature]

Oh, there’s more to say, but I’m too busy to say it.

Cokie Roberts Is Such a Republican

Seth Anderson0 comment

Cokie Roberts has a real problem sticking to facts, especially when the facts support Democrats. During the VP debate, I heard a word I didn’t know, and so I looked it up. Took me about 5 seconds to discover that Bosniaks is a valid word. Apparently, Ms. Roberts doesn’t know how to use any of the internets or their traditions.

During coverage of the October 2 vice-presidential debate on PBS’ Charlie Rose, Rose asked, “Did either of them make any mistakes that you noticed?” National Public Radio senior news analyst Cokie Roberts responded that Sen. Joe Biden “talked about the Bosniaks.” Roberts later said: “[I]f [Gov. Sarah Palin] had said ‘Bosniak,’ everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know.” In fact, Biden correctly referred to certain residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Bosniaks. According to the U.S. State Department, as of 2002, the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina consisted of the following ethnic groups: “Bosniak 48.3%, Serb 34.0%, Croat 15.4%, others 2.3%.”

The CIA World Factbook states: “Bosniak has replaced Muslim as an ethnic term in part to avoid confusion with the religious term Muslim — an adherent of Islam.”

[From Media Matters – On PBS, Cokie Roberts falsely suggested Biden’s reference to “Bosniaks” was a gaffe]

Cokie Roberts has never heard a Republican talking point she won’t repeat.

Medicare and Totalitarianism

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sarah Palin1 voiced an odd statement2 about freedom being one generation from extinction. Turns out she was quoting that nutjob Ronald Reagan when he was fulminating about Medicare in the 1960s. Yeah, Medicare really ruined the country, didn’t it?

Rockefeller and Reagan

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

When did he say this? It was on a recording he made for Operation Coffee Cup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were supposed to organize coffee klatches for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

[From Raising the white flag of surrender to Medicare – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog]

Funny, if it wasn’t so sad3

Footnotes:
  1. or her note-card writers [↩]
  2. well, one of many [↩]
  3. which could be said about most of the McCain-Palin campaign [↩]

Palin Lie about Climate Change

Seth Anderson4 Comments

More discussion of last nights debate later (still half-formed in my mind, and you probably aren’t losing any sleep waiting for my opinion on it anyway), but this Palin lie jumped out:

99 in the Shade

PALIN TONIGHT: “We have got to encourage other nations to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that. As governor I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.”

FACTS: PALIN WAS NOT THE FIRST GOVERNOR TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE OR REORGANIZE HER CABINET TO DEAL WITH IT

In JANUARY 2007, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Began Sweeping Cabinet Reorganization to Integrate Energy and Environment to Deal With Climate Change. “The challenge of climate change illustrates vividly the need to integrate energy and environmental policy,” added Governor Patrick, who has begun a sweeping Cabinet reorganization that combines energy and environmental affairs agencies into a single secretariat.” [Gov. Patrick Press Release, 1/8/07 ]

· Nevada Created Climate Committee in April, 2007. On April 10, 2007, “Governor Jim Gibbons today signed an executive order creating the Nevada Climate Change Advisory Committee and named its 13 members. The Committee is tasked with making recommendations to the Governor on reducing Nevada’s greenhouse gas emissions.” [State of Nevada Press Release , 4/10/07]

· By May of 2007, 29 States had Taken Action On Climate Change. “Among the 29 states that have taken steps to curb their contributions to global warming, some have been more active than others. Massachusetts sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court last month. California, at the urging of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed the nation’s most stringent emissions control legislation. California also worked with several New England states to set up the carbon registry.” [St. Petersburg Times, 5/10/97 ]

Palin Created Subcabinet on Climate Change In SEPTEMBER 2007. According to a press release, “Governor Sarah Palin today signed Administrative Order 238 establishing a sub-cabinet to prepare a climate change strategy. ‘Many scientists note that Alaska’s climate is changing,’ Governor Palin said. ‘We are already seeing the effects. Coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice and record forest fires affect our communities and our infrastructure. Some scientists tell us to expect more changes in the future. We must begin to prepare for those changes now.’” She also said that the sub-cabinet would look at ways to develop the state’s renewable energy sources. [Palin press release, 9/14/07]

[From Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need]

So in her mind, being 30th is the same as being first. Interesting math.

The full transcript of this portion of the debate, and a bonus wordie map, here

YouTube Pulls Obama Spot

swanksalot0 comment

Now I’m really curious to see the ad, I wonder if it is available.

Google-owned YouTube has pulled a Barack Obama ad from its site at the insistence of NBC, which charged that the spot infringed on its copyrighted content and that it did not give Obama’s campaign permission to use the material.

The ad, titled “Bad News,” is designed to get out the vote by appealing to voters and potential voters who do not want John McCain to win the election. At one point, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann are shown — with Olbermann announcing that McCain has “won.”

NBC has demanded that Obama stop using the clip altogether. But his campaign balked and instead attached a disclaimer to it that said, “NBC and MSNBC did not cooperate in the making of this video.”

[From YouTube Pulls Obama Spot]

I checked YouTube, and found the ad, removed, with this disclaimer: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC

If I find a copy, I’ll post it. Must have really irked NBC to be hoisted with their own petard.