Good news for Washington State this week in a recent Moore Insight poll.

Though John McCain trails Barack Obama by 10 points in Washington, Republican Dino Rossi is tied with Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire in the replay of their infamous 2004 grudge match.

You'll remember that Rossi beat Gregoire twice before she somehow pulled out a very, very, very narrow win after the third count of the votes. (Visit Sound Politics if you care to reread the accounts of how the Democrats stole the governorship.)

In a New York Times piece today, readers are informed of the continuing battle between McCain and Obama for votes of the Hispanic community and the tactics the two campaigns are using. It's a fairly lame piece that tells readers incredibly little.

But there is one important item buried at the end of the piece that reminds us that the Obama campaign is, indeed, concerned with and campaigning on race. Check this out:

“We’re going to spend more money on Latino TV and radio than has ever been spent on a presidential campaign, and by a lot,” Cuahtemoc Figueroa, the director of Mr. Obama’s Latino vote effort, told members of La Raza on Sunday.

The campaign also views Mr. Obama’s half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who taught school for several years in the Bronx, as something of a trump card to be deployed at events for Hispanic voters. “She speaks fluent Spanish, with a Dominican accent, and looks Latina,” Mr. Figueroa said.

Haven't we been told repeatedly that skin color was not something the Obamaniacs were going to focus on?

Who cares? We all knew they were lying.

If you just read "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race" in today's New York Times without thinking or without looking at the polling information, you would walk away with exactly the impression the Times is hoping most of its lock-step, blindly following readers will -- blame whites for any political problems Obama might have.

But if you're not a lemming, you'll start to wonder who is to blame for the political, black-vs-white racial tension that the Times appears to believe is running rampant in the U.S. -- a view average Americans would likely say is held mostly by the we-know-better-than-you elites on the East Coast.

Let's take a quick look at just a couple items the Times fails to point out:

First, the Times article implies (or at least the reader can easily infer) that white Americans are the voters with the racial hangups, which is why the fact that Obama garners so much more of the black vote. This paragraph is supposed to reveal how well Obama is doing courting the black vote:

Among black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, Mr. Obama draws support from 89 percent, compared with 2 percent for Mr. McCain. Among whites, Mr. Obama has 37 percent of the vote, compared with 46 percent for Mr. McCain.

That graph reveals that blacks are voting by race, not whites. You see, Mr. and Mrs. Editor, 89-2 is a bigger discrepancy than 37-46. If anyone at the Times were either honest or smart, that would have been seen for what it is -- racial voting by a racial bloc . . . that's not white.

A second, more egregious lie-by-omission is the Times' coverage of its own poll, a pretty graphic for which they even took the time to create (see below).

Reporting on the voters' opinion of Obama by race, the Times says:

After years of growing political polarization, much of the divide in American politics is partisan. But Americans’ perceptions of the fall presidential election between Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, also underlined the racial discord that the poll found. More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama; about 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him.

Reading that, you would again think that whites had a real problem with the black candidate and were, therefore, the real source of the "racial discord" that is the focus of the entire article. Two important points are missing from this paragraph's analysis of the Times' poll:

1) White's aren't happy with either candidate. Interestingly, white voters have a 31 percent favorable view of Obama (notice how the Times calls it "about 30 percent" to make it seem lower) and have a meager 35 percent favorable view of McCain. Those two numbers are so close that they're practically insignificant and reveal nothing about the racial biases of white voters.

2) More telling is the unreported views blacks have of the white candidate. The Times breathlessly reports that "more than 80 percent" of blacks have a favorable opinion of Obama, but they don't bother to tell the reader blacks' opinion of the white candidate. According to the Times poll (again, see below), only 5 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of McCain. For the Times, it's worth reporting that only "about 30 percent" of whites view the black candidate favorably, but the Times neglects to report that only 5 percent of blacks view the white candidate favorably.

Sure, someone will point out that blacks skew Democratic, so they're more likely to support the black candidate. True, but why write the article?

The point was to show the racial divide among voters -- especially whites' inability or refusal to support the black candidate. In order to do that, the Times had to be its usual dishonest self.

My friend Mac Johnson, who wrote a brilliant piece on gas prices for the June issue of Townhall Magazine, has a smart, funny piece at Human Events today.

Titled "John McCain's Economic Plan: Only 33% Stupid," the piece takes an honest, and therefore painful, look at some of McCain's economic ideas. When you get to the end of it, you realize that McCain wasn't joking when he said he doesn't understand economics.

To be fair, and Mac is, there are some good things McCain has proposed, including:

[T]he most important and avoidable factor driving up the cost of food right now is our idiotic infatuation with the mathematically ludicrous idea of making “biofuels” out of the corn we used to use for “food.”  We are currently destroying 25% of all the corn in America in order to make just enough expensive low-quality motor fuel to replace 0.6% of global oil.  The inflationary pressure of the price of food skyrocketing is substantial, coming on the heels of oil price surges.  Corn ethanol as biofuel is a threat to our economy, among other things.

McCain wisely proposes to roll back corn ethanol mandates and remove the $0.54/gallon tariff that prevents U.S. fuel producers from importing cheap Brazilian sugar-based ethanol to compete with the corn-based product.  To get more fuel, McCain radically proposes we drill for it at home, instead of relying on foreign oil or glorified corporate moonshiners.  This is unusually clear thinking for politician. 

But then, as Mac points out, McCain's ideas go downhill fast, especially with regard to his home mortgage subsidy plan.

McCain’s plan is to use government to give new cheap loans to the “deserving” homeowner in default.  Evidently, “deserving” is a new term for “those with poor judgment,” because the only people getting HOME welfare are those that ran out and got subprime adjustable rate mortgages at the height of the housing bubble and are now shocked to find that the rates on those mortgages are actually adjustable. ...

If you, like me, passed up that stupidity and got a fixed rate mortgage despite the fact that this meant you struggled to pay more for years while others used the surplus income provided by the introductory rate on their ARMs to buy gold-plated disposable jet skis for their pit bulls, then you are now officially a chump.  You can keep on paying.  That’s your punishment for forethought.  John McCain now wants you to pick up the tab for everyone else, too.

It's nothing new to those who are honest about the career of John McCain.

That’s pretty much the pattern of the whole “jobs” plan, and for that matter, McCain’s career – two common sense ideas followed by an excerpt from the Unabomber manifesto, Ted Kennedy’s website or some other crazy diatribe.  In fact, I see this economic plan as a wonderful preview of what a McCain Presidency might be like for conservatives: two steps forward then one step off a cliff.

So now we return to what's been the GOP argument for the last few months -- at least he's not as bad as Obama.

How inspiring.

A disturbing report from CNNMoney this afternoon says McCain's promise to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) might not be as solid a commitment Republicans have been looking for.

John McCain's pledge to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax has morphed into a promise to phase it out.

Translation: More than 4 million households would continue to pay the so-called "wealth tax" under his proposal during his term if elected. And the tax likely would remain on the books long after the presumptive Republican nominee left office.

But McCain's amended AMT policy would still end up protecting most of the folks who would be unfairly trapped by the tax, which otherwise would raise a ton of revenue from middle- and upper-middle-income families instead of the wealthy, for whom the tax was initially intended.

"I will also propose ... a phase-out of the Alternative Minimum Tax," McCain said in a speech on June 10.

That's a modification of his promise last fall, when he said, "I am committed to repealing this tax before millions of American families are forced to devote even more of their hard earned money to paying for the spending largesse in Washington."

The Right is continuing to seek reasons to support McCain, and his promises on taxes are a step in the right direction, including his vow to repeal the AMT. But these types of stories don't help his case with conservatives.