So Jerome Corsi, yes he of swiftboat fame, has come out with "Obama Nation", another smear job against another Democratic presidential candidate. And right when Obama is on vacation and the Olympics are in full swing, so "nobody will notice". Except, though, it is on the New York Times "non-fiction" bestseller list at least for the next few weeks.

I've seen the response from the Obama camp and, IMHO, it is highly underwhelming. This is the same kind of tepid pushback that lost John Kerry the last election. So, good ole Kossacks, let's compile an action list for Obama. A real action list, with real hits back at the slime. Let's draw blood. Here are my suggestions, but really, I hope each of you will add your own here.
UPDATE: I am shocked at the degree of self-satisfaction and hubris in the poll and comments. Kerry all over again, IMHO.

According to TPM:

ALERT!
Flash: Larry Craig available for kicking around past Sept. 30th!

Let's see, first he resigned according to Fox (Sep 3):

WASHINGTON —  Idaho Sen. Larry Craig resigned from his Republican Senate seat Saturday, bowing to pressure from Republicans to step down after his arrest and guilty plea in a sex scandal...
"It is with sadness and deep regret that I announce that it is my intent to resign from the Senate, effective Sept. 30," Craig said, appearing with his wife, Suzanne, at a press conference in Boise, Idaho.

Ah, now CNN is saying:

EDINA, Minnesota (CNN) -- Sen. Larry Craig won't resign from the Senate while awaiting a judge's ruling on his effort to get a guilty plea withdrawn in a restroom sex sting, a source said Wednesday.

This was a historic day in Jena, Louisiana:

JENA, La. (AP) — Thousands of chanting demonstrators filled the streets of this little Louisiana town Thursday in support of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.

Not since the sixties has the nation seen this kind of gathering and this kind of emotion in the name of racial equality:

Elizabeth Redding, 63, of Willinboro, N.J., said she marched at Selma when she was in her 20s. "This is worse, because we didn't get the job done," she said as she walked up a hill leading to the park rally. "I never believed that this would be going on in 2007."

Gonzales may have resigned, but his legacy lives on:

(Sep 12, 2007) BIG CREEK, W.Va. - Inside a shed on a remote hillside of this coalfield community, authorities say a young black woman was tortured for days, sexually assaulted, beaten and forced to eat rat droppings.

Her captors, all of them white, choked her with a cable cord and stabbed her in the leg while calling her a racial slur, poured hot water over her and made her drink from a toilet, according to criminal complaints.

This is the beast that Bush, Cheney, Gonzo, Ashcroft, Yoo and their ilk have unloosed upon the land. And lest you think this is an isolated incident...

This is a small but sometimes overlooked part of the Iraq story. It starts prosaically:

The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms....Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT - has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But murder and corruption cannot be far behind...

So Rove resigns on a Sunday, not a Friday. Clearly "spending more time with my family" and "Bartlett pushed me out" are silly excuses. The real reason had to be something big, something compelling, something legal. Now Leahy may be a threat, but that is controllable. "Executive privilege" or what used to be called the Divine Right of Kings, will keep Leahy away, specially with a pliant Supreme Court. So what is not controllable that just got hotter? Here is Harpers:

At the center is an affidavit which exposes a Republican political cabal aimed at using the machinery of prosecution to bring down the Democratic governor as the first step in an effort to retake the Statehouse in Montgomery for the GOP

So, just like Al Capone, Rove has been felled by the smallest of his peccadillos.

You guys are there with the powerful people. Make a statement. Interrupt the proceedings and have a session with those people. Why FISA, why now, why the McConnell resolution? If YKos cannot make a statement, what does Crashing the Gates mean?

While we ponder why Democrats are caving in haste to revising FISA, which probably stands for Federal Illegal Surveillance of Americans by now, consider this exquisite situation that has arisen from another of Bush's anti-terrorism laws. Here's the Washington Post:

Chiquita's executives left the meeting convinced that the government had not clearly demanded that the payments stop. Federal prosecutors, however, are now weighing whether to charge Hills; Robert Olson, who was then Chiquita's general counsel; former Chiquita CEO Cyrus Friedheim; and other former company officials for approving the illegal payments, according to records and sources close to the probe.

more below the fold...

Spying on Americans by the administration is a hot topic, with potential underlying serious crimes against the law and against the people. And, this is the one issue the American people will get behind for impeachment. But, don't you worry, the Rovians have the answer: get the Democratic Congress to own the problem.

Democratic lawmakers said on Wednesday they were closer to a deal with U.S. President George W. Bush to expand the government's anti-terror powers to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mail from abroad.

More below the fold...

Breaking: White House releases letter on NSA program.

After missing the noon deadline imposed by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the White House has released a statement seeking to resolve the discrepancies in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ contradictory statements about the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. According to CNN’s Suzanne Malveau, the letter from Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell says that "a number of these intelligence activities were authorized in order."

via ThinkProgress.

Gonzo is gone, his ashes shot out of a cannon according to his last wishes. But never gone from our minds, our national consciousness. Here he is:

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

But today we saw the dimunitive gonzo:

"The attorney general has lost the confidence of the Congress and the American people," said Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT). He said the Justice Department was now "shrouded in scandal."

What a contrast...

Tonight is the debate on withdrawal from Iraq in the Senate. The Democrats hold 49 seats (with Sen Johnson still incapacitated), Republicans 49, one Independent solidly with the Democrats and good ole Joe Lieberman. So for Harry Reid to bring up the debate in the face of a threatened filibuster is really taking a stand. The country is solidly with him and even the Republican tide has turned. King George is still in his madness, but he may be in for an unpleasant surprise tonight. Here's why I think that despite the filibuster more than 60 Senators will end up voting to end the war:

should be the Democratic meme. Not impeachment, not bashing Pelosi or Reid, not the pardon of Scooter Libby. I imagine all Democratic spokespeople on TV putting their hands over their ears and going "criminal conspiracy, criminal conspiracy, la, la la,..." over and over again. If pressed, they repeat what Patrick Fitzgerald said about a cloud over the Vice President:

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

and the pardon of Libby? Obstruction of Justice....

Today brings probably the best news for Scooter Libby, the court will not let him stay out of jail while he appeals. Why is that good news, you ask? Because now he knows that all that stands between him and jail are either a pardon from Bush or a nice song about uncle Cheney to Fitz. But a pardon might bring about new accusations on Bush:

Wilson also argued that Bush should recuse himself from any involvement with the Libby scandal. "The idea that the President would not recuse himself given the superior-subordinate relationship he had with Mr. Libby — and considering that it would be the first time that you would consider a pardon in a criminal investigation that involves perhaps the Office of the President, certainly the Office of the Vice President — would be totally inappropriate," he said.

So the alternative is to sing...

and counting. This is a victory for justice in an America where it is argued that justice should no longer be blind, but be doled out based on social class:

The reason is that although Libby is certainly guilty of having lied, he is not, in the view of weighty arbiters of the law, deserving of a jail sentence. What he did was to involve himself in a security matter of no consequence.

Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil (June 21) drops a bombshell:

Anthony Menendez, who was Halliburton's director of technical accounting research and training, has accused the world's second-largest oilfield-services company of using so- called bill-and-hold accounting and other undisclosed practices to ``distort the timing of billions of dollars in revenue.'' In short, Menendez says this allowed Halliburton to book product sales improperly, before they occurred.
The allegations are part of a 54-page complaint Menendez filed against Halliburton with a Labor Department administrative- law judge in Covington, Louisiana, who released the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

If true, this will hit Halliburton where it most hurts: with its stockholders. Watch out for Dead-eye Dick to be selling his shares tomorrow!

Found this article on CBS/AP, Missing Soldier's Wife Faces Deportation, which talks about:

While the U.S. military searches for a soldier missing in Iraq, kidnapped by insurgents possibly allied with al Qaeda, his wife back home in Massachusetts may be deported by the U.S. government.

So these immigrants are good enough to die for us, but certainly not good enough to live among us? They violated some immigration rule. But the punishment of deportation for a soldier's wife?

So I went back and re-read former Deputy Attorney General Comey's testimony to Congress. It is still as riveting as a Hollywood thriller, with the notorious midnight visit by Andy Card and Al Gonzales to John Ashcroft's hospital bedside to recertify a secret program.

But which program? It appears to me that this is the NSA's Total Information Awareness program. The private records of at least 50 million Americans are in this database, and since it was being fed directly from the telephone switches at AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth and ISP e-mail servers from all ISPs, there was no way of stopping it without killing the massive domestic infrastructure created for this program.

This may now prove to have the serendipitous effect of one Bush law-breaking program revealing another law breaking of the most loyal of loyal Bushies.