Obama and Hillary already going negative and dishonest.

Eager to prove that Republicans aren’t the only ones who can launch headlong into negative and dishonest campaigning, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have already gone negative against one another, and are doing so completely dishonestly.

FactCheck.org, a non-partisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, says that:

• Clinton falsely accused Obama of saying he “really liked the ideas of the Republicans” including private Social Security accounts and deficit spending. Not true. The entire 49-minute interview to which she refers contains no endorsement of private Social Security accounts or deficit spending, and Obama specifically scorned GOP calls for tax cuts.

• Obama falsely denied endorsing single-payer government health insurance when he first ran for the Senate, saying, “I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single-payer.” But in fact he gave a speech in 2003 saying, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program.”

I was watching Dan Abrams earlier, and he made the fairly accurate statement that we might expect Hillary to go negative (I’m not sure why), but Barack was always supposed to be above the fray, the guy who’d bring us all together and clean up the discourse and all of that. Just goes to show, you don’t need Rove to go ugly and dishonest.

I think I’ll go back to real news tomorrow, this primary season crap is starting to wear me down.

Damage control: Thompson “didn’t really want” to be president

Fred Thompson’s exit from the 2008 race didn’t exactly cause the ruckus his entrance did, largely because by then his infectious apathy had spread to the electorate. However, now we’re getting the (ahem) true story on why he dropped out. Because… he didn’t actually want to be president.

I reported first that he was eyeing a White House bid. At the time several insiders told me OFF THE RECORD that it was largely a trial ballon to guage his popularity and float his name as a possible vice presidential nominee. I was sworn to silence.

Those insiders have now lifted the conditions on our conversations. From March to August of 07 through postponed announcement days, staff changes, firings, resignations and general disarray the Thompson camp was stunned by the incredibly positive response and didn’t really know how to manage it. The trial balloon soared mighty high and he found himself being dragged into a race.

A lot of people use the phrase “sour grapes” to refer to anyone bitter about something, but that’s not what the fable referred to. The fox could not reach the grapes and, when he realized that, said he didn’t want the grapes anyway because they were probably sour. Fred Thompson, after his candidacy went over like a lead balloon, “lifts” a silence to tell everyone that no, he was just trying to get his name out there. Right.

Death sentence for “insulting Islam” in Afghanistan

Keeping in mind that one of the big reasons we went into Afghanistan (aside from getting the terrorists) was to wrench them out from the stranglehold the Islamic fundamentalists had on them and bring the country into the 21st century. However, when a reporter can be sentenced to death for distributing something that merely insults Islam, it means we have a long way to go.

“Based on the crimes Perwiz Kambakhsh committed, the primary court yesterday sentenced him to the most serious punishment which is the death penalty,” Balkh province deputy attorney general Hafizullah Khaliqyar told AFP.

Kambakhsh, a reporter for a city newspaper called Jahan-e Naw (“The New World”) and a journalism student at Balkh University, indicated he did not accept the verdict and would appeal, his family said.

Afghan and international media groups called on President Hamid Karzai to step in.

Hamid Karzai, of course, being the guy that the United States put in. You’d think that would mean he’d be right on board with total freedom of the press and shooting down things like this, but… that just doesn’t seem to be the case. When you talk about a country that uses a holy book as its foundation, this is what happens.

And before anyone says it, don’t think for a moment that the Christian nutjobs in the United States wouldn’t love to execute atheists and “pagans” and put homosexuals in prison. Vote Huckabee!