There’s a scrap going on over a foreign policy question asked at the CNN/YouTube debates.

QUESTION: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since.

In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

OBAMA: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.

Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We’ve been talking about Iraq — one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they’re going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.

They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.

COOPER: Senator Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort because I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are.

I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don’t want to make a situation even worse. But I certainly agree that we need to get back to diplomacy, which has been turned into a bad word by this administration.

And I will purse very vigorous diplomacy.

And I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we’re not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.

The next day, this turns out to be the opening salvo of a war of words.

Clinton called Obama’s comments “irresponsible” and “naive.”

Obama countered by accusing the Clinton campaign of hatching a “fabricated controversy” and suggested that her position put her on the same track as the Bush administration.

Earlier this year, Senator Clinton claimed: I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people. [Associated Press, 4/23/07].

And it goes on.

“The notion that I was somehow going to be inviting them over for tea next week without having initial envoys meet is ridiculous,” he said in an interview outside his Senate office. “But the general principle is one that I think Senator Clinton is wrong on, and that is if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing with Bush-Cheney policies.”

And on…

SEN. CLINTON: “Well, this is getting kind of silly. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly. We have to ask what’s ever happened to the politics of hope?

It’s a bit of a media-manufactured fight. So let’s see what the original YouTube poster who asked the question thinks about all of this:

So we called Stephen Sixta, the 59-year-old California video producer who asked on YouTube about the candidates’ willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Cuba, N. Korea and Venezuela. He said it’s been pretty much “surreal” to spend the last week hearing the question he wrote repeated in some kind of endless loop by everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Rush Limbaugh.

His bottom line: He liked Obama’s answer, and he thought Hillary misconstrued what he meant by “preconditions” in acting like Obama had agreed to meet Fidel and Chavez with no diplomatic groundwork whatsoever. He said his question just meant there shouldn’t be a requirement of a change in a country’s behavior as a condition of talking to them.

“My question had something I wanted my government to achieve. I wanted my country to go out and speak to countries we don’t speak to,” Sixta said. “When the attacks started on Obama they were attacks on my question and what I wanted. They made me feel bad.”

Mark Ambinder of the Atlantic brings us this:

With the headline “Democrats Play Dirty In Charleston,” the Palmetto Scoop blog published what it said was a flier found affixed to fence posts near the Citadel, the location of Monday night’s Democratic debate.

The pamphlet, suggestive of an appeal to racial prejudice, visually links Barack Obama to Michael Dukakis and to Willie Horton, the convicted rapist whose furlough in Massachusetts became a controversial television ad during the 1988 presidential race, and it goes on to accuse Obama of favoring early release for sex offenders.

The charge in the flyer is a distortion of a 1999 state senate vote in Illinois that grant “good time” credits for convicts (i.e., those who are good prisoners are eligible to shave time off of their sentence for their good behaviour.
                           

For Mark’s report, click here.

Via Goon Qu Appelle:

Seems like there’s a group called Californians for Obama. Pretty upstanding group, right? They’re raising a lot of money for Barack Obama through fundraisers, like a “Women of Power” cruise, “…which boasts star attendees like singer Eartha Kitt, poet Maya Angelou and Rep. Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles.”

Except for one problem.

None of the fundraising money has actually gotten to Obama.

Cash’s “Californians for Obama” boasted an official-looking Web site (www.californiansforobama.com) that was graced by a smiling photo of the candidate. The site pitched a star-studded Obama “Women of Power” cruise for 2,000 to Mexico that attracted donors like a 65-year-old woman from Compton (Los Angeles County), who said she has paid the $2,423 cruise fee believing the funds would help support her candidate.

But a Chronicle examination of the latest Federal Election Commission records on file for the organization for the reporting period ending June 30 shows that while Cash has raised nearly $10,000 this year, not one dollar has gone to the Obama campaign — or any other political candidate.

The Obama campaign issued a statement, asking Cash to stop. Unfortunately:

The Federal Election Commission says that such independent fundraising groups have existed for decades and are entirely legal — as long as they cannot be directly connected to campaigns or fraudulently suggest such a connection to gather donations.

It’s important to remember here that neither Obama nor his election campaign had anything to do with this, and be be careful who you give you money to.

Sex Ed for Kindergarteners ‘Right Thing to Do,’ Says Obama

Oh, ABC, why do you have to be so misleading? OK, he did say it:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

But it gives the false impression he’ll be handing out condoms to 5 year olds. What’s it actually mean?

When Obama’s campaign was asked by ABC News to explain what kind of sex education Obama considers “age appropriate” for kindergarteners, the Obama campaign pointed to an Oct. 6, 2004 story from the Daily Herald in which Obama had “moved to clarify” in his Senate campaign that he “does not support teaching explicit sex education to children in kindergarten. . . The legislation in question was a state Senate measure last year that aimed to update Illinois’ sex education standards with ‘medically accurate’ information . . . ‘Nobody’s suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it,’ Obama said. ‘If they ask a teacher ‘where do babies come from,’ that providing information that the fact is that it’s not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing. Although again, that’s going to be determined on a case by case basis by local communities and local school boards.’”

Here’s the kicker:

In addition to local schools informing kindergarteners that babies do not come from the stork, the state legislation Obama supported in Illinois, which contained an “opt out” provision for parents, also envisioned teaching kindergarteners about “inappropriate touching,” according to Obama’s presidential campaign.

Well, I never.

Mitt Romney immediately let out a wail.

“How much sex education is age appropriate for a 5-year-old?” Romney asked rhetorically. “In my view, zero is the right amount.”

Problem is, Mitt Romney held this same position as governor of Massachusetts. You’d think that even GOP hatchetmen would feel uncomfortable attempting to get political mileage out of talking points from the Alan Keyes campaign.

Goon bbsrock adds: Honest information should be presented to children while in school, at an age-appropriate level. Something along the lines of “when a mommy and a daddy love each other, they make a baby” would be fine for a kindergartener. It’s time to stop thinking of sex as some disgusting act that children have to be shielded from, when they are going to get the information from other sources anyway.

This article is warped and horrible and the picture may either offend or scare you or both.

I can kind of agree with the perception that Smarty McSmart Guy tends to lose to the Straight Shooter I’d Wanna Have A Beer With, and thus the point of the article seems pretty decent, and painfully somewhat true, but then he tries to stretch his comparisons way too far. Bill Bradley? Paul Tsongas? Energizing the intellectual youth voters? The author is trying so hard to shoehorn Obama into a wholly concocted and inconsistent narrative of “nerdy, egghead candidates with no populist appeal who lose elections” and fails miserably. One of the major premises of it is that Obama hasn’t focused on low-income people’s issues at all- which is complete bullshit on the face of it, even if Edwards is supposedly the anti-poverty champion. The author is also completely wrong about Obama’s fundraising.

Further, Obama tends to be both Smarty McSmartpants and the guy you wanna have a beer with. He’s the guy who apologizes for cockblocking a reporter, who apparently has some b-ball skills, who jokes that he’s gone so often his wife is reffering to him as “my first husband.”