The truth comes out:  Fox News admits — John McCain simply did not vet Sarah Palin.

Ladies and gentleman, the future of the Republican party?

At an Obama rally in North Carolina, a lone protester is confronted by Obama supporters on his anti-Muslim views:

And at a McCain rally in Virginia, an anti-Muslim faction of McCain supporters is confronted by… McCain supporters.

Racial and religious intolerance is simply unacceptable… no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.  Good job by both campaigns’ supporters in confronting this abhorrent behavior without getting ugly.

Some audience members were removed from the audience at a rally in Cedar Falls, Iowa — even though they weren’t protesting.

David Zarifis, director of public safety for the University of Northern Iowa, said McCain staffers requested UNI police assist in escorting out “about four or five” people from the rally prior to McCain’s speech.

Zarifis said while the people who were taken out weren’t protesting or causing problems, McCain’s staff were worried they would during the speech.

“Apparently, they had been identified by those staffers as potential protesters within the event,” Zarifis said. “The facility was rented by the RNC for the McCain campaign, so it’s really a private facility for them. We assisted in their desires to have those people removed.”

Lara Elborno, a student at the University of Iowa, said she was approached by a police officer and a McCain staffer and was told she had to leave or she would be arrested for trespassing.

“It was a very confusing, very frustrating situation,” Elborno said. “I said that I had a right to be there, I wasn’t doing anything disruptive — I was sitting, waiting for the rally to start.”

The kicker?  Some of them were there to support McCain.  Their problem was that they looked like they would cause trouble.  I can’t guess what the criteria was to eject these “suspects.”  Were they too young?  Ethnic?  Shady?  It’s all speculation, really.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

Apparently, these are not the Americans that John McCain is running for.

Hat Tip:  Fred2Blue

Josh Marshall at TPM makes a valid point.

I’ll admit being ignorant as to Rashid Khalidi was when the McCain/Palin campaign decided to drag him into the national limelight.  But based on everything I’ve read, turns out he’s not the “radical” they’ve made him out to be.  He looks to be an intelligent, articulate academic who’s a respected voice on international relations in the Middle East.

Per his Wiki page:

Khalidi’s research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community, the role of education in the construction of political identity, and in the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region. Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as “preeminent in his field.” He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994. Khalidi is currently editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Much of Khalidi’s scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the historical construction of nationalism in the Arab world. Drawing on the work of theorists Benedict Anderson who described nations as “imagined communities”, he does not posit primordial national identities, but clearly argues that these nations have legitimacy and rights. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), he places the emergence of Palestinian national identity in the context of Ottoman and British colonialism as well as the early Zionist effort in the Levant. This book won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997. His dating of Palestinian national emergence to the early 20th century and his tracing of its contours provide a rejoinder to Israeli nationalist claims that Palestinians either do not exist, or had no collective claims prior to the 1948 creation of Israel. Nevertheless, Khalidi is also careful to focus on the late development, failings and internal divisions within the various elements of the Palestinian nationalist movement as well.

In Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004), Khalidi takes readers on a historical tour of Western intervention in the Middle East, and argues that these interventions continue to have a colonialist nature that is both morally unacceptable and likely to backfire.

Oh, and by the way, he’s not a “PLO spokesman” at all.

Khalidi has been accused of having ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), based on his work for Wafa in the late 1980s, and later serving as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation during the Madrid Conference of 1991. Khalidi denied the allegation that he served as a PLO spokesman. Khalidi explained that he often spoke to journalists in Beirut, and was usually cited, without attribution, as a well-informed Palestinian source. He also said that he was unaware of any misidentification as a PLO spokesman. Palestinian sources, speaking to The Jerusalem Post, also denied that Khalidi was a PLO spokesman.

Sound like a crazed anti-Semite to you?  Some unhinged radical of questionable character?  Me neither.

So why is this scholar being booed at campaign rallies throughout the “real America?”  It sounds like John McCain and Sarah Palin are essentially playing the Fear Card… again.  And in all actuality, it’s the Fear Card with a dash of the Anti-Intellectual Card thrown in for good measure.

It boils down to this:  Rashid Khalidi has an Arab name.  He’s of Palestinian descent.  He sounds scary.  And though it’s true that he’s been critical of Israel, he’s speaking from a Palestinian historical perspective.  He’s an American citizen who has done extensive studies on the Middle East.  He is such a respected authority that John McCain’s own International Republican Institute donated nearly $500K to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine’s Research and Studies in 1998 to help them continue their research.

And now his name is being dragged through the mud, simply to achieve a political end.  It’s irresponsible at best, and if the McCain/Palin team had any sense of decency they would apologize to Khalidi, put an end to their latest meme, and talk about their solutions to the real problems facing America today.

Unless they don’t have any real solutions, that is.

Which, based on what I’ve seen these past few weeks, wouldn’t be too far of a stretch.

Another blast from a staunch conservative.

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.

Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate”?

I’ll bet you’re thinking I was going to talk about Barack Obama’s connection to “PLO spokesman,” Rashid Khalidi.  I mean, after all he toasted the guy at a party before he left for New York to become a professor at Columbia.  And John McCain is just livid that the Los Angeles Times refuses to release the videotape of that toast.  I mean, “He’s palling around with terrorists, for Pete’s sake!!!“

McCain today said, “The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public…I’m not in the business of talking about media bias…but what if there was a tape of John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit…I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.”

But as is usually the case with John McCain, if he accuses Barack Obama of something, you can bet he’s guilty of it himself.

He’s inexperienced!  Enter Sarah Palin.

He’s a celebrity!  Again… Palin.

He’s got questionable associations!  Enter G. Gordon Liddy.

He’s connected to a PLO spokesman!  Enter… Rashid Khalidi?

As Jake Tapper has discovered, John McCain has his own connections to this “questionable” character.

In 1993, McCain became chairman of the International Republican Institute. He still chairs that respected organization.

That same year, Khalidi helped found the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, self-described as “an independent academic research and policy analysis institution” created to meet “the need for active Palestinian scholarship on issues related to Palestine.” (Its archived Web site is HERE.)

Khalidi was on the board of trustees through 1999.

According to tax returns, the McCain-chaired IRI funded the organization Khalidi founded and served on to the tune of $448,873 in 1998 (click HERE to see the tax return)* as first reported by Seth Couter Walls at HuffPo.

The IRI continued to give money to the CPRS after Khalidi left the group as well.

Sensing a theme?

You can bet that if John McCain accuses Barack Obama of double-dipping a chip, it’s because John McCain himself has put his whole mouth right in the dip.

Rich Lowry, as enthusiastic a cheerleader as there could possibly be for the McCain/Palin ticket, just wrote an article blaming McCain for the “loss of 2008.”

No other Republican candidate had a character and background — as a courageously independent spirit — better suited to making the presidential campaign competitive this year. But perhaps no Republican candidate was so poorly suited to the task of running a presidential race.

McCain earned his chops as the media’s favorite Republican senator by being a maverick, or in a less exalted formulation, a gadfly. He pursued pet causes inimical to his party, such as campaign-finance reform, and made it his role to tell fellow Republicans what he considered hard truths.

None of this endeared him to Republican primary voters. He won the nomination anyway on the basis of his admirable support for the surge (adopted when he was in typical gadfly mode) and a few stock lines. He became the Republican nominee by default, without an organization or fundraising operation to speak of, and soon enough lost the press, too.

McCain’s rapport with the media depended on snarky banter about his own party and about himself. That couldn’t continue in the general election, so McCain’s campaign cut him off. His lifeline to his former admirers denied to him, McCain became a demonstrably unhappy warrior.

Outside his campaign, meanwhile, McCain is getting abandoned by all the Republicans who usually pronounce themselves “troubled” by Republican tactics. If McCain weren’t running for president, and it were some other Republican who had attacked Obama for his associations and picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, surely McCain himself would be on some Sunday show clucking his disapproval.

The Moderate Voice waves some smelling salts under the noses of McCain supporters sniffing out Socialism in Obama’s agenda.

John McCain’s issues platform calls for a plan to fix Social Security which still involves collecting money from people, including the wealthy, and redistributing it to poor people, many of whom will pay no taxes at all. McCain has a health-care plan which will collect money from people, including the wealthy who can afford their own health insurance, and redistribute it in the form of $5,000 checks to poor people without such coverage, many of whom will pay no taxes. (In fact, he’s made a point of criticizing Obama’s health care plan over just this point.) McCain continues to tolerate and support a progressive tax system – and I’m just taking him directly on his word about how he would structure proposed tax rates and cuts here – which will collect a larger amount of money from people who earn more and deposit those funds into a Federal system which will, in some cases, redistribute some of those funds to Americans who earn less money, some of whom will pay no taxes at all.

Additionally, Joe Canason at Truthdig discusses legislation signed into law by none other than John McCain’s idol, Ronald Reagan.

Finally, let’s discuss the other bit of demagoguery in McCain’s most recent speeches, when he complains about the “redistribution of wealth” and equates an income tax rebate for working people with “welfare.” Leaving aside the racial subtext of those remarks, it is hard to say whether they display ignorance, dishonesty or both. The American tax system, like all other taxation in modern nations, has always redistributed wealth. Sometimes it sends streams of money upward, from low-income taxpayers into the pockets of corporate executives; at other times it sends those streams downward, to assist the very poor.

In 1986, Reagan signed legislation greatly increasing the earned income tax credit, a credit for low-income workers that reduces the impact of payroll taxes in order to boost take-home pay above poverty levels. When the credit is more than the amount of federal income taxes owed by an individual, that person receives a tax “refund.” Reagan praised the earned income tax credit as the best “anti-poverty” and “pro-family” legislation ever enacted by Congress.

It must be troubling for Republicans to learn that according to McCain, the Gipper was a socialist, too.

Something a little more lighthearted.

The Chicago Tribune, a right-leaning publication who made headlines for endorsing a Democrat for the first time ever, released a scathing criticism of John McCain and his association with convicted felon, G. Gordon Liddy.

The article accuses McCain of hypocrisy in demanding Barack Obama “explain” his relationship with Bill Ayers, but stonewalling any attempt to clarify the extent of his relationship with Liddy, who famously advocated the use of lethal force against federal agents.

Liddy is not someone most of us would want to see visiting the Oval Office. Working for President Richard Nixon, he committed a raft of crimes to secure Nixon’s re-election and punish his perceived enemies. He proposed to do still more—bomb the liberal Brookings Institution, kidnap anti-war activists and murder a couple of inconvenient people. But cooler heads prevailed.

What does any of this have to do with McCain? Plenty. Liddy held a fundraiser at his home for McCain’s 1998 Senate re-election race. He agreed to speak at another McCain fundraiser in 2000.

He has given several large contributions to McCain, including $1,000 this year. He has hosted McCain on his radio show, where the Arizona senator gushed, “I’m proud of you.”

McCain says Liddy paid his debt, as if that erases everything. Actually, most of the debt was forgiven by President Jimmy Carter, who commuted his sentence. McCain doesn’t mention that, like Ayers, Liddy has never repented of his crimes, but takes pride in them.

His contempt for the law has not abated. After the 1993 raid in Waco, Texas, Liddy urged lethal violence against federal agents. “Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms,” he told listeners. “Kill the sons of bitches.” Only a year later did he amend his remarks to recommend that citizens not shoot unless they are shot at—which would have been a great comfort to any ATF agents gunned down in the meantime.

But don’t take that as a sign that he has changed his ways. Liddy, who as a convicted felon is forbidden to possess a firearm, has bragged about keeping guns in his house and using them for target shooting. When I asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms what an ex-con could get for firing a gun, even at a target range, I was told it’s a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

For at least a decade, this unreformed criminal and enemy of democracy has been McCain’s loyal friend, supporter and contributor. It may be a mystery just why the Republican nominee consorts with a lawless radical. But it’s no mystery why he doesn’t want to talk about it.