The Los Angeles Times reports:

According to court records, creditors have secured at least two liens against [Joe the Plumber] Wurzelbacher, whose legal name is Samuel. Ohio has a $1,182 lien for owed taxes and St. Charles Mercy Hospital has filed a 2007 lien for $1,261.

I think we can all agree that this is critical information.

Not because it says anything about Joe the Plumber, mind you. But it does serve a useful function: it warns any future citizen who might dare question Barack Obama that his life will be closely scrutinized for any irrelevant but embarrassing information.

So, you know. Critical in that sense.

Oh — I almost forgot to mention: Martin Nesbitt, the treasurer of Obama’s campaign, has tax liens. So do his companies.

You’d think that matters more than the tax liens of Joe the Plumber, wouldn’t you? But good luck finding a Big Media story about Nesbitt’s liens.

Barack Obama in last night’s debate:

Obama: . . . 100 percent, John, of your ads — 100 percent of them have been negative.

McCain: It’s not true.

Obama: It absolutely is true.

It absolutely is not.

This is John McCain’s reward for having shown some class: to have the object of his praise lie about him to his face.

(H/t Mike Gallagher.)

UPDATE: Via K-Lo come three more “negative” ads:

(more…)

No “recorded basis,” eh? Only if you don’t count the 2005 blog entry by a liberal who was there when it happened.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times today, in an editorial titled McCain’s Debatable Strategy:

And then, returning to Ayers, McCain alleged that Obama launched his political career in the former Weatherman’s living room, an assertion for which there is no recorded basis.

And this is from the Musings & Migraines blog, January 27, 2005:

When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the livingroom of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.

How will the L.A. Times defend this? By saying it wasn’t “recorded” because it’s a blog entry and not a podcast??

I think I’ll write the Readers’ Rep and see.

The author is no conservative. She goes on to fault Obama for being an insufficiently authentic liberal, and criticizes him for being too chummy with Republicans. [UPDATE: And, I meant to add, the existence of this blog entry was reported by Politico in February. So it’s not like the editors had no reason to know.]

No recorded basis, eh?

P.S. The liberals’ defense du jour on this McCain claim is to quibble over insignificant details: e.g. some rabbi’s wife thinks she remembers having a similar event before Ayers’s event — so the “launched” claim is a LIE!!!11!!1!

In a particularly amusing blog entry at the Chicago Sun Times, Lynn Sweet assures us that McCain “is misleading the public by overplaying the size and significance of Ayers’ early support.” But Sweet’s underlying facts neatly undermine this conclusion. Sweet tells us: “Obama’s campaign really was launched when he got the backing of then state Sen. Alice Palmer (D-Chicago), who wanted him to replace her as she was planning a run for Congress. Palmer’s backing gave him entrée into local influential political circles.” And she quotes a supporter as saying that “the event at Bill Ayers’ house (prior to ours) was a fund-raiser for Alice’s congressional campaign at which she also introduced Barack as the successor she would like to see elected.”

So, to sum up: at Ayers’s house, Alice Palmer gave Obama her official support, by declaring him to be her anointed successor. And his campaign “really was launched” when he received her official support. Applying the transitive property:

Sounds like his political career “really was launched” at Ayers’s house.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times will not be correcting its error. Details in this post.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Some people are doing everything they can to discredit Joe the Plumber:

The Toledo Blade says Joe isn’t a licensed or registered plumber and he has a tax lien on his house.

Andrew Sullivan #1 complains because Joe isn’t a licensed plumber and because he uses his middle name (Joe) instead of his first name (Samuel). “Next up: not actually a man?”

Andrew Sullivan #2 issues a correction [emphasis supplied]:

“Correction

“Joe” the “Plumber”, pace HuffPuff, does not appear to be related to Charles Keating. Apologies for the link (now deleted).”

Democratic Underground has embraced the Keating meme and is convinced Joe is a Republican plant.

What did Joe do to deserve all this scorn? He had the audacity to ask Obama questions about his tax policies after Obama made an unscheduled stop at his home on Sunday afternoon as he “was playing football in his front yard with his son, Joey.”

The nerve of Joe.

Does that make Joey a GOP plant, too?

Meanwhile ABC reports John McCain plans to call and spend some time with Joe, which I think is an excellent idea. Joe and Sarah Palin are the most exciting people in the GOP — a real-life Joe Six-Pack and Hockey Mom.

— DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

On Tuesday, reporter David Singleton of the Scranton (PA) Times Leader reported that a man at a Sarah Palin rally said “Kill him” as a Republican Congressional candidate warmed up the crowd with anti-Obama rhetoric:

“1:25 p.m.

[Republican Congressional candidate] Chris Hackett addressed the increasingly feisty crowd as they await the arrival of Gov. Palin.

Each time the Republican candidate for the seat in the 10th Congressional District mentioned Barack Obama the crowd booed loudly.

One man screamed “kill him!”

Supporters have been noted shouting “kill him,” “terrorist,” “off with his head” and other equally incendiary terms about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Others have directly suggested Mr. Obama is a Muslim, which he is not, or a traitor. Some comments even drew rebuke from Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

Other than the lone man, there were no other such outbursts.“

Now we learn Singleton may have special powers of observation that others lack since the Secret Service announced no one other than the reporter heard anyone yell “Kill him” at the Palin rally:

“The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.
***
Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience along with an undisclosed number of Secret Service agents and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, all of whom were at the Republican vice presidential candidate’s rally at the Riverfront Sports Complex.

“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”

Singleton and the Times Leader stand by the story but I’m not surprised. In addition to being smarter than everyone else, maybe reporters like Singleton have better hearing, too.

H/T daleyrocks.

UPDATE: Dana Milbank says the Secret Service is actively preventing the media from accessing supporters at Palin’s rallies:

“I wasn’t at the Scranton event, but I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they’ve started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty — protecting the protectee — and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it’s unfounded because the reporters can’t get close enough to identify the person.“

Milbank also claimed the local paper reported two instances of someone yelling “Kill him.” Odd, that, since the original report specifically said there was only one outburst.

— DRJ

The media is not going to do anything to help John McCain, ladies and gentlemen. The media will give us stories like this:

[T]he 90-minute debate was a perfect distillation of McCain’s general election campaign, with all of its inconsistent messages.

He spoke passionately about education and free trade and put Obama on the policy defensive more than in previous debates, but he also spent precious minutes bickering over a domestic radical [note well” “radical” and not “terrorist” — P] from the 1960s. He spoke of his desire to reach peaceably across the aisle, while at times exuding what seemed a barely controlled anger, his jaw clenched as he appeared to show disdain for his opponent.

Racist.

As I say: the media is not going to do anything to help him, or any other Republican.

I’m with Ace — and you should go to his post for the full details of a proposed insurrection. We need action, mostly on informing voters about the Democrats’ responsibility on Fannie and Freddie.

McCain won’t do it. We must.

Here’s how I put it on the 6th: “We need endless TV commercials with clips of Democrats saying there is no crisis. Find the footage of McCain’s speech (if it exists) [decrying the problems at Fannie and Freddie, and sponsoring legislation to do something about it] and run that too.”

When I said that, I was talking about ads like this:

Or this:

It turns out that ads like this work:

Who knew?

Well, we out here in the blogosphere did. John McCain didn’t and doesn’t.

Put aside your rosy scenarios. We are headed for a bloodbath. At this point, every single undecided voter is going to break for Obama. His coattails will bring in more Democrats to a Congress that has a worse approval rating than Bush. It’s absurd — but it’s going to happen.

If we’re going down, we might as well go down fighting — with the truth. So spread the truth to every undecided voter you can.

Show them the ads above. If you’re a fan of the stuff on Obama’s character, read this detailed piece by Baseball Crank, and pick your favorite parts to show the undecideds. But always present your arguments in the context of the economy — and the judgment and integrity needed to do something about spending and borrowing. All roads lead back to Fannie and Freddie and ads like the ones above.

Tell people Obama voted “present” on Fannie and Freddie reform, and considered it a Big Accomplishment to write a letter.

Get out there with the truth.

Luckily, all the ugliness in this campaign is on the right. Luckily, nobody on the left is contemptuous of Sarah Palin because she’s a woman.

If they were, they might be selling T-shirts of McCain having sex with Palin doggie-style. (Not safe for work, in case you had any doubt.)

I’m sure there are similar T-shirts of Obama boning Biden.

Because there is no sexism in this campaign. Racism, you bet. Every time those Republicans link Obama with that white male terrorist, you can be sure racism is to blame.

But sexism? In this campaign? Nah!