Mikkel, I haven't heard everything he's said in every venue, obviously- I'm only noting the inaccuracy in certain statements that he's made.

I spent considerable time in laying out the broader picture of how we could ADVANCE in thIs disussion to a post politics zone, I actually thought about gas-tax relief. ..

Your response is more nit-picking.

Over and out.

If that's the definiton, then fine. It's not my definition, nor is it, as far as I can tell, Obama's.
What his detractors fail to grasp is that he is more about process than mmediate outcome. How will oil companies react later this year and next year and the year after that? How will consumers? Will it make them see the importance of conservation or wil it l encourage willy-nilly spending money on gas.?

Argumetns like this, as on the farm bill, the inheritance tax and other measues always bring up the specter of the hard-working American who will lose everything if he doesn't get what he needs right now. The trouble with all these scenarios is precisely because they are not need based. As a consequence, the majority of the money spent on many gov't programs goes to those who need it least. 'Consumers' include the wealthy owners orf 3 gas guzzlers as well as the working mom in a rural area who needs to get to her job.

How much revenue will be lost to aid people who are not in need in aird?
How much will be pure waste?
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I already gave you several examples of McCain's change of mind.
I'm not interested in spending my time to provide you with a recap of McCain's public statemtnts over the last 4 years.
I'm sure you'll be able to link to them.
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Just go ahead and vote for McCain, if that's your preference.This has once again devolved into nit-picking and argementation instead of real argument. or trying to understand the beyond-candidate and behond-parrty world. It's the 'gotcha' style of discussion, which just goes around in circles and never advances.

It really is a waste of itme., IMO.

Anyway, besides the shortcomings of the media, I have to admit I'm just a bit shorttempered at the moment due to stressful personal circumstances, so I didn't do the best job of expressing myself.

A little fact checking.
What happened in Illinois is exactly what Obama himself cites in campaign speeches as one reason he opposes th gas-tax relief.
There is such a rush to score points, there seems to be no time to check the bases for scoring them.

I agree that fact checking is in order, so please feel free to read the facts that are presented in the link I provided. Do you dispute what is said there, and if so, on what factual basis? Was there in fact another report that verifies that what Obama said is true, or not?

I notice the popularity of providing links to blogs and opinion pieces as a means of providing evidence for an argument. But haht is the evidence for the original opinion?

Personally when I link to another blog or opinion piece it's just a shorthand way of stating an opinion if I think someone has stated it well and if it's the type of thing that is a claim based on facts then I generally won't link to analysis pieces unless those pieces provide the primary source links to back up what's being stated in the analysis. For instance, yesterday I linked to a qando piece which itself linked to a WHO report to back its claims. Of course that didn't stop one commenter from saying that qando was just unacceptable because it's <gasp!> a conservative blog!

Even his steadfastness about Iraq comes with regular amendments and clarifications. In one inerview, he sounded remarkably like Obama, except for the mention of dates. In another inerview, he sounded more like GWB.

Can you be more specific? In general I don't see why that would be a problem, and it in fact adds to his cred as a more centrist candidate that he'd sometimes 'sound like' the conservatives and sometimes 'sound like' a more liberal politician. He agrees with conservatives on most issues but he's not afraid to give criticism toward them when it's due. Why is that a problem?

If you don't happen to agree with his stances, then by all means don't vote for him, but it makes no sense to me for people to criticize him from both right and left- he's considered by a lot of center lefties to be pandering when he iterates his more conservative opinions, and he's considered disingenuous when he iterates a point where he agrees with the left. I guess that's the trouble with centrist politics; everyone is a centrist on some issues but identifies with the more left or right position on others, and any other centrist who lines up differently will be accused of having those positions based on political expediency instead of principle.

He has changed his mind about so many things, I feel I wouldn't know what his principles are until after he is elected. Flexibility is okay with me, too. But I would line to know what he would be flexing from.

Again, specific examples would help. I don't see nearly as much change in his positions as his current critics do, and the only explanation I can think of for that is that some people thought they agreed with him in the past more than they really did- they mistook his previous positions I guess. The one that I see cited the most is the torture issue but again I think people misunderstood his previous position; he argued passionately for the military manual to list specific techniques as the only ones that could be used but even when that was being debated he's on record as saying that this would apply specifically to the military (not CIA) and that all branches- military and civilian (CIA) would need to comply with Geneva conventions or other international agreements. The distinction he makes there is that the CIA techniques shouldn't be broadcast and our enemies need only know that there will be no interrogation technique that breaches the international agreements. Again, agree with him or disagree but don't present your own misunderstanding of his former position up against his current one and act as though there's been a flip flop when there hasn't been one.

And for the record, I don't think that all flip flops are wrong either, but they should be demonstrably related to changes in the facts that support one position or another.

I notice the popularity of providing links to blogs and opinion pieces as a means of providing evidence for an argument. But haht is the evidence for the original opinion?

What I've also noticed is that this is sometimes a means of perpetuating the blogosphere's outrages. It's a rumor mill on steroids.

I've also noticed that whole flocks of people use the same verbatim talking points from site to site, comment to comment.

Is original thinking dead?

I have no one in pararticular in mind, BTW. These are things i've been noticing for some time.
I seriously worry about the impact of this trend on critical thinking abilities in the US. I'm sure college kids are doing it, too.

They seem to be evolving on a daily basis.
I don't call a change of mind flip-floppiing, btw. Better a change of mind than continuing bad mistakes.
He backed English being our official language, but he has Spanish language ads, for example.

He has changed his mind about so many things, I feel I wouldn't know what his principles are until after he is elected. Flexibility is okay with me, too. But I would line to know what he would be flexing from.

Even his steadfastness about Iraq comes with regular amendments and clarifications. In one inerview, he sounded remarkably like Obama, except for the mention of dates. In another inerview, he sounded more like GWB.

It's confusing.

A little fact checking.
What happened in Illinois is exactly what Obama himself cites in campaign speeches as one reason he opposes th gas-tax relief.
There is such a rush to score points, there seems to be no time to check the bases for scoring them.

Like Clinton, the one best known for this? (Either one of them, that is.)

It's not so much that I would ask him different questions (I thought yours were quite good, actually) but that I'd challenge his answers more. I find that he's got his own bias, which appears to be due mainly to McCain's Iraq War stance that is so diametrically opposed to his own- and so he's finding reasons to say that this means that McCain can't possibly be principled.

I don't actually have too many assumptions about John McCain, or Cliff Schecter for that matter. This is just what I was interested in asking Schecter after reading his book. I'm definitely not an advocate for McCain and I don't actually say much against him in my writing because I just don't think about him too much – for better or worse. Just being honest.

What would you have asked if you were interviewing Schecter?

I'm not even arguing that the gas tax holiday is a good idea, but can we stop pretending that Obama opposes it strictly on principle rather than having calculated that he had more to gain politically from taking this stance than from taking the same one as McCain and Clinton (which I also admit are based on their own political calculations, or pandering.) Obama simply looked at the fact that the other two chose to pander on this (as he himself had done in IL) and decided he had less to gain from saying “Me too!” than he did by portraying himself as the more honest candidate on this issue.