From The Associated Press:

DES MOINES, Iowa - John McCain’s presidential campaign has apologized to Republican rival Mitt Romney’s campaign for comments about the Mormon church allegedly made by a volunteer earlier this year.

The incident dates back to a meeting of Iowa Republican activists in April, where McCain’s Warren County chairman, Chad Workman, is alleged to have made negative comments about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon faith. Romney is a Mormon.

Between Obama’s camp taking shots at Indians and McCain’s camp taking shots at Mormons and way back when Edwards bloggers taking shots at the Catholic Church I am starting to think these campaigns need to rein in the people working for them or at least spend some time working with them on etiquette.

Lets also not forget the candidates themselves including Joe Biden’s “clean African American” remark & Wesley Clark’s “money people” Jewish comment. Oh and Edwards did also suggest Israel was the greatest threat to world peace.

The media is fixed on Bloomberg becoming a candidate and on the racial, religious, ethnic & gender differences in 2008.

The big thing now is throwing in descriptors about Bloomberg for articles including of course the fact that he is Jewish.

Reuters: He’s from New York, an independent and Jewish.

But best of all the candidate himself remarked a couple of times on the liklihood of a short, jewish man winning the president which seemed to open the floodgates.

Eric Alterman: “Short Jewish billionaires from Manhattan who love gun control, gays and abortionists don’t win national elections.”

New York Sun: “Never mind that there’s no national constituency in American politics for a four-foot-tall nasal Jew with a Boston accent”

I can see the campaign sign now: Vote Bloomberg the short, nasal, abortionist loving, gay sex having chosen person!

At least The Toronto Star did at least use the quote on the side in H1 “A short, Jewish billionaire from New York? C’mon. Michael Bloomberg, New York mayor, on his chances of being president”

That is what is suggested by Joe Trippi & reported on by Hugh Hewitt. That is not good at all, especially with Clinton & Obama expected to do as well or beat Q1 raising.

I don’t quite understand the Edward’s campaign plan. They seem to be running a campaign in Iowa & NH alone. That might make some sense, though not much, any other year. This year though with so many states moving their primaries up, well, it seems downright silly and the fundraising numbers show that.

Scott Keeter explores the issue at the Pew Research Center.

Twenty years ago the survey research profession — having grown comfortable with telephone interviewing as an alternative to personal interviewing for conducting surveys — worried mostly about the roughly 7% of U.S. households that could not be interviewed because they had no telephone. Today our concern is somewhat different, and potentially more serious. According to government statistics released last month, nearly 13% of U.S. households (12.8%) cannot now be reached by the typical telephone survey because they have only a cell phone and no landline telephone.

There is a story on ABC.com right now about how the Pentagon spends a good deal of money on research, some of it very wacky research at that. Gay bomb & psychic teleportation wacky.

Now granted the idea of creating a ‘gay bomb’ sounds pretty crazy. Well it is pretty crazy too. With that said, this is science. Not long ago funding billion dollar research to split a microscopic atom in order to blow up cities probably sounded pretty darn wacky too. I am not going to lie, a good chunk of this research will end up never leading to anything substantive. Because of that plenty of politicians and political watchers will use it in a stump speech to talk about the waste of government. The reality is you never know where good science will come from. Did anyone think mold could be used to cure disease? Probably not.

With that said THE LAST group of people who should be talking about funding stupid things is the media. At the same time this story is running another story is out purporting that NBC is paying Paris Hilton $1 million for her first post-jail interview. I guarantee the country and the media would get more out of that $1 million searching for psychic teleportation then they will spending it on Paris Hilton. Which is to say, what can you get for less then nothing?