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This Week with George Stepanopoulos notes the passings of the actress Joy Page, best known for her role as Annina in Casablanca, longtime NBA chief official Darell Garretson, comedic ice skater Werner Groebli aka ‘Frick,’ as well as the names of 12 more service members killed in Iraq. That now brings icasualties.org’s U.S. military casualty total in Iraq to 4,052, and according to IBC, 505 civilians were killed this week, “the highest weekly total this year.”

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This Week with George Stepanopoulos notes the passings of musician and E Street Band member Danny Federici, Ford speechwriter Robert Hartmann, painter Joseph Solman, as well as 8 more service people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to icasualties.org, that brings our military casualties in Iraq to 4,039. And per IBC, 414 civilians were killed this week.

Leave it to John McCain to straight talk himself into the ground over John Hagee. Isn’t it interesting that it took all this time for the media to finally discuss McCain’s relationship with John Hagee? McCain foams up over Obama’s knowledge of Ayers, not an endorsement mind you, but says he still is very happy with the endorsement of the extreme Catholic hating preacher by the name of John Hagee and is proud to have lobbied to get it. Obama never asked anything of Ayers, but McCain begged Hagee’s help. It probably was a mistake actually says STM, but he’s glad he got his support anyway. What the heck is he talking about?

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STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you say he should condemn these comments.

MCCAIN: Sure.

STEPHANOPOULOS: A lot of Senator Obama’s allies and others say that you should condemn the comments of Reverend John Hagee, an evangelical pastor…

MCCAIN: Oh, I do. And I did. I said, any comments that he made about the Catholic church I strongly condemn, of course.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yet you solicited and accepted his endorsement?

MCCAIN: Yes, indeed. I did. And I condemned the comments that he made concerning the Catholic church.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’re going to hold onto his endorsement? Your own campaign acknowledged that you should have done a better job of vetting Pastor Hagee.

MCCAIN: Oh, sure.

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Wow. George Stephanopoulos actually listened to us and asked John McCain some pretty tough questions today on This Week. Who knew that George read teh blogs? McCain’s body language and facial expressions really belied his discomfort, but if you look closely, you can see it. And I’ve discovered a “tell” on the part of McCain when he’s really painted into a corner, see if you can find it.

Case in point: note this little exchange between Stephanopoulos and McCain over healthcare. Elizabeth Edwards has been a vocal critic of McCain’s proposed healthcare plan in that it basically doesn’t help those who need it the most. McCain’s response falls into the less than satisfactory category:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What’s wrong with government — what’s wrong with government-run health care?

MCCAIN: And we continue to have these debates — what’s wrong with it? Go to Canada. Go to England and you can find out what’s wrong with it. Governments don’t make the right decisions. Families make the right decisions.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the points Mrs. Edwards made in the Wall Street Journal, she said that your whole life, you had government health care. You were the son of a Naval officer, a Naval officer, now a member of Congress. And her point is, why shouldn’t every American be able to get the kind of health care that members of Congress get or members of the military get?

MCCAIN: It’s a cheap shot, but I did have a period of time where I didn’t have very good government health care. I had it from another government. (LAUGHTER) So, look, I know what it’s like in America not to have health care. We know that Americans are hurting there as well. We’ve got to make health care affordable and available. The difference, again, between myself and the Democrats, and with all due respect, Mrs. Edwards, I want the families to make the choices. They want the government to make the choices. That’s a fundamental difference, and we will continue to debate that issue.

Actually, McSame, let’s look at England’s healthcare. PBS’s Frontline did a fantastic program comparing healthcare in the US to five other capitalist democracies, including the UK. While the UK’s program did have its drawbacks, the government has instituted policies to expand choice for the people and moreover, the government pays significantly less as a percentage of the GDP for healthcare than we do (8.3% vs. 15.3%) and it covers everyone. Hard to make facts sound bad, doesn’t it, John?

Did you pick up the tell? Rather than respond intelligently to Edwards’ valid point that McCain has taken advantage of government health care his entire (rather lengthy) life, he pulls the “Hanoi Hilton” card. Anyone think that calling attention to his POW days could be like Giuliani’s invoking of 9/11? Not to detract from the traumas he experienced at the hands of the Vietcong, but what the heck does that have to do with healthcare?

full transcript below the fold:

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The Washington Post ran a featured piece on McCain’s temper this morning ” McCain: A Question of Temperament.”

In the piece, Rep. Bob Smith said this about hothead McCain:

Former senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, expresses worries about McCain: “His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.”

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That’s pretty harsh…McCain blamed Smith’s quote on their ummmm “working differences” from the past and said he’s just as angry as every American these days. He’s just passionate after all.

“They want change, they want action.”

That is true. We want change and action, but we’ll only get more of the same Bush policies with a McCain presidency so what exactly is he going to change?

Transcript via ABC News below the fold:

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Let’s call Nash McCabe. I don’t see a single lapel pin between them, do you? 

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Since ABC’s George Stephanopoulos is so willing to take directions from hosts on rival networks, Keith Olbermann offers some helpful hints for questions to ask Republican presidential candidate John McCain when he appears on This Week this Sunday. After all, these are questions the public deserves to have answered to better understand the candidate, right?

Your continuing association with radicals from the 1970’s. A man who tried to destroy the two-party electoral system and subvert Democracy, and to this day remains utterly unapologetic, saying only that he wishes he’d done more of it, and better? As recently as November 8th of 2007, you had a public conversation with G. Gordon Liddy, not merely a criminal, but an unrepentant enemy of the U-S constitution who is now in radio.

Why do you hate the Constitution, sir?

Full transcripts below the fold

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Hannity’s laughing at you, George, for making him the only clear winner of last Wednesday’s debate.

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Hannity: The liberal blogs are losing their minds today in part because I suggested the question to George Stephanopoulos Tues afternoon on my radio show.

While we’ve had plenty of criticism for MSNBC’s and CNN’s debate coverage this season, nothing they did came anywhere near to what ABC pulled last Wednesday and Stephanopoulos’ on-air dumpster diving for gotcha questions on Hannity’s radio show will likely go down as one of the dumbest moves by a debate moderator ever. We’ve come to expect smear jobs like this from the likes of Hannity, and the Dems have rightly refused to attend any debate on the GOP/Fox News Channel because of it, but now we have ABC News’s Chief Washington Correspondent and former Democratic presidential political adviser openly seeking their advice and unapologetically emulating them.

How is it that Stephanopoulos, of all people, thought this was a good move? Josh Marshall offers this depressingly valid observation:

I was mulling over the ABC debate this morning and the moderators’ claim that knocking Obama with a more or less uninterrupted stream of Swift Boat gotchas was justified by focusing the debate on ‘electability’. And it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant. …

Thankfully, there are still more than a handful of journalists who aren’t GOP pawns who together have penned a letter slamming ABC for its debate debacle.

HuffPo has dug up a doozy from 1993 of George Stephanopoulos decrying the same vapid and petty “side issues” he and Charlie Gibson dedicated half of Wednesday’s Democratic debate talking about.

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Transcript via HuffPo:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What he’s going to do in this campaign is focus on what’s important to the American people, on the jobs and the education. That’s what the American people care about. They want to move into the future. They don’t want to be diverted by side issues, and they’re not going to let the Republican attack machine divert them.

Check. Mate. What a difference 15 years makes.

Does it surprise anyone that the establishment media back then, in this case Sam Donaldson, focused on the same petty “character issues”? Me neither.

Publius does a terrific job describing what ABC News viewers may have seen if the network existed in 1858, and had covered the Illinois Senate race.

MR. GIBSON: So we’re going to begin with opening statements, and we had a flip of the coin, and the brief opening statement first from Mr. Lincoln.

LINCOLN: Thank you very much, Charlie and George, and thanks to all in the audience and who are out there. I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind.

We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you think Mr. Douglas loves America as much you do?

LINCOLN: Sure I do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But who loves America more?

LINCOLN: I’d prefer to get on with my opening statement George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If your love for America were eight apples, how many apples would Senator Douglas’s love be?

It goes on from there. I hope someone sends a copy to Gibson and Stephanopoulos.

One more thing about Wednesday night’s Democratic debate and then I’ll let it go. Determining which of the discussion topics was the most inane is tricky, but I’d have to go with the flag lapel-pin question.

Early on in the debate, Charlie Gibson said he wanted to offer a question that “goes to the basic issue of electability.” Gibson said, “[I]t is a question raised by a voter in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a woman by the name of Nash McCabe.” From videotape, McCabe then asked Obama if he “believe[s] in” the American flag, and why he doesn’t “wear the flag.”

For ABC, this offers a little distance from the trivia — the moderators didn’t ask about lapel pins, some regular ol’ person did. I had assumed that ABC went around western Pennsylvania, looking for voters with good questions, and thought McCabe’s was provocative.

But that’s not quite what happened — ABC appears to have sought McCabe out.

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GIBSON: [H]istory shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

While much of the well-deserved criticism of ABC’s Democratic debate on Wednesday night centered around the dwelling on gotcha questions and smears instead of substantiative issues, when they finally did get around to a question that could have been considered a real issue, Charlie Gibson, who has a history of sandbagging Democrats with right-wing disinformation about Bush’s tax cuts, once again loaded up a question, disadvantaging the candidate and misled the millions of people watching:

As Jason Furman explains here, and as Len Burman explains here, the best evidence suggests otherwise. Cutting these taxes may lead to a temporary spike in revenue, because people sell stock to realize gains while rates are low. But over the long term, the biggest owners of stock—the wealthiest Americans—will mostly save what they will save, regardless of fluctuations in the rate.

The Congressional Budget Office notes that “the potentially large difference between the long- and short-term sensitivity of realizations to tax rates can mislead observers into assuming a greater permanent responsiveness than actually exists.”

As Barack Obama correctly alluded to, an article that same day reported that “the top 50 hedge fund managers earned a combined $29 billion in 2007. Five managers earned more than $1 billion.” One of the main reasons they are doing so well while the economy is teetering is that the income derived from stocks is currently being taxed at less than half of the rate of what people who actually work for a living have to pay on their salaries.

Salary in the highest tax bracket is taxed at 35 percent, but profits from stocks held long enough to be called “long-term capital gains” are taxed at 15 percent. A hedge fund manager making $100 million in a year would pay $15 million to the government if he is able to take his income as capital gains, not the $35 million he would have to pay if the income was considered salary.

Full debate transcript here.

Unlike most in the media and blogosphere, Stephen thinks Gibsonopoulos did a heckuva job at ABC’s Democratic debate.

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Last night was the Pennsylvania Democratic debate on ABC. It was the most exciting verbal sparring held in Philadelphia since Ben Franklin haggled with an 18^th century pimp. The night was a huge success. To begin with, for moderator, ABC courageously chose George Stephanopoulos, who owes his career to the fact that he was Bill Clinton’s Communications Director. So he was objective, in the sense that everyone knew his bias. Listen to how he went after Sen. Clinton about a conversation where she said Obama couldn’t win the general election.

I’m not going to ask about that conversation; I know you don’t want to talk about it.

She doesn’t want to talk about it. Enough said. Let’s move on. Besides, it would have taken away time from asking Obama this:

Do you think Rev. Wright loves America as much as you do?

He followed up with the equally