A convicted terrorism supporter is being held in contempt for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury. Mike Gravel tells an audience to, essentially, terrorize the prosecutor:

Find out where he lives. Find out where his office is. If you’ve got some chutzpah – which is a word that you don’t hear often – if you’ve really got it, find out where he lives, find out where his kids go to school, find out where his office is; picket him all the time. Call him a racist in signs if you see him. Call him an injustice. Call him whatever you want to call him, but in his face all the time. They can’t take the heat; deliver it to them. We have to stop laying down to these injustices.

Find out where his kids go to school?

This is what Gravel says to an audience of people supporting someone who has been convicted of supporting terrorists?

Thanks to Pat Riotic.

[Guest post by DRJ]

WLS has the political scene covered so that frees me to cover the important stories: Cheerleaders trapped in elevators and National Enquirer photos that purport to be John Edwards and his love child.

UPDATE: McClatchy notices this story:

“With two weeks to go before their national convention, a number of Democrats are saying that Edwards needs to publicly address National Enquirer stories that have alleged he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.

If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short order, he risks party officials deciding not to have him speak or, if they do, creating a distraction from a week focused on Barack Obama accepting the nomination.
***
“He absolutely does have to (resolve it). If it’s not true, he has to issue a stronger denial,” said Gary Pearce, the Democratic strategist who ran Edwards’ 1998 Senate race. “It’s a very damaging thing. …

“The big media has tried to be responsible and handle this with kid gloves, but it’s clearly getting ready to bust out. If it’s not true, he’s got to stand up and say, ‘This is not true. That is not my child and I’m going to take legal action against the people who are spreading these lies.’ It’s not enough to say, ‘That’s tabloid trash,’ ” Pearce said.”

Who knew the media treats Democrats with kid gloves?

— DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

A new Pew Research Center poll confirms many Americans believe Barack Obama has had too much press and it may be hurting his popularity:

“By a margin of 76% to 11% respondents in Pew’s weekly News Interest Index survey named Obama over McCain as the candidate they have heard the most about in recent days. But the same poll also shows that the Democratic candidate’s media dominance may not be working in his favor. Close to half (48%) of Pew’s interviewees went on to say that they have been hearing too much about Obama lately. And by a slight, but statistically significant margin – 22% to 16% – people say that recently they have a less rather than more favorable view of the putative Democratic nominee.”

Republicans are more likely to say they want to hear less about Obama, although 51% of independents felt they had heard too much and almost a third of Democrats agreed.

When it comes to advertising, almost 60% of Republicans and Democrats say they have seen a commercial for the candidates. Approximately a third of the respondents from both parties viewed Obama’s message as largely positive and McCain’s as largely negative.

— DRJ

Posted by WLS:

Andy Sullivan offers up Excuse No. 647 for why Obama’s polling has dropped the last couple weeks.  Linking to fellow Atlantic Blogger Marc Ambinder, who,   among other rationalizations, offers this:

Right now, the type of voter who’s paying attention is primed to support John McCain. After the conventions, when younger voters typically tune in — and by younger here, I mean, under 55 or so — then Obama’s margins will widen because these folks are his folks.

Funny, I don’t remember the “our guys aren’t paying attention” meme when Obama had the +15% Newsweek poll, or when his Gallup number bumped up to +9% only 10 days ago.

[Guest post by DRJ]

From yesterday’s Austin American-Statesman:

“How many cheerleaders can cram into an elevator? Apparently not 26. A group of teenage girls attending a cheerleading camp on the University of Texas got stuck and had to be rescued after trying to squeeze into an elevator at a residence hall Tuesday night.

One girl fainted and was treated at a hospital and released. Two others were treated at the scene.”

It took 25 minutes for the fire department to extricate the 14- to 17-year-old cheerleaders from the elevator. Campus officials were described as “not amused.”

The good news is they seem to be ready for college.

— DRJ

Posted by WLS:

The chatter is getting a little too loud for this to be pure media/internet speculation.

Latest out of the box today is Karen Tumulty over at Time this afternoon — “Have the Clintons Gotten Over It?”  But Drudge has links up to two different articles on this topic, which follow only one day after Politico put up this story which DRJ posted about yesterday.

From Tumulty’s Time article:

But behind the united front, says an adviser, “it’s not a great relationship, and it’s probably not going to become one.” In private conversations, associates say, Clinton remains skeptical that Obama can win in the fall. That’s a sentiment some other Democrats believe is not just a prediction but a wish, because it would prove her right about his weaknesses as a general-election candidate and possibly pave the way for her to run again in 2012. Clinton is also annoyed that Obama has yet to deliver on his end of an informal bargain, reached as part of their truce, that each would raise $500,000 for the other. “Hillary has done her part in that regard,” says an adviser. “Obama has not.”

[I]f Hillary Clinton’s feelings are still bruised, her husband’s are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions—which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp—that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries. Not helping is the fact that Obama has yet to follow up on the tentative dinner plans he and Bill Clinton made at the end of the primary season. “It’s personal with him, in terms of his own legacy,” says a friend of Bill Clinton’s. “And the race stuff really left a bad taste in his mouth.”

This ABC News story says there is a

“fierce behind-the-scenes squabble between the Clinton and Obama camps over how to recognize Clinton and her achievements in the primaries without overshadowing or detracting from a convention that belongs to Obama.”

But the very fact that details of her convention role remain unresolved less than three weeks before the Democrats descend upon Denver is a fresh sign of the difficulties the party will face at a convention when nearly half the delegates were chosen because of their support for a candidate who will not be the nominee.

And these stories follow just a few days after Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s former campaign spokesman, made sympathetic comments about way in which the McCain camp responded to the race-baiting by the Obama camp. 

But, most significantly, they follow only a couple days after Bill Clinton specifically declined to affirm in any positive fashion that Obama is qualified to be President.   He told ABC News:

“I never said he wasn’t qualified. The constitution sets qualification for the president. And then the people decide who they think would be the better president.”

So, he’s old enough, and he was born in the US — so far as they know.

[Guest post by DRJ]

The El Paso Times reports:

“Osvaldo Aldrete Davila was sentenced to 9 1/2 years Wednesday for smuggling more than 100 kilos of marijuana in 2005.”

Aldrete-Davila was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, the same judge who sentenced Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

— DRJ

Posted by WLS:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/sports/olympics/07masks.html

I’m still not having much luck with hyperlinks, so cut and paste if you need to.

But to goad the athletes into apologizing to the Chinese because they were “insulted,” when the real issue is the outrage the world should feel over the manner in which THEY have fouled the air in their own country, makes me want to retch at the pathetic PC of the US Olympic Committee.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan has been convicted by a military jury of supporting terrorism but acquitted of conspiracy charges. The AP described the jury as a “Pentagon-selected jury” of 6 military officers who deliberated 8 hours over 3 days.

Hamdan could be sentenced to life in prison. The sentencing hearing will be held later today.

— DRJ

Posted by WLS:

As reported today by Michael Calderon over at Politico, Milbank says that he began working on a deal with CNN on July 7, and that his dissatisfaction with Olbermann/Countdown/MSNBC went back a couple months. He says it was a conversation in early July he had with one of Olbermann’s producers about why he hadn’t been booked on the show for a couple weeks that led him to look at options with CNN.

Milbank says that Olbermann’s producer told him that there was some concern on the staff about a “favorable” comment Milbank had made about McCain adviser Charlie Black in June.  From the Politico story:

Here’s the exchange from June 23, where Olbermann talked to Milbank on-air about Black’s statement to Fortune magazine, that a terrorist attack would be a “big advantage” for the McCain campaign.

OLBERMANN: But where do we go in terms of this story from here? Does McCain have to, whether he likes it or not, fire Charlie Black or face having this bell along with other bells around his neck all summer and all fall?

MILBANK: Well, he’s going to wait and see. I imagine they are certainly going to hope that this becomes a 24-hour thing that blows over. Which it well could be, depending on what events happen in the coming days. But if it keeps being brought back to them, they’ll have to take some action here.

The irony here is that Charlie Black is a very soft-spoken, well-liked figure, and this does seem rather out of character for him to sound off in this way.”

Amazingly, MSNBC confirmed that a producer did mention Charlie Black in the conversation that Milbank recounts, but states the producer was only kidding.

I said yesterday that it seemed clear from Olbermann’s own comment that he was uneasy about whether Milbank would go about trashing McCain in the general election in the same manner he was reliably called upon to trash Bush/Cheney.  Its clear now that Olbermann canned him for that very reason, and the dust-up over Milbank’s July 30 column was just a convenient excuse.

That’ll be all the more clear in the weeks and months ahead as Milbank shows himself to be a more even-handed analyst of the general election campaign on CNN.