The famously loudmouth radical is "breaking his silence" in an interview with "Good Morning, America," tomorrow where he'll be promoting the reissue of his book, "Fugitive Days."

The great irony of calling out Obama for his association with an unrepentant, domestic terrorist is that the likely result will be a serious increase in the terrorist's speaking fees in the warped world of academia. Watch out for him on your campus.

It will not end with Ryan Lizza, the Washington Times, New York Post, and Dallas Morning News getting kicked off the campaign plane, if this profile of the prospective press secretary is to be believed.

They call Robert Gibbs the "Barack Whisperer," which reveals that he a) has a very close strategist relationship with the president-elect and that b) he should have Obama's very capable speech writers come up with his nicknames (The "Barack Whisperer" doesn't exactly roll off the tongues. "Boss Whisperer," maybe?).

On the trail, Gibbs got more guarded as his status rose, shouting matches with reporters were not uncommon, and critical reporters (such that they were) could be frozen out by the spokesman for weeks at a time.

If you're wondering what it takes to get on Gibbs' bad side, the answer is not much. Dean Reynolds of CBS, who wrote the much-linked account of Obama's gamy campaign plane, received a "rather tendentious note" from Gibbs. Gibbs said later the piece hurt staff's feelings and raised issues the reporter did not raise in person. Well, then. In the Obama White House, presumably critical reporters will have to say everything they write "to his face" before they write it.

Another way to get Gibbs' censure, apparently, is to veer from unfailingly fawning coverage for even one instant, as Newsweek had the gall to do in one or two of its Obama cover stories throughout the year.

Last spring, when Newsweek ran a cover portraying Obama as the elitist "arugula" candidate, followed weeks later by a cover story in which editor Evan Thomas wrote Obama an open memo on dealing with race, the campaign suddenly stopped cooperating with the magazine's quadrennial book project, which requires behind-the-scenes access. Thomas had to fly to Detroit and try to assuage Gibbs during a campaign flight before access was restored.

"I thought the Obama campaign was overreacting to those two covers," Thomas says. "They thought we were overly concerned with race." In light of the election, "maybe they were right."

The magazine covers in question are "Obama's Bubba Gap" of May 5, 2008 and "Obama, Race, and Us" of June 2.

The "Bubba Gap" cover was, perhaps, the most critical of the 11— count 'em, 11!— covers that featured Barack Obama over the past two years. Three of those covers featured him with others— one with Hillary, one with Biden, and one with McCain— but the rest featured him alone, and most were utterly positive.

Click through this slide show to see the scathing coverage that warranted Gibbs' freeze-out: "The O Team," "What He Believes," and "When Barry Became Barack," among them.

As we saw throughout the campaign, the Obama team is a disciplined message machine that puts a premium on loyalty and limits access, in much the same style the Bush administration has been maligned for. Because the press is predisposed to like Obama, his arm's-length treatment of the press never became the story, as it did about the McCain and Palin camps, which allowed Gibbs to punish press members for slights both tiny and imagined.

It will continue in the White House. This paragraph makes me lament the lack of a similar figure in the Bush White House:

He also monitors coverage intensively, pushing back against the smallest blog post he considers inaccurate.

In the late years of the Bush administration, the relationship with press has remained contentious, but without systematic push-back on controversial issues such as pre-war intelligence, even though press coverage pushed much more problematic memes than the "Bubba Gap."

Sounds like the Obama administration won't be making such mistakes. Will they ever go far enough in limiting access and punishing critics to turn off the journalists who love them so? Yeah, I won't hold my breath.

Bill Sammon's sources tell him Steele may announce as soon as Thursday, and is courting the endorsement of Newt Gingrich, which if landed, would do much to scare off the incumbent and possible challengers:

The source also contradicted a report in Tuesday's Washington Times that Steele and Gingrich were competing for the RNC post.

"There is no fight," the source said. "This tension between Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich is totally fabricated and, in fact, Gingrich and Steele are working together to create a new strategy for the direction of the GOP."

In a statement issued by the former House speaker, Gingrich said he was not interested in seeking the post of Republican party chairman.

"A number of people have asked me to consider running for Republican National Committee chair. They have been very flattering, and I am very honored by their support," he said.

The Washington Times' report on the "behind-the-scenes battle" between the two is here.

I like the direction this is heading, if correct. Michael Steele is an eminently likable guy who can communicate conservative values and ideas with competence and charm, and has always inspired the base. He comes without the significant political baggage of a Newt chairmanship, but will undoubtedly be bolstered by Newt's ideas, as Gingrich has signaled that he wants to be very involved in the remaking of a party that could use some new ideas.

As for the somewhat fallacious face-off David Brooks drew between traditionalists and reformists, a Steele and Newt alliance could offer both a fresh face and fresh ideas without succumbing to the temptation to fight Democrats by becoming second-rate, imitation liberals. Both are "Hayesian reformitionalists" (see the above link) in their public pronouncements.

Mike Duncan will likely make a bid to stay in place, but there is serious danger in leaving the three most visible members of GOP leadership in place--Duncan at RNC, Boehner in the House, and McConnell in the Senate. If GOP voters and the rest of the country notice that Republican party leadership is subject to fewer consequences than team leaders on "The Apprentice," they will continue to impose their own punishment at the polls.

Meet Renegade, Renaissance, Radiance and Rosebud.

I'm mostly just goofing, although three-syllable code names are not usually the order of the day. Renaissance? George W.'s and Laura's names are Tumbler and Tempo, respectively. Sarah and Todd Palin were reportedly Denali and Driller, which are equally reflective of their personalities and approaches as the Obamas' names.

If you were to read Nicholas Kristof today, you'd conclude Obama had lobbied for "Niebuhr" and "Nietzsche" but was rebuffed by the stiflingly anti-intellectual environment engendered at the White House during the Bush years.

In other Secret Service news, Scott McClellan needed a name? And, he warranted "Matrix?" If I were Renaissance, I'd lodge a complaint.

Obama makes a joke at Nancy Reagan's expense at his first post-partisan, uplifting press conference. The press corps enjoys it.

Ronald Reagan's 86-year-old widow is currently recovering from a broken pelvis suffered in October.

Perhaps picking on her is part of Obama's vaunted "social perception," as praised by David Brooks.

Reagan consulted an astrologist, after her husband was shot. There's at least one account of Hillary Clinton attempting to speak to the deceased Eleanor Roosevelt during her time in the White House in the spiritual biography, "God and Hillary Clinton," by Paul Kengor.

H/t Allah.

Let's add some context to the Carl Cameron and Newsweek airing of rumors from anonymous McCain/Palin staffers. The most controversial claims, all of which come without names attached because the purveyors are apparently determined to stick around to undermine future campaigns and candidates, are that Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent as opposed to a country, and that she didn't know who the members of NAFTA were.

Let's start with NAFTA. If folks want to believe Gov. Sarah Palin did not know even the most basic facts about NAFTA, they have to believe a couple other improbable things.

Before she became governor, Palin's husband Todd's commercial fishing business on Bristol Bay accounted a decent percentage of the family's income. The couple reported about $46,000 from the business last year on a license Todd purchased from his grandfather in the 1970s. He has been a lifelong commercial fisherman and she has often been his partner both in the business and literally on the boat.

Surely while the two were working in the commercial salmon fishing industry in post-NAFTA Alaska, they would not have missed the effect farmed-salmon imports from Canada had on the industry, causing the number of fisherman, the size of the harvest, and the value of permits to go down significantly in Alaska. According to a 2003 AP article:

"This loss of equity, which for self-employed fishermen is equivalent to retirement accounts, will continue to reverberate throughout the Alaska economy in coming years," Gilbertsen said.

The economic losses have ricocheted through coastal communities as fewer fishermen have caused a decline in both crews and shore-based services. Monthly employment in the state's seafood processing industry fell from 11,200 in 1992 to 7,400 in 2002.

Chile and Canada are the two major suppliers to the U.S. market of farm-raised salmon. The two countries accounted for 94 percent of the Atlantic pen-reared salmon, valued at $818 million.

Canada is a partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which removed certain trade barriers, and Chile has fewer environmental regulations and cheap labor, the analysis showed.

"The fact that Canada is a NAFTA partner, and that the U.S. has just approved a bilateral free trade agreement with Chile, would seem to indicate that these imports will continue to grow," Gilbertsen said.

So, let's say for argument's sake the couple missed that bit of information. They would also have had to miss the fact that in 2002, the federal government decided to make commercial salmon fisherman on Alaska's Bristol Bay eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance under the North American Free Trade Agreement due to the impact Canada's farmed-salmon had on the industry. From a 2002 AP brief:

The U.S. Department of Labor has certified about 200 commercial salmon fishermen in the Bristol Bay area as eligible to apply for transitional adjustment assistance under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The certifications cover Sept. 5, 2001, to Nov. 25, 2004. Workers laid off or reduced to part-time work during that time may be eligible for extra benefits and services.

The Labor Department found that major customers for Bristol Bay salmon increased their reliance on imports of salmon from Canada, adversely affecting fishermen.

NAFTA authorizes assistance to cover workers affected because of increased imports from Mexico or Canada or shifts in production to those countries.

After they are certified as eligible, workers may apply for benefits at a state employment service office. They may receive retraining services, career counseling, job placement assistance and income support.

On the flip side of the coin, Canada is within the top three of Alaska's trading partners, a position it moved into in the increased trade years after NAFTA was passed. It's a huge market for seafood and metals mined in Alaska.

Disgruntled McCain staffers not only require you to believe that the chief executive of the state of Alaska knew nothing about one of her state's most important trading partners, but that she was equally oblivious to the economic winds affecting the industry that provided her very own livelihood. Perhaps they should head to the NYT next, which has a history of employing anyone who has a penchant for writing slam books about Republicans.

This accusation didn't pass the smell test to begin with, but because McCain staffers are requiring us to defend our popular former vice presidential nominee against NYT-like attacks, there are some facts to consider.

In Baghdad, the reaction to Obama's election:

In the normally querulous Union of Iraqi Writers club in Baghdad, there was a rare unanimity among the secular, the religious, Shiites, Sunnis and former regime loyalists: While the election of the first black man to the highest office in the United States was admirable, Mr. Obama’s promise to start withdrawing troops from Iraq was a cause for great concern.

At the club’s restaurant and bar, which has survived the wrath of religious extremists over the past few years, Daoud al-Rahmani, a self-styled poet, writer and satirist, gathered at one table with two of his colleagues for an early lunch. They drank beer and nibbled from little bowls filled with marinated fava beans served as hors d’oeuvres
.
“There will be chaos if they leave,’’ Mr. Rahmani said. “We are still in disagreement. Sectarianism is ingrained in us now.”

Listen to Mr. Rahmani, Mr. President-elect.

Meet the bad cop to Obama's good:

Democratic officials say Barack Obama's fellow Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel has agreed to be White House chief of staff.

One of Obama's first decisions as president-elect was to ask the Illinois congressman to run his White House staff. Emanuel accepted Thursday after struggling over family and political considerations.

Good news: Emanuel is in favor of mandatory "universal citizen service." Bring on the civilian national security forces!

I know what you've been thinking. Sure, America is engaged in two wars, is in the beginning stages of the worst economic downturn in a quarter century, and has a bloated government that is perhaps impervious to reform. But you have your eye on the real prize. You've been wondering, along with several hundred other people, how Obama's victory will change the Beltway social scene:

At weekend soccer games, parents wonder aloud which of the city’s exclusive private schools might win the presidential sweepstakes by enrolling Malia and Sasha. (The Obamas could, of course, go the Jimmy Carter route and enroll their daughters in public school; Michelle Obama has said privately that she did not intend to make a decision about school until after the election.)

At the Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, the Rev. Robert Maddox Jr., a onetime Carter adviser, has already sent a letter inviting the Obamas to join. “We’ve gotten word from the grapevine that they will not decide where they go to church until they get in and settled a bit,” he said. “But they will obviously be looking for a place where their girls can be involved.”

This city has had eight years of a president who goes to bed at 9 p.m.; Laura Bush, the first lady, once said that she and Mr. Bush did not come to Washington to make new friends. A big night out on the town for the Bushes is dinner at Karl Rove’s house. With the Obamas, the capital’s hostesses are hoping to get back into high gear.

Good to know that at least some of us have our priorities straight.

He'll make way for Eric Cantor of Virginia. Adam Putnam has already stepped down, and while Boehner is expected to stay on, there are rumblings in the grassroots about ousting him. He makes his case, here.

Blunt's letter on his decision:

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Dear Republican Colleague,

In January 2007, I wrote myself a letter and mailed it to my office. The letter, unopened, sat on my desk until Wednesday. Almost two years ago, I wrote that our ideas didn't lose the mid-term election, we did. I wrote that it was my intention to spend the next two years holding the Democrats accountable and defining the differences between our parties. I also wrote that, were we not successful in recapturing the majority in 2008, it was my intention to serve only two years as Minority Whip.

With another election behind us, I still believe that conservative ideas define where the country wants to be and needs to be. And I believe that together we held the Democrats accountable and that we began to define some of the differences between our parties.

Against the pundits' best predictions, we stood against a flawed expansion of government run health care in the SCHIP bill. When many were saying it was political suicide, we gave the surge a chance to work and today we are rapidly handing over control of Iraq to a stable government capable of securing the peace. We stopped billions of dollars in frivolous spending. We won an unprecedented number of motions to recommit, defining the differences between our parties and on a few occasions forcing the Democrats to pull their own bills from the floor. And when an energy crisis threatened our families and our whole economy, we advanced common sense solutions that resonated with the American people.

A few weeks ago, Robert J. Samuelson wrote an excellent column describing why young people should be angry.

Here's why. The two largest government programs, Social Security and Medicare, transfer wealth from the young and working to the old and retired. These programs are set to grow much, much larger in the coming years, as the Baby Boomers retire and live longer (a good thing!). This threatens the fiscal position of the United States, because the number of workers supporting each retiree is going to shrink.

Reasonable solutions to this problem include raising the retirement age, indexing benefits to prices not wages, progressive indexing of benefits (so that wealthy retirees don't receive as much as middle-class retirees), and increasing Medicare co-pays while introducing competition into the system (see: Medicare Advantage). But since these solutions are reasonable, they stand no chance of happening. President-elect Obama, for example, has pointed to Medicare Advantage as one of the few programs he wants to cut. He wants to increase governments' responsibilities while sheltering individuals from risk. If entitlements grow without reform, either taxes or the deficit will skyrocket, and possibly both. You get stuck with the bill.

Today, though, economist Casey Mulligan has a fascinating post on why Obama's victory may prove troublesome for those who do not want to reform our gerontocratic entitlement system:

2008 did not stop the aging process for the baby boom, or for anybody else. However, the stock market and housing crash delayed many retirements. With many of the baby boomers remaining in the workforce with the young, it is less likely that they will identify with retirees. Even if they do, work will keep them busy -- maybe too busy to pay much attention to political matters.

This year also witnessed significant innovations in political fund raising, with much of the credit going to the Obama campaign. The previous campaign finance reform ultimately did not stop the collection and disbursement of hundreds of millions of political dollars.

The young survive to fight another political day, and to do so with more numbers and dollars than we previously expected.

We'll see.

Meet the new face of the Obama White House. A little McClellan-esque for my taste.

This is my favorite Robert Gibbs moment of the campaign, when Mark Halperin got surprisingly tough on him about the Obama-Ayers relationship. He's also well-known for a pretty decent shouting match with Sean Hannity. Below is what the ferocious spinning will look like for the next four years.

Update: Here's Rahm Emanuel saying his family life might keep him from a second run in the White House. Video at the link.

Emanuel is a serious and sometimes mercenary partisan, but he's no ideological lefty, often picking and backing Blue Dog Democrats to the dismay of liberal activists. It's certainly a bit of a P.R. snafu for the new Obama White House that its first publicly named pick may be turning them down, very publicly.

Meanwhile, Emanuel's father, speaking about his son's possible new job, apparently didn't get the message about hope and change:

In an interview with Ma’ariv, Emanuel’s father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son’s appointment would be good for Israel. “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,” he was quoted as saying. “Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”

Baseball season is over, but inside baseball season is just beginning.

Florida Rep. Adam Putnam announced today that he will relinquish his post as House Republican Conference chairman. Putnam's departure as the third-ranking Republican leader in the House, opens the door to Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling.

Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner are looking to keep their positions as minority leaders in the Senate and House, respectively, but Boehner will likely face some opposition.

Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) is thought to be safe in the Whip position, and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) will keep his conference chair.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is running for the No. 5 spot in the Senate, conference vice-chairman, while Sessions, Burr, and Murkowski are also considering the post.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) will run for head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Norm Coleman will be his likely opponent after a recount in the Minnesota race.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) will leave his NRSC spot for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's Republican Policy Committee slot, as she ponders a run for Texas governor in 2010.

Cantor is a very bright, solid conservative with proven political and fund-raising skills. The word is that he plans to run for House Republican whip.

What a weird night. When it comes to marriage, it appears there are no red states or blue states.

Florida also passed a gay marriage ban narrowly, as did Arizona.

Methinks if California is passing gay marriage bans, the great leftist mandate and majority have not yet arrived.

Norm Coleman and Al Franken are separated by mere hundreds of votes with 95 percent of precincts reporting.

Coleman is currently up about 400 votes, with the Independent candidate garnering 400,000. Michael Barone said earlier in the evening that, given what's left to report, he thought the state would go to Coleman, but my, it is close.

On the brighter side, the Oregon senate race is extremely close, with Republican Gordon Smith leading by a hair, but only 45 percent of precincts are reporting.

Stevens is inexplicably leading in Alaska. I believe Palin would appoint his replacement when he, umm, goes to jail?

Taking into account all House races, Democrats are poised to gain a net of at least 17 seats with a possibility of gaining a total of 25 seats. Worst case scenario for the GOP will be a 261/174 breakdown in the House.

Democrats are leading comfortably or have been declared the winner in these Republican-held districts:

VA-11: Gerry Connolly (D) v. Keith Fimian (R)
NC-8: Larry Kissell (D) v. Robin Hayes (R)
CT-4: James Himes (D) v. Christopher Shays (R)
FL-8: Ric Keller (R) v. Grayson (D)
FL-24: Suzanne Kosmas (D) v. Tom Feeney (R)
IL-11: Debbie Halvorson (D) v. Marty Ozinga (R)
PA-3: Kathy Dahlkemper (D) v. Phil English (R)
AZ-1: Ann Kirkpatrick (D) v. Sydney Hay (R)
CO-4: Betsy Markey (D) v. Marilyn Musgrave (R)
MI-9: Gary Peters (D) v. Joe Knollenberg (R)
NY-13: Michael McMahon (D) v. Robert Straniere (R)
NY-25: Dan Maffei (R) v. Dale Sweetland (D)
NM-2: Harry Teague (D) v. Edward Tinsley (R)
NM-1: Martin Heinrich (D) v. Darren White (R)
NY-29: Eric Massa (D) v. Randy Kuhl (R)
NV-3: Dina Titus (D) v. Jon Porter (R)
VA-2: Thelma Drake (R) v. Glenn Nye (D)
OH-1: Steven Driehaus (D) v. Steve Chabot (R)
OH-16: John Boccieri (R) v. Kirk Schuring (R)
AL-2: Jay Love (R) v. Bobby Bright (D)
NJ-3: John Adler (D) v. Chris Meyers (R)

Republicans are leading comfortably or have been declared the winner in these Democratic-held districts:

FL-16: Tom Rooney (R) v. Tim Mahoney (D)
LA-6: Bill Cassidy (R) v. Dan Cazayoux (D)
TX-22: Pete Olson (R) v. Nick Lampson (D)
KS-2: Lynn Jenkins (R) v. Nancy Boyda (D)

These Republican-held seats are still pretty close:

VA-5: Virgil Goode (R) v. Tom Perriello (D)
OH-15: Mary Kilroy (D) v. Steve Stivers (R)
MD-1: Andy Harris (R) v. Frank Kratovil (D)
MI-7: Tim Walberg (R) v. Mark Schauer (D)
CA-4: Charlie Brown (D) v. Tom McClintock (R)
ID-1: Bill Sali (R) v. Walt Minnick (D)
WA-8: Darcy Burner (D) v. Dave Reichert (R)
AK-AL: Don Young (R) v. Ethan Berkowitz (D)

Because she may have been my favorite part of this campaign, and because she's good for cheering you up on a disappointing night. Yes, the Obama girls are adorable, but no one's been more of a natural on the trail than Piper.

I do not know who he is. I do not know which Obama will show up in Washington, D.C. to govern. My good feelings for him have diminished considerably throughout the campaign, as I've become increasingly convinced that his post-partisan, post-racial pitch was naught but a political pose.

But Obama has lived a colorful life, a patchwork American life of obstacles overcome and unlikely victories and self-made dreams. It is hard not to admire his accomplishments even as I criticize his policies and ideology. He ran an incredible campaign, humbling the Clinton machine with a candidacy fueled more by remarkable charisma than experience. He spoke words people wanted to hear and created one of the greatest brands in modern political history in startlingly short order.

His race and his middle name, long touted as obstacles to Obama's ascendence, were not obstacles to the American people. Racism and xenophobia were background buzz in a clean campaign, existing largely in liberals' nightmares rather than in real life. It is a testament to both candidates and the American electorate that, even if the wrong man was elected, he was elected for right reasons.

I will never be a conservative who writes paeans to Obama's uplifting message and transcendent candidacy. I don't find him either uplifting or transcendent, and would argue that his opportunism precludes both. But I will try my best to hope for good judgment, pray for pragmatism, and never wish ill for the country just because it would mean ill for Obama and his party.

That has been one of the more execrable tendencies of parts of the far left (and even some elected Democrats) while out of power, and it's one to which Republicans should not succumb.

This is America. We all live to regroup and fight another day. Soon, we'll be back to talking about Obama's self-involved speeches and their inefficacy against rogue regimes going nuclear. And, we may be delving into the small matter of his campaign contributions. But for tonight, congrats to Obama. It was a race well run.

Next, let's get started on 2010. We've got plenty of work to do.

John McCain opened with a stirring account of Obama's win as an indicator of just how far we've come when it comes to bestowing the full blessings of our country on all of our citizens, as he appeared on stage with his wife, mother, running mate, and her husband.

"Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth."

It was an emotional address, as he urged "all who supported me to join me in offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to come together."

He noted that the campaign was perhaps one of the "most challenged" in history, and asked supporters not to be discouraged or indulge in despair.

"Tonight, it is natural to feel some disappointment, but tomorrow, we must move beyond it. We fought as hard as we could," he said, adding that there were likely some mistakes made along the way, but that he would not dwell on them as he moved forward in working to solve America's problems.

He took responsibility for the campaign's loss dramatically, saying "the failure was entirely mine, not yours," which elicited emotional chants of "John McCain" from the Arizona crowd.

McCain intimated that Obama's win was the fruition of an American dream, and promised to reach across the aisle to help "his president" when he got back to Washington, D.C. You got the feeling he really meant it.

Whatever happens next, it was truly a beautiful speech and exit for McCain.

You'll be glad to know, that in his celebratory speech, Sen. Harry Reid said that the mandate Democrats got tonight is not a mandate for a "political party or for an ideology," but for coming together.

I imagine they'll flip-flop on that in about two weeks. The ideological mandate is what they're after, but let's remember what Reid said tonight and remind him of it frequently.

The guy who replaced Mark Foley running on honesty and family values has lost his seat to a Republican challenger.

Republican challenger Tom Rooney, a lawyer and former Army officer, had trailed early in the campaign until news broke last month about Mahoney's affairs.

Rooney quickly gained ground and handily won Tuesday night to replace Mahoney representing District 16, covering parts of eight counties from Palm Beach County across the state to the Gulf. The district traditionally leans slightly Republican.

Mahoney acknowledged two affairs. He also says he paid one woman to keep quiet about their tryst.

His two affairs and bribery of at least one woman inexplicably were not treated to wall-to-wall treatment on all networks as Foley's inappropriate e-mails to pages in '06, but Mahoney did have to pay a price. Good to see that. It's one of just a few pick-ups Republicans can look forward to tonight.

Pennsylvania's Rep. John Murtha, who got into trouble after calling his constituents "racists" and "rednecks," just called his race for himself, but no network has called it yet.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is still in some trouble, up against Republican John Kennedy. The two are only separated by several thousand, and one of them has to get 50 percent in a three-way race or they go to a run-off. Perhaps Jindal's popularity in the state and Landrieu's ineptitude will be enough to counteract the prevailing political winds.

CNN calls CT-4 for Democrat James Himes. Republican Christopher Shays represented the Connecticut suburbs of New York City as New England's lone Republican congressman.

MO: State Attorney General Jay Nixon (D) wins governor race over Republican congressman Kenny Hulshof.

IN: Incumbent Mitch Daniels (R) wins governor Race over Jill Long Thompson.

WV: Joe Manchin (D) wins governor race over former legislator Russ Weeks.

NH: John Lynch (D) wins governor race over state senator Joe Kenney.

DE: State Treasurer Jack Markell (D) wins governor race over retired judge Bill Lee.

ND: Incumbent John Hoeven (R) wins governor race over state senator Tim Mathern.

That's seriously the new pitch for the cable network/arm of the Obama campaign.

Dole's failure in the Tarheel State doesn't bode well for the McCain campaign in that state, showing that the anti-Republican tide is strong enough to knock over even a very famous incumbent.

Things are looking bad for McCain in bellwether counties in North Carolina, but Virginia which had polled better for Obama than N.C., is looking decent for McCain.

Is it possible that N.C. could go blue and Virginia could stay red? Of course, with Pennsylvania called for Obama, it might not matter at all.

The fairly moderate former governor was up against another former governor, Jim Gilmore, who although solidly conservative may have been the only candidate who significantly hurt his image by making a primary presidential run.

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner has breezed to victory in his bid for the Senate, capturing for Democrats a southern seat long held by Republicans and fueling expectations that Democrats would solidify their now-thin leadership grip over the chamber.

Warner beat another former governor, Republican Jim Gilmore, in the race to replace retiring five-term Sen. John Warner.

One of Warner's greatest sins as governor was that he hid a significant budget surplus while pitching the General Assembly on the highest tax hike in Virginia history, which went into effect the very year I moved to Virginia. It was a pretty shady move.

Since then, however, aside from a bit of canoodling with the Kos crowd when he was flirting with the idea of running for president, Warner has disappointed liberal Dems and activists at every turn. First, by deciding not to run for president, despite his proven ability to win white, Southern voters. Then by delivering a deliberately moderate anti-stemwinder at the Democratic National Convention, which was mostly positive about the American dream and tepid in its criticism of George Bush.

Let's hope this moderate Dem with a talent for talking to rural voters continues to stymie his liberal colleagues in the Senate when it comes to things like the Fairness Doctrine and card check.

NOTE: If you haven't voted, go vote. These numbers should not discourage anyone, as they have a history of being totally wrong. Please see the handy-dandy, "10 Reasons You Should Ignore Exit Polls" while I begin to obsess over them.

Gawker had the first exit poll numbers, reporting rather small margins for Obama— up 4 in PA, up 2 in VA, up 1 in FL and OH. McCain showed a lead in NC of 2. If true, sounds like decent news, considering Obama supporters are much more likely to respond to exit pollers.

MyDD reports exit poll numbers, allegedly from inside sources, that show devastating data for McCain, pretty much everywhere. But, Obama takes VA by 10? Color me even more skeptical of that than other exit polls.

More from Gawker, with data on issues (economy leads nationally), and broken down by state.

Jim Geraghty reports from McCain camp sources:

The McCain camp and state GOP sources that I talk to are far from "stoic" as a CNN report just claimed. They think they have astonishing, record turnout in red parts of all of the important swing states - you name it - Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, even New Hampshire. I cannot tell you that what they say they see is enough to give McCain a win. But it should be enough to refute the Obama's set-to-win-huge argument.

In good news, networks have called KY for McCain and VT for Obama. That makes the current electoral vote count 8-3, McCain. Oh, yeah!

IN reelected Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, which bodes well for the GOP mood in the state.

This morning in Miami-Dade County, Naylette Soublette went to vote at the same precinct where she's been voting since she was 18. The marketing professional and daughter of Cuban immigrants didn't expect her choice of candidates to be inspected by a poll worker.

But as she was inserting her ballot into the reader, a poll worker asked her who she voted for. Surprised by the question, she didn't answer,. The poll worker then looked down at the ballot she was holding, and said in Spanish something that translated to, "I could kill you for voting that way. How could you do that? You shouldn't do that."

The comment was not a threat, Soublette said, but she was concerned that it was out-of-line for a poll worker, and might be happening to other people.

"It's not his place to ask me who I voted for and it's definitely not his place to look at my ballot," Soublette said. "Had it been someone who agreed with me, I would still have taken offense."

After casting her ballot, she followed a fellow voter to the same poll worker, who was handing out "I Voted" stickers.

He told her she didn't "deserve to wear a sticker," she said. "I felt intimidated. Basically, it was more of a shock than anything."

She called her local elections board to complain about the incident, at which point they said they'd "take care of it," but she wasn't told of any action taken. Soublette also called the McCain campaign's election hotline to report the incident.

"It's not about me. This is about what's going on at the polls. I just am concerned that if there are people doing this out there, what else are they doing and who else are they affecting," she said.

Miami-Dade County was the epicenter of chad counting and butterfly ballot sorting during the 2000 presidential election, and has since moved from butterfly ballots to no-touch electronic voting, and then to paper ballots with an optical scanner.

Past problems with poll workers and close election results, including issues in its Aug. 26 primary, have meant beefed up training for Florida's 8,000 poll workers.

According to press reports, there's been at least one other complaint of a poll worker looking at a voter's completed ballot, which spurred one elections supervisor to instruct poll workers to avert their eyes:

"Keep the ballot in the sleeve," he (Joe Campbell) instructed 400 workers last week at their final training seminar before Tuesday's presidential election. "Put it out partially, and then slide it in.

"And I want you to say something to them. Say, 'I don't want to see your ballot.'"

The poll worker should keep his eyes on the person casting the ballot, not on the ballot itself, Campbell instructed.

A call to Miami-Dade's elections board spokesperson was not returned, and no one who answered calls was able to tell me if there was a procedure in place for dealing with such poll worker violations. Soublette was not convinced Miami-Dade was dealing with the problem.

"I am just a citizen trying to do my civic duty. I just want things to be done correctly," she said.

He fears the "intimidation" is a "systemic thing," and that his name being dropped from rolls was not a "random elimination."

He ended up being able to vote, and Susan Sarandon was unimpeded.

The McCain campaign is hoping a lawsuit will be heard within the next hour, so that the secretary of state will have to allow Republican poll-watchers back within earshot of the new voter registration tables. Right now, they're being kept up to 40 feet away, which doesn't do a lot of good for poll-watching.

Whew, good thing we've got these guys around to prevent intimidation. And, what better tools for preventing intimidation than all-black paramilitary uniforms and billy clubs? Thank you, New Black Panther Party!

Hey, they're probably just "guys in the neighborhood" to folks voting, right? Michelle Malkin notes that the NBPP made clear its objectives to protect the black vote from "enemy sabotage." Video of Fox News coverage of the incident at the link.

Update: Police respond to Black Panthers.

Intimidation, of course, takes many forms. And, in their ever magnificent projection performance, Democrats will whine that it's Republicans doing all the intimidating by, err, having people stand in line to vote, or something.

While radical liberals in Philly use billy clubs for intimidation purposes, the more refined liberal intellectuals of Yale University just print the names and departments of the five (that's right, there are a whole five of them!) professors on campus who donated to McCain. Though professors gave to Obama at a 20-to-1 ratio, none of the 79 Obama supporters names are listed. Classy.

The seas will recede when he becomes president, and the nation will find a renewed purpose, but the press? He thanks them for merely being "gracious."

The report calls Obama's trip to the back of the plane to thank the press a "rare foray," during which he took no questions. Meanwhile, Huffington Post continues to kvetch about the fact Sarah Palin hasn't held a press conference.

As anyone who's been paying attention knows, Palin has become in the past several weeks the most accessible candidate on the trail for press. But way to prop up the myth through the homestretch, HuffPo!

Update: And, also on Huffington Post today, here's video of Sarah Palin taking questions from the press in Wasilla, Alaska after she voted today. Included are questions about Troopergate and American/Japanese relations. What a hidden candidate this one is, huh?

Obama's media avail post-voting for comparison's sake, under the fold:

Someone in Starbucks's legal department made a big oops. The company put together a promotion for today where they would give out a free drip coffee to people who had voted. Only this might run afoul of some election laws, so at the last minute they amended the giveaway to everybody.

So head to your local Starbucks and ask for a tall coffee today--it's free!

And here you thought you'd have to wait until the Obama presidency actually began before the seas began to recede and the coffee started to flow freely.

Not only did Barack Obama leave his Internet donation process open to money from foreign nationals, he's now deploying insipid liberal, foreign actors to phone bank for him.

Please, Barack, send Orlando Bloom to Western Pennsylvania. I'm sure that'd help you connect.

Moran always manages to stick a foot in his mouth shortly before elections, but it makes little difference, as he's running in the heavily blue Northern Virginia 8th District. In 2006, he proclaimed that, “When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I'm going to earmark the sh** out of it.”

He won 66-31 percent.

This time around, he reveals to us his very frank feelings about redistribution of wealth, which he feels has been impeded by simplistic notions such as right to property. This is the kind of Democrat Obama the Redistributionist will have obliging him in Congress, if elected:

Bonus video of Moran freaking out on constituents who dare to ask Democrats to take at least a bit of responsibility for the housing crisis. He really doesn't like that. Both statements look to have happened at an education forum in Arlington around Oct. 31. What a class act this guy is.

Obama and the "guys in his neighborhood" will vote today at an elementary school in Hyde Park. Who else votes there? Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan.

The press preoccupies itself with the straw man, "Are we ready for a black president?" My concern is we're so very not ready for a Hyde Park president.

This morning in Miami-Dade County, Naylette Soublette went to vote at the same precinct where she's been voting since she was 18. The marketing professional and daughter of Cuban immigrants didn't expect her choice of candidates to be inspected by a poll worker.

But as she was inserting her ballot into the reader, a poll worker asked her who she voted for. Surprised by the question, she didn't answer,. The poll worker then looked down at the ballot she was holding, and said in Spanish something that translated to, "I could kill you for voting that way. How could you do that? You shouldn't do that."

The comment was not a threat, Soublette said, but she was concerned that it was out-of-line for a poll worker, and might be happening to other people.

"It's not his place to ask me who I voted for and it's definitely not his place to look at my ballot," Soublette said. "Had it been someone who agreed with me, I would still have taken offense."

After casting her ballot, she followed a fellow voter to the same poll worker, who was handing out "I Voted" stickers.

He told her she didn't "deserve to wear a sticker," she said. "I felt intimidated. Basically, it was more of a shock than anything."

She called her local elections board to complain about the incident, at which point they said they'd "take care of it," but she wasn't told of any action taken. Soublette also called the McCain campaign's election hotline to report the incident.

"It's not about me. This is about what's going on at the polls. I just am concerned that if there are people doing this out there, what else are they doing and who else are they affecting," she said.

Miami-Dade County was the epicenter of chad counting and butterfly ballot sorting during the 2000 presidential election, and has since moved from butterfly ballots to no-touch electronic voting, and then to paper ballots with an optical scanner.

Past problems with poll workers and close election results, including issues in its Aug. 26 primary, have meant beefed up training for Florida's 8,000 poll workers.

According to press reports, there's been at least one other complaint of a poll worker looking at a voter's completed ballot, which spurred one elections supervisor to instruct poll workers to avert their eyes:

"Keep the ballot in the sleeve," he (Joe Campbell) instructed 400 workers last week at their final training seminar before Tuesday's presidential election. "Put it out partially, and then slide it in.

"And I want you to say something to them. Say, 'I don't want to see your ballot.'"

The poll worker should keep his eyes on the person casting the ballot, not on the ballot itself, Campbell instructed.

A call to Miami-Dade's elections board spokesperson was not returned, and no one who answered calls was able to tell me if there was a procedure in place for dealing with such poll worker violations. Soublette was not convinced Miami-Dade was dealing with the problem.

"I am just a citizen trying to do my civic duty. I just want things to be done correctly," she said.

Ronnie's late-night pep talk, God bless him:

I should have gotten this out earlier, but just didn't get all the video clips together quick enough. In putting this together, it's been surprising, even to someone who's followed the entire presidential race in great detail, the extent to which Obama has gotten away with blatant position switches, political opportunism, and outright lying while floating above us all as the post-partisan redeemer of America.

I hope even the seasoned among you will be surprised anew when you watch it. I hope you'll pass it along to anyone you know who needs help making a decision at this point. Audacity is certainly something Obama does not lack.

Oh, the angsty music, the riveting images, the stirring speeches, and the decent production values of a mainstream media outlet's pathos-ridden paean to the Obama campaign in its final days. "Will Karl Rovian tactics be capable of crushing the sun of a new day dawning back below the dismal horizon?" the guitar strains seem to cry.

The drum beat is slow and insistent, echoing the plodding determination of the tobacco-'n'-moonshine besotten racists of Appalachia to wrench Pennsylvania and the presidency from the one leader who could redeem them.

Well, don't let me ruin it for you. Go check out this even-minded video for yourself.

Then, check out the last days of the McCain campaign for comparison's sake. All black and white, no music.

Well, here's hoping. I swear, if I hear one more media wimp complain about the "negativity" (unprecedented, of course) of this campaign...

The whinging is more unseemly than the worst advertisements I've seen. This is a contest, people. A hard-fought contest. Hundreds of hard-fought contests, in fact, that end on one day, and that sustain about three weeks of negative TV advertising foisted upon audiences between "Family Guy" reruns and NFL football. Emote me an estuary.

Media types and liberals can't simultaneously fetishize "each vote counting," the expanded electoral map, and the importance of "just one voice" while shielding all those votes and voices from candidates' pitches. If you're telling people to "vote or die," you should support their access to some information to work with.

And, in this media age, where a courtroom drama is waged in public over every allegation of every ad, and all of it's is available at the touch of the Google search button, people can figure it out. Are some ads misleading? Of course, but there are many that are not, and simply get a bum rap for being "negative." Negative is not always bad. Negative offers insights into a candidate who has, say, radical associations, wildly liberal positions, and a thin resume, when said candidate would never admit to such things.

In such a case, negative ads render a positive service to the voters. The ritual hand-wringing and crying over free speech (generally directed at Republicans exercising it) is a vain undertaking, all in service of one's reputation as a civilized, intellectual voter/commentator who just wants to hear about "the issues," while indulging in self-righteous, substanceless conversations about "negativity" without ever touching on the "issues" on which the ads give insight.

So, to the Washington Post, which runs a story today under the doleful headline, "A Positively Negative Home Stretch," I say, why not go all out and just start writing with emoticons instead of words? Politics is a grown-up's game, and if they insist on infantilizing both voters and their commentary, they might as well be honest about it, placing very clear smiley, winky faces under Barack Obama's picture and frowny, disgusted faces under John McCain's.

And, I close with Arnold Schwarzenegger's "positively negative" take on Obama, whom he invites to get "pumped up" with the Governator to do something about those scrawny arms and legs. I'm sure I could do some searching and find that Arnold's attack is simultaneously racist and homophobic in some way, according to a liberal blog. For normal people, it's a humorous line from a beloved cultural icon that leads to the all-important substantive punchline: "Now, if we could just do something about putting some meat on his ideas."

Enjoy. Or, for the Post's writers: :(

Rasmussen's numbers show that Democrats, ever eager to choose their own adventure on Election Night and subject the rest of us to it for the next four years, are more willing to participate in exit polls than McCain voters. That, of course, will make the numbers suspect:

The bottom line is that in every state we polled--Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia-- Democrats are a lot more eager to take exit polls than Republicans.

In five of the six states, a majority of Democrats say they would be Very Likely to participate in the exit polling process. At the same time, in five of the six states, fewer than 40% of Republicans would be willing to do the same.

In every state, Republicans are at least twice as likely as Democrats to say that they are not at all willing to take an exit poll.

Unaffiliated voters tend to align more closely to Republicans in all six states in both willingness and unwillingness to participate in exit polls.

The media has been chastened in the past by inaccurate exit poll numbers and promised to be careful about calling states early, but one can imagine that their legendary self-control might not hold up to sanguine exit polling for Obama from, say, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Indiana, and North Carolina, as east coast polls close (Indiana and Virginia, red states the press would love to paint blue, come in the first wave of poll closings).

Jim Geraghty hit on this last week, and it poses a real problem given than states such as Nevada and Colorado will still be voting when the media jumps to crown Prince Obama:

Will the networks even acknowledge the fact that one candidate's voters are less likely to be represented in the exit polls?...The ingredients are there for a rerun of 2004, when the exit polls indicated a Kerry victory and deviated signficantly from the actual results.

Barack Obama, who allegedly wants so much to change the map, to overcome our differences, to soothe our tensions, sure has a funny way of showing it.

Yesterday, Newsbusters uncovered a tape of Obama discussing coal-fired plants with the San Francisco Chronicle. Safely seated at the reclaimed wood table of the Chronicle editorial board, Obama felt free to remark without remorse or hesitance about his desire to bankrupt the coal industry to serve the environmentalist cause:

"If somebody wants to build a coal power plant they can, it's just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted," Barack Obama said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January.

Now, ever since 2000, Democrats have been tsk-tsking blue-collar Republicans for voting "against their interests." Thomas Frank's best-selling "Why Won't You Vote For Us, You Ignorant, Flat-Land Kansan Rubes?" "What's the Matter With Kansas?" was the embodiment of this blame-the-voter-first theory of electoral politics. Michelle Obama's long-delayed pride in her country and Barack's belief in its redemption at the moment of his win in Iowa are the culmination of this theory. Because white, blue-collar workers are now voting for effete liberals, America ain't so bad after all. But woe betide the blue-collar areas that decide to turn on the Obamas in the closing hours of this election.

If areas of southeastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and other rural areas end up, by some chance, costing Obama the presidency, the blame will be placed squarely on them and not the candidate who failed to woo them. Liberal pundits and mainstream media (such that a distinction exists) will immediately blame the intractable racism of white Americans for Obama's loss.

But in voting for Obama, wouldn't these blue-collar workers in the coal regions of our country be, ahem, "voting against their interests?" Joe Biden first made it clear that he wanted no coal plants in America, caught in an impromptu Q&A on a rope line back in September. Obama quickly assured everyone that he's not anti-coal—"Just look at my website!"— but his Chronicle comments reveal the cold indifference with which he views the economic livelihood of thousands of Ohioans and Pennsylvanians.

In order to turn Ohio blue, as Obama wishes to do, he would need to increase urban turn-out, which is probable, while retaining Kerry's wins in a handful of southern and eastern counties. One of those counties is Belmont County, which went for Kerry 52-46 percent. Another is Athens, which went for Kerry 63-36 percent; Jefferson, 52-47 for Kerry; Mahonig, 62-36 for Kerry; Stark, 50-48 for Kerry. The raw number margins in those counties were not huge, with most of Kerry's payload coming in Cuyahoga and surrounding counties, but it would seem Obama would need to retain most of those margins to flip the state.

Unfortunately for Obama, Belmont is the highest coal-producing county in the state. Athens, Jefferson, Mahonig and Stark are also home to some of Ohio's 3,000 mining jobs and an estimated 11 coal industry spin-off jobs that each of the mining jobs represents. Now, wouldn't voting for Obama be decidedly against these people's interests?

The same goes for Pennsylvania, where the state's culture, history, and economy have long been dependent on the coal industry. From the mirrored black luster of Scranton's anthracite in the east to the dark dust of the west's bituminous mines, folks will not take kindly to Obama's blithe talk of bankruptcy. He will undoubtedly increase turn-out in Philadelphia, but will he hold on to coal-region counties Luzerne, Beaver, Fayette, Washington, and Allegheny?

Particularly in the case of Pennsylvania, there are now about five Democrat-issued warnings or insults that could entice blue-collar voters in these formerly blue counties to vote Republican without ever having to resort to race.

Obama started the ball rolling during another trip to San Francisco, during which he was caught on tape calling the people of Pennsylvania and other rural areas "bitter" people who "cling to guns and religion" and dislike of immigrants and others. Joe Biden offered his opinion on coal in September, which the Chinese can have at but we shouldn't go near. Rep. John Murtha of Western Pennsylvania followed up on Obama's sneering with a one-two punch by calling his own constituents "racists" and then following up with a softer epithet— "rednecks." And finally, we have Obama's cavalier talk of coal industry bankruptcy.

Rather than wondering which racists will not vote for them on Tuesday, a more realistic worry would be which reasonable people possibly could in these areas where the Democratic ticket and surrogates have offered high-profile insults to the the very people whose votes they wish to earn. When your outreach is this inept, the race card should be revoked. We should not allow them to use the imagined bigotry of others as an excuse for their own considerable bungling.

If Obama can't manage to "redeem" these areas of the country on Election Day, and I hear liberals blaming it on race, I'm going to carry around a bag full of copies of "Why Won't You Vote For Us You Racist, Trogolodytic, Bible-Thumping 'Backy-Chewers?" "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and remind my liberals friends that they wouldn't want anyone voting "against their interests." Would they?

Here is Obama, speaking in Missouri yesterday:

It's not change when he (McCain) wants to give $200 billion to the biggest corporation or $4 billion to the oil companies when today, Exxon-Mobil announced that it had made the greatest profits of any corporation in the history of the world: $14 billion in one quarter. That's all your money. You are -- you are paying it at the gas station. That's not change when John McCain comes up with a tax plan that doesn't give a penny of relief to more than 100 million middle-class Americans.

Barack, once a person gives his money freely in a voluntary exchange of currency for a commodity, that money does not belong to him anymore. It's not surprising that the Prince of Redistribution does not understand this concept, but it is surprising that he openly talks about it, even in reddish states he'd like to win.

The New York Times editorial board makes the case against extending the bailout to Detroit - before supporting exactly that:

The specific request by General Motors and Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that controls Chrysler, is preposterous: billions to help pay for a merger of dubious value. Neither automaker has been able to produce cars that consumers want to buy. Both are losing money hand over fist. Gluing them together would not change this dynamic.

Detroit made its own problems. The auto companies have refused to change their product models even as consumers reject those models again and again. The autos signed over-the-top benefits packages with the United Auto Workers that cripple productivity and efficiency (a sign of what could happen, writ large, if Congress passes and a President Obama signs card-check next year). As their market share diminishes, the autos rely heavily on political connections to sustain their enterprises. It's corporate welfare at its worst.

The Times gives two arguments in support of using bailout money to prop up Detroit. Neither argument holds water. The first is that "it is not unreasonable to believe that they might survive as self-sustaining companies if government money can get them over the credit crunch and deep recession that is expected in 2009." Why is it "not unreasonable" to believe this? Because

In 2010, they are expected to offload responsibility for their retirees’ health care onto a new fund. It would cost them some $40 billion but would get the problem off their books and stop the hemorrhaging of money. They have negotiated new contracts with the auto workers’ union that eliminate retiree health care and allow for lower wages for new hires. They are slashing the production of gas-guzzlers. Some analysts believe they finally have a promising lineup of fuel-efficient cars.

But if this is the case, then why do the autos need the money to begin with? Couldn't they simply speed up offloading their pension commitments into the "new fund"? If they are going to make cars that people will want to buy, can't they rush those product lines? "Some analysts" may believe Detroit could pull through with only a few more billion from the federal government. This analyst is doubtful.

The other argument the Times offers is that the government should help Detroit tread water for a year or so, because "the economy and the job market will have their hands full" during this time. The additional responsibility of picking through the wreckage of the big auto companies would prove too much. For whom? The market? Surely there are vulture capitalists who are ready to take over the autos, re-size them, and turn them into leaner, better companies. The government? It's already on the hook.

This is economic reasoning on stilts. The economy is probably in recession. But the sooner we hit bottom, the sooner we'll begin to recover. Government intervention to keep failing enterprises afloat may keep us from hitting bottom. But it will also keep us from recovering. Extending the bailout to Detroit is a bad idea.

The Drudge Report is running a story about three newspapers having been kicked off the Obama campaign plane for the last 72 hours of the race— the Dallas Morning News, the NY Post, and the Washington Times, all of which endorsed McCain on their editorial pages.

The NY POST, WASHINGTON TIMES and DALLAS MORNING NEWS have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs -- and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Despite pleas from top editors of the three newspapers that have covered the campaign for months at extraordinary cost, the Obama campaign says their reporters -- and possibly others -- will have to vacate their coveted seats so more power players can document the final days of Sen. Barack Obama's historic campaign to become the first black American president.

Some told the DRUDGE REPORT that the reporters are being ousted to bring on documentary film-makers to record the final days; others expect to see on board more sympathetic members of the media, including the NY TIMES' Maureen Dowd, who once complained that she was barred from McCain's Straight Talk Express airplane.

After a week of quiet but desperate behind-the-scenes negotiations, the reporters of the three papers heard last night that they were definitely off for the final swing.

The Washington Times formally protested the move, citing multiple occasions on which the Democratic nominee has used information from Times investigations and interviews in ads and speeches throughout the campaign. Times reporter Christina Bellantoni, after traveling with the campaign since 2007, is being asked to consider traveling on Sen. Biden's plane for the homestretch of the election, where there is of course, plenty of room.

In defending its decision, the Obama campaign said it respected Ms. Bellantoni's reporting and simply ran out of seats on the campaign plane for the finale because of high demand. It also noted that the Obama campaign is allowing some news media critical of the Democrat to travel, including Fox News.

"Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply, and because of logistical issues we made the decision not to add a second plane. This means we've had to make hard and unpleasant for all concerned decisions about limiting some news organizations and in some cases not being in a position to offer space to news organizations altogether," wrote Obama campaign Senior Advisor and Chief Communications Officer Anita Dunn in an e-mail.

This is not the first incident in which critical reporters and columnists have lost their campaign plane seats during this race, but it's certainly the most high profile. Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker was ousted this summer after a critical piece Obama's Chicago political rise. The NYT's Maureen Dowd was left by the McCain campaign in Pennsylvania earlier this year.

In the waning days of this campaign, Obama seems to be succumbing to his worst tendencies. Lofty, presumptuous infomercials. Snarky campaign commercials that take aim at a female opponent in a condescending manner. And, now, the unceremonious dumping of longtime pool reporters. After reading Peter Nicholas' account of life in the robo-candidate's pool, it's not all that surprising that he cuts ties at such a crucial moment with not so much as a second thought:

I've watched Obama demonstrate a soccer kick to his daughter in Chicago; devour a cheesesteak in Philly; navigate a roller rink in Indiana; drive a bumper car; and catapult 125 feet in the air on an amusement-park ride called "Big Ben." He's done it all with dogged professionalism, but with little show of spontaneity. After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is...

First Clinton, then John McCain made the argument that Obama is someone we don't really know. Obama's supporters counter that we have his record in the U.S. and Illinois senates, two memoirs that reveal his inner thinking and a vast trove of public speaking. Ironically, those of us who were sent out to take his measure in person can't offer much help in answering who he is, or if he is ready. The barriers set in place between us and him were just too great.

Obama's distance, even from those who cover him every day, allows him to coldly calculate about who will be more valuable to him in the final days on the trail. Unsurprisingly, he stuffs the plane with hagiographers over skeptical reporters. Because the thumping he'll receive from the press for this move will be relatively minor compared with the one a Republican candidate might get, the calculation is likely a good one. If one ever has trouble pegging the real Obama, "opportunist" is usually a safe guess.

Barack Obama's running mate, Joe the Gaffe Machine, recently predicted that an international crisis will occur sometime during a President Obama's first year in office. What will it be? Trouble in Iraq? Tension between China and Taiwan? State collapse in North Korea? Crisis in the Straits of Hormuz? War in central Africa? There are so many options. How about a Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France said Tuesday that Moscow had been issuing Russian passports in Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based. “We all know that they are handing out Russian passports over there,” Mr. Kouchner said in an interview with Kommersant, a Russian online newspaper. The government of Ukraine has said it wants the fleet to leave the Crimean base in Sevastopol when its lease runs out in 2017. But the Russian naval authorities have indicated that they want to retain the base. Mr. Kouchner said Russia might try to make advances in Crimea after the success of its military operations in Georgia in August.

When you talk to Obama supporters, in particular the younger ones, you get the sense that they believe all the world's problems will disappear if Obama becomes president. Newsflash: They won't.

The morning after Obama's $3-million appeal to people who'd rather be watching "Knight Rider," he hit me up for a couple bucks. This is perhaps a preview of the administration:

Mary --

The next 6 days are going to be the toughest we've seen, and I need your support to reach as many voters as possible.

Donate $5 or more today to strengthen this movement for the final push.

This campaign is in your hands.

Thank you for everything you're doing,

Barack

As Andrew Malcolm notes, "Just to relieve himself of that $150 million before the polls open, Obama will have to spend $12.5 million a day," but he's still asking for fivers from his supporters.

You'd think with his website set up to accept multitudes of fraudulent donations, he wouldn't need me:

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited...

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.

We can all rest assured, however, that if a Republican candidate had explicitly promised to take public financing only to change his mind once he had gotten the nomination, then went on to raise more than $600 million dollars, roughly two thirds of which may have been raised through fraud-enabling practices, and outspent his opponent by three-to-one on TV, that'd be cool, too. Right?

Credit goes to Campbell Brown of CNN for calling Obama out for his broken promise, and to John McCain for delivering a decent soundbite on it:

In Palm Beach, Florida, today Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attacked Sen. Barack Obama's pending 30-minute prime-time address as a "gauzy, feel-good commercial," that was "paid for with broken promises."

Unlike the John Mayer endorsement of Obama, this comes from the counterintuitive celebrity endorsements file. Joe Perry on McCain:

“I’ve been a hardcore Republican my whole life,” he told the Herald. “My mother and father drilled into me from the very start that if you work hard and be positive, you’ll get what you’re working for. I guess I’m living proof of that.”

Of criticism about McCain’s age, Perry said: “My mother’s in her 80s and she does aerobics. My manager’s 70 and he’s right there. That doesn’t bother me.”

And despite lopsided polls, he urged his fans to get out and vote.

“I’m an optimist. It ain’t over till its over,” he said. “I think that he’s got a chance.”

And, Perry was inexplicably able to express all this without a 5-minute high-production-value, low-impact video.

The "don't vote" joke wasn't funny the first time they told it for five minutes, so they're back again with another five minutes of embarrassingly bad self-referential civic humor. Remember, these people are paid millions upon millions to entertain. At least when Obama presents a prime-time snooze-fest, he has the excuse of being a politician:

This and John Mayer's cloying Obama endorsement, "Hope is not a buzz word," taken together should have you welcoming the robo-calls that come into your home around dinnertime this weekend. Just a taste:

To those who question whether hope is a tangible product worth building a campaign around, I'd say take a look at despair and how powerful that has been in reshaping how people think and live. I believe the definition of the "hope" that Barack Obama enthuses operates on the unspoken thesis that there has to be a polar opposite to the despair of 9/11. Because if we accept that there's not, the will to live becomes forever altered. To adults who will vote for him, Barack Obama represents a return to prosperity. To the youth, he represents an introduction to it.

Yes, Rudy Giuliani, I would love to hear more about how Barack Obama is soft on crime. What was it you were saying?

Last night's episode of The Barack Obama Show was blog-worthy in several respects. And it raised many important questions, such as, Will it be picked up for a full season? (We find out next Tuesday.)

One thing that struck you as you watched the show was how downbeat it was. All the families Obama highlighted seemed at the end of their ropes. They have trouble paying bills, worry about the kids' future, wonder if they will have health insurance in a few weeks. They feel like the American dream isn't working out. They remind you of something Michelle Obama once said, about how our country can be "downright mean." Every family profiled last night was looking to the federal government to help them out. To save them.

This is a new understanding of the American electorate with questionable results. Americans have typically understood themselves in terms of self-reliance and self-making. As individuals who can shoulder responsibility and strive and succeed. And politicians, especially presidential candidates, tend to appeal to voters' ideals and optimism about the future. A non-incumbent challenger may highlight what's gone wrong, but they also will almost certainly argue that things can - and will - be better. Obama does argue things can improve, but he doesn't exactly strike you as an optimist. He's a realist. There's no guarantee things will improve, Obama says. What is guaranteed is that he will try to mobilize (and expand) the state to alleviate your suffering. Not exactly "build a bridge to the 21st-century," is it?

As one watches the show, one has a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. The characters may be miserable, but they all have nice homes, drive good cars, have happy families, and certainly aren't starving. Surely most viewers noticed this as well. I wonder whether Obama's strategy - always look on the bad side - may go too far.

For the last few months I've been reading that the Reagan era is about to end, or is in the process of ending, or has ended already. Now it's true that the people who have been arguing this have made the same argument, again and again, since the Reagan era began in 1980. But in recent months they've had some facts to back it up: Bush's dismal popularity, the GOP losses in Congress, the Bush administration's embrace of massive government intervention in the economy as a response to the financial crisis, the likelihood of an Obama victory next Tuesday, etc.

Here's the thing, though. If you watched The Barack Obama Show last night, you saw the Democratic nominee for president campaigning on ... a tax cut; "eliminating" government programs that "don't work" and making those "that do work work better" (meaning, "cheaper," presumably); and expanding the U.S. military and increasing U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

Yes, Obama wants to "end" the war in Iraq and expand government subsidies for health insurance. Those are both major parts of his agenda. But they are just parts. Other parts, a whole lot of them actually, are center-right. The most liberal senator is running as a centrist candidate. Which sets up plenty of expectations for how President Obama might govern. Expectations that would be politically perilous for Obama to dismiss.

Gore to close for Obama in Florida. Well, his track record there is so good. In addition to losing the state for Obama, he'll probably make it snow as he rails about global warming. I'm super serial.

Perhaps this is the reason for Obama's positively Kerry-esque numbers in Florida early voting:

Democrats are beaming that their party is outperforming the Republicans in early voting, releasing numbers Wednesday that show registrants of their party ahead 54 percent to 30 percent among the 1.4 million voters who have gone to the polls early.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll gave McCain a 49-45 lead over Democrat Barack Obama among Floridians who have already voted.

And Republicans continued to show a traditional strength, leading 50 percent to the Democrats' 30 percent in the 1.2 million absentee ballots already returned.

Kerry lost Florida by five percent after leading early voting by a decent margin.

Other early voting shows similarly underwhelming results for the alleged flood of first-time voters and young voters Obama is supposed to draw:

But serious pollsters know that the electorate may have changed slightly since 2004, but that massive turnout will still reflect past performance. It will be the same, just much more of it. Consider what’s going on with early voters in swing state Nevada.

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, a quarter of the state’s electorate had already voted by Sunday. But of those voters, just 20 percent were Hispanic, 14 percent were under 30, and 15 percent didn’t vote in the last three elections.

Early voters this year look pretty much like what we’ve seen in Nevada before. If that’s the case, polls based on a huge shift in the electorate that show Obama with a doughty lead would come up a cropper.

This has got to worry Team Obama:

After several weeks of John McCain’s campaign attacks on Barack Obama’s tax plan and idea of “spreading the wealth around”, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds voters trust McCain more than Obama on taxes, 47% to 45%.

Two weeks ago, Obama had a one point-advantage on the issue of taxes and a month ago, he had a three-point edge. The last time McCain had the advantage on this issue was September 14, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers started the meltdown on Wall Street.

One month ago, Obama was up nine points on this crucial issue. McCain continues to outperform the generic Republican ticket by a longshot, and while Obama leads in six of ten top issues for Americans, Obama led in all 10 last month.

Now that McCain has a resonant message in Joe the Plumber's plight, is finally matching Obama ad-for-ad in battlegrounds, and Biden has just lowered the Obama campaign's "wealthy" mark to $150,000, it's a mighty good time for things to be looking up for him.

More on the moving target that is the $250,000 threshold for the Obama campaign's tax hikes. The Wall Street Journal reminds, "Just as Bill Clinton promised a 'middle-class tax cut' in 1992 only to raise taxes on the middle class in 1993, Mr. Obama will quickly find that his tax-revenue math doesn't add up. Add in the demands on Capitol Hill to spend more and to offset the Alternative Minimum Tax, and our bet is that even $150,000 would soon prove to be a moving tax target. Remember when the AMT was only supposed to hit 21 millionaires? Next year, without relief, it could hit 26 million taxpayers. Tax increases always hit the middle class because that's where the money is."

Voters are rightfully wary.

Hat tip: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Funny how no one is talking about the election being bought by rich Republicans. That’s probably because John McCain is not the candidate who has raised more than $600 million this year. That would be Barack Obama, who is now planning a final blitz, including a 30-minute infomercial on major networks. I haven’t seen this kind of spending since Brewster’s Millions. But some in the mainstream media have caught on. CNN’s Campbell Brown, for instance, takes Senator Obama to task, and rather handily.

Can Democrats reach a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate? State level polling averages reported in this morning’s Real Clear Politics (RCP) reveal that the road to sixty votes--while not impossible--looks pretty tough for the Democrats. But the numbers also show little margin of error for the GOP.

The surveys reveal Democrats currently lead in six Republican-held states and are tied in two more. If the GOP ends up losing all eight, Democrats would hold a 59-41 margin.

According to today’s RCP poll averages, Democrats command a double-digit edge in three states currently held by Republicans (VA, NM and CO). In New Hampshire, incumbent Republican John Sununu trails by an average of 8.6% points, but the most recent polls show the race tightening a bit. In Oregon, incumbent Senator Gordon Smith trails by 3.5% points. North Carolina incumbent Elizabeth Dole is down by 2% points. Minnesota’s Norm Coleman is in a near dead heat, according to RCP. And recently convicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is also in a near tied, based on the averages. But all the reported polling is pre-conviction.

Based on these current numbers, losses for Republicans in the 4-8 seat range appears likely. Getting to the coveted 9th seat and reaching the magic number of 60 looks more daunting. That would require Democrats sweeping the eight seats mentioned above plus winning one of three seats in the South (MS, GA and KY)--all states where Republican incumbents currently lead in the polls.

That’s why this most recent Rasmussen poll showing Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker with a double digit lead probably resulted in a sigh of relief among some Senate Republicans and others hoping Democrats don’t reach a filibuster proof majority. Still, even Wicker’s race will likely tighten depending on African-American turnout in the state.

Obama’s new ad attacking Palin provides an opportunity for the McCain-Palin campaign.

Palin should hold a press conference today to respond, and do TV, radio and print interviews. In them, she should take on the Obama campaign on economic policy--the topic on which the Obama ad ridicules Palin’s alleged unpreparedness. In fact, economics--taxes and energy in particular--is an area in which Palin’s been a strong spokesman for the McCain campaign. So put her out there. And let her accept the Sunday shows--and challenge Biden to debate economic policy with her on the Sunday shows. A Palin press conference and interviews today would also 1) step on Obama’s prime time speech tonight, and 2) put to rest rumors of tension within the McCain-Palin campaign, and show that everyone was doing their best to elect the ticket, rather than focusing on defending individual staffers’ reputations or past decisions.

The tracking polls suggest McCain has an outside chance to win. The campaign should go for it.

Forget Fannie and Freddie, Alan Greenspan, collateralized debt obligations and other mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps. Who's really responsible for the global economic meltdown? The Guardian notes that the rock band AC/DC always seems to prosper during financial panics:

Those keen to draw wider inferences from its success might note that the last time AC/DC made No 1 in Britain, the country was on the brink of recession. Back In Black, the album that marked their commercial breakthrough and went on to become the second biggest-selling of all time, was released in 1980, just as inflation had reached 20% and unemployment inched towards 2 million. ...

[T]he album that returned the band to its heyday was The Razors Edge, released in 1990 - just as Britain headed towards its last recession.

Maybe it's time to regulate stadium rock?

(A tip of the hat, as they say, to Kai Ryssdal.)

The Globe offers a write-up of Beantown's own "well-known conservative columnist, author, and blogger," which includes some wonderful thoughts from Dean's brother, Keith:

"All his life he's been aware that he had this terminal disease but it never stopped him from doing everything and enjoying life to the fullest," his brother said. "Whether it was writing about politics, or working on his golf game, or spending time with friends and family." ...

"He very much enjoyed that he touched people, inspired people, provoked thoughts. It was perhaps the most fulfilling thing he did professionally," Keith Barnett said. "Although he didn't set out to do this, he was an example to the entire cystic fibrosis community that one could still build a life with meaning and I think he took pride in that."

Judging from the outpouring from fellow bloggers and our readers, he had plenty to be proud of. Read the whole thing for more about Dean from a man who knew him very well.

A funeral will be held tomorrow at 1 p.m. at Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline.

Really, anything with the short "i" sound in it will do. After all, it's muddled crowd noise on a CNN feed, and if you're a race-obsessed partisan who is just dying to think the worst of conservatives, you'll hear the n-word or "kill him" in whatever you're listening to. You'll then post video of the muddled crowd noise with your interpretation superimposed upon it on You Tube to the delight of 200,000 other race-obsessed partisans.

Too bad it wasn't the n-word at all. As another Kos diarist confirms, to his/her great, great credit, the person in the crowd was yelling "redistributor," which makes a lot more sense because "redistributor" has been the word of the week on the McCain-Palin team. Unfortunately, the video of the "redistributor" audio has only gotten about 3,000 views to the n-word's 200K.

Keep this video on file for when liberals (or Obama himself) decide to perpetuate this rumor in blogs, on the campaign trail, or in the mainstream media. "Kill him" has become an urban myth that will likely never die now thanks to the uncorroborated account of one reporter, for which the Secret Service and other attendees/media have offered no supporting evidence. Even Obama himself felt it necessary to give the rumor validation in a presidential debate, much to the chagrin of security officials.

Now you know, thanks to an honest DKos poster, that this one didn't happen either, but that doesn't mean the story will go away. Video/audio below the fold.

"Mike Thompson has been a bad boy," said the female voice, "...for backing the bailout."

Someone should send this to the candidate himself, who is talking about "righteous winds," planning his Election Night bash, and unveiling an unorthodox new plan to deal with an economic downturn by asking roughly 50 percent of the nation not to work for a day. That'll do wonders for productivity.

Look at that smile on Maverick's face as he cruises to victory. Really warms your heart.

Yes, even some liberals can't stand Keith Olbermann. It sounds like MSNBC could learn a lot if it listened to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, famed creator of "Designing Women":

Olbermann was criticized by many who attended Monday's luncheon sponsored by the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The event was dubbed "Hollywood, America and Election '08."

Bloodworth-Thomason and others seemed especially critical of the way MSNBC -- and other media -- has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while demeaning her supporters.

"We should stop the demonizing," she said, adding that Democrats have been worse than Republicans as far as personal attacks on candidates are concerned. "It diminishes us," she said of her fellow Democrats.

Bloodworth-Thomason even suggested a defense of Palin and her supporters should be written into TV programming, just as she went out of her way to portray Southern women as smart in her hit TV show "Designing Women."

Thomason and her husband, of course, were big Clinton supporters, so that may be reason for some of the enmity, but her point is salient nonetheless. Anytime you can get a bunch of Hollywood liberals, Hollywood conservatives, and Frank Luntz to agree on something a week before Election Day, it is a given that whatever they're agreeing on must be true. In this case it's that MSNBC should be left in charge of news distribution like Bill Ayers should be left in charge of childhood education and bomb squad missions.

John McCain released a statement this morning calling for Alaska senator Ted Stevens to resign:

Yesterday, Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty of corruption. It is a sign of the health of our democracy that the people continue to hold their representatives to account for improper or illegal conduct, but this verdict is also a sign of the corruption and insider-dealing that has become so pervasive in our nation's capital.

It is clear that Senator Stevens has broken his trust with the people and that he should now step down. I hope that my colleagues in the Senate will be spurred by these events to redouble their efforts to end this kind of corruption once and for all.

The jury in Stevens's corruption trial convicted him on seven counts yesterday afternoon. The jury decided Stevens was guilty of failing to report gifts of more than $250,000.

The deadline for candidate replacement or withdrawal in Alaska was September 17. If Stevens resigned immediately and/or promised not to serve if he is reelected next week, Alaska voters would have an opportunity to elect a new Republican to the Senate within three months.

Unfortunately, Republicans would have to face an insurmountable hurdle next week in asking Alaskans to vote for a convicted felon. Stevens announced in a statement yesterday evening: “I am innocent. This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial. I ask that Alaskans and my Senate colleagues stand with me as I pursue my rights. I remain a candidate for the United States Senate. I will come home on Wednesday and ask for your vote.”

Meanwhile, Nevada senator John Ensign, chairman of the NRSC, said, "Ted Stevens served his constituents for over 40 years and I am disappointed to see his career end in disgrace."

Our friend Dean Barnett died today. In reading tributes to him--dozens of them--it's clear that considering Dean a friend was easy, whether one had met him online or in person. Even without meeting him, knowing him to be a good and good-humored man required only reading his writing.

His passing is a loss for both our hearts and our cause. Having suffered from cystic fibrosis his whole life, he was a guy who was simultaneously frank about his fate and cheery about his future. The combination was striking, and a gift to all who knew him. There's nothing for getting perspective on your own life like listening to a friend talk about how blessed he is to have a relatively "benign" form of a fatal disease.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dean in person, long after he had become a source of encouragement and support while we were colleagues at Townhall. I don't think I'd miss my guess if I said I have him to thank for putting in more than one good word for me with the folks at the Standard, for which I'm grateful. After meeting him at a conference, I read his pamphlet on living with cystic fibrosis--"The Plucky, Smart Kid With the Fatal Disease."

Dean's political writing was never without a personal touch--his beloved Red Sox and thick-as-chowdah accent were ever present--and his personal story likewise reveals how his struggles shaped the optimistic pundit we came to know. He was a man who was only supposed to live to 30 and accomplished enough for 70. He knew there would not likely be a cure in his lifetime, but welcomed each year as a gift and new treatments as grace. He would have laughed out loud if someone had tried to peg him as a "victim" of anything. Those are the makings of the toughest of happy warriors, and that's what Dean became. We were lucky to have him this long, and I wish so much we could have had him around much longer.

Once, by chance, Dean and I realized we happen to share the same favorite song. I had hoped to post it for him when he came back to writing, but tonight with a much heavier heart, this goes out to him nonetheless. He will be so missed.

The McCain supporter who claimed she was attacked by an assailant at a Pittsburgh ATM, who then became enraged by her McCain-Palin sticker and carved a "B" into her face, has admitted the incident was a hoax.

Ashley Todd, a College Republicans volunteer, reported to police that she was assaulted by a 6-foot-4 black man after getting money out of an ATM Wednesday. She claimed she gave him $60 before he was set off by her McCain sticker and started beating her. The police were skeptical of her claims because there were inconsistencies in her story, and the attack had taken out of range of the ATM's surveillance cameras. There were reports earlier today that police had given her a polygraph, but declined to release the results. Questions about her account continued to mount, as it was revealed that she only called police 45 minutes after the attack from a friend's house and that she didn't make any reference to her attacker's political motivations during her first iteration of the story.

Conservative bloggers, to their great credit, examined Todd's claims with a critical eye, noting that the "B" carved into her face was backwards, suggesting she might have done it to herself, and fielding contributions from police officers who said the incident was a bit too perfect to pass the "smell test."

Todd now, unbelievably, says she's upset with the media for having hyped the story.

She has managed to well and truly hurt the very people she purported to be helping, by going from volunteer to vigilante fabricator. The College Republicans have terminated her, as they should have.

Todd claims not to know where the black eye and "B" came from:

Todd confessed to police that she was driving alone, looked in the mirror, saw her black eye and the "B" on her face, and didn't know how they got there. She assumed she could have done it herself, she said, and then she made up the story about the attacker.

"She saw the 'B' on her face, and she immediately thought about Barack," Bryant said.

Kraus said the 'B' was what first led him to suspect Todd's story. He said he was struck by how neatly the letter was etched on her face.

Police suspect Todd's wounds were self-inflicted. She remained at police headquarters on Friday afternoon, because police "have concern for her well-being," Kraus said. He said officials are trying to determine whether she needs psychiatric evaluation.

"She hasn't really shown any obvious remorse," Kraus said. "She's certainly surprised that it snowballed to where it is today."

As if the media needed an excuse to a) paint all McCain-Palin support as unhinged and racist, b) accuse the campaign itself of inciting such behavior or, c) ignore similar rage and incitement on the left, now they have the perfect excuse to do all three, thanks to Todd.

The hate crime hoax is not a new phenomenon, but it's fairly rare on our side of the ideological spectrum. By calling Todd out swiftly and condemning her in the strongest terms possible, we can keep it that way. Bizarre and disgusting.

Why is it that, without fail, the worst, most tedious, too-long political ads of the season have come from people who are paid exclusively to make films?

One would think that entertainment professionals could at least manage to, well, entertain during a short political ad. But nope. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sarah Silverman, and a host of other stars brought us five minutes of the one-note joke, "Don't vote."

Now, famed director Ron Howard brings us this slightly funnier and mercifully shorter endorsement of Barack Obama, co-starring Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler. It still drags on for 3:40, and the cheap thrill of seeing Opie and Andy fishing together again is offset entirely by watching the sheriff endorse Obama, presumably because he thinks all international crises can be solved if only Obama and Ahamadinejad could settle in for a creek-side chat in Mayberry about Israel, "the stinking corpse" and America, "the Great Satan."

Somewhere, Aunt Bea and Barney Fife are looking down and endorsing McCain: "Nip it in the bud! You got to nip it in the bud!" You can find Howard's stultifying video making ill use of beloved cultural icons, below the fold.

A new web ad from McCain, as he embarks on the "Joe the Plumber" tour through Florida:

And, in perfect contrast to the honest, normal concerns of hard-working Americans about their is yet another freaky, self-serious video from hypnotized Obama supporters. They present, without irony, "Yes, We Carve:"

Yep, got it, Joe.

As uncomfortable with victory at home as abroad, Democrats freak out at the good electoral forecast many are giving them:

Obama himself has reacted to the dismal drumbeat of good news. At a fundraising concert in Manhattan last Thursday featuring Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, Obama got up and said: “Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don’t underestimate our ability to screw it up.”

Which is the prevailing mood in the top echelons of the Democratic Party right now.

And, then there's this from the party that's pitching us one of the least experienced candidates of all time, who is guaranteed to be tested by a created crisis from our global adversaries, according to his own VP candidate:

The Democrats are fearful of all this. The Democrats are always fearful.

Tell us about it.

“We have been on the precipice of victory before,” Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama spokesman, told me. “You have never seen a more superstitious campaign than ours. We do not talk about victory.”

"We do not talk about victory." Pfeiffer, you sound like you're writing for a Palin stump speech. A few more rhetorical flourishes from The One and The Mouth, and you never know...

At the very least, Republicans should be doing their partisan duty by just scaring the ever-loving jodhpurs off their local limousine liberals with tales of impending Rovian tactics on a scale never seen before.

As always, these are polls with margins of error, and this one seems decidedly different from others recently released, but it shows gains with exactly the kind of voters who would find the Joe the Plumber's question, Obama's answer, and McCain's message pertinent:

The presidential race tightened after the final debate, with John McCain gaining among whites and people earning less than $50,000, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that shows McCain and Barack Obama essentially running even among likely voters in the election homestretch.

The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain's "Joe the plumber" analogy struck a chord.

Three weeks ago, an AP-GfK survey found that Obama had surged to a seven-point lead over McCain, lifted by voters who thought the Democrat was better suited to lead the nation through its sudden economic crisis.

The article offers a thorough perusal of the less McCain-friendly polling numbers of the week, where McCain has taken a dive among all-important likely voters:

Obama and McCain were essentially tied among likely voters in the latest George Washington University Battleground Poll, conducted by Republican strategist Ed Goeas and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. In other surveys focusing on likely voters, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Obama up by 9 percentage points, while a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center had Obama leading by 14. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, among the broader category of people registered to vote, found Obama ahead by 10 points.

An interesting note about the poll's methodology:

A significant number of the interviews were conducted by dialing a randomly selected sample of cell phone numbers, and thus this poll had a chance to reach voters who were excluded from some other polls.

Cell-phone users are supposed to be left-leaning demographic historically missed by pollsters (though the vast unpolled cellular herd has never been vast enough to change the game on Election Day). Why would McCain be gaining in a poll with cell-phone users included, and if he is, isn't it exceedingly promising for the Republican candidate that the numbers are this close? Perhaps they're polling a disproportionate number of "push-to-talk" Nextel users (read: Joe the Plumber and Tito the Construction Worker) and undersampling Sidekick users.

McCain's numbers are lower among registered voters:

The AP-GfK survey included interviews with a large sample of adults including 800 deemed likely to vote. Among all 1,101 adults interviewed, the survey showed Obama ahead 47 percent to 37 percent. He was up by five points among registered voters.

Well, I think it's safe to say contingent of people pleasantly surprised by Sarah Palin's abilities has grown by at least two since her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" this week.

First Lorne Michaels:

Q: What do you think Palin gained from her appearance?
I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her.

Q: She's a ratings magnet, too — do you think she can land a development deal if this VP thing doesn't work out?
She could pretty much do better than development. I think she could have her own show, yeah.

He even goes on to sympathize with her rapid and rough introduction to the nation, and applaud her convention speech:

She was fresh casting. The fact that no one knew anything about her, the fact that the audience got to go with her from Wasilla to Minneapolis. Literally six weeks ago she was in another world. I think there's a lot of sympathy for anybody who can step forward and handle that level of pressure. That thing on a human level was fascinating to watch. She was characterized so quickly by the media. She got a really tough welcome. So when she introduced herself that way at the convention, people went, oh, I see. She gave a great performance.

Second, Tina Fey's comment, which I confess to reading on a celebrity gossip blog, but will oblige you with a link to an actual news source:

"I'll tell you, that lady is five times better-looking than I am," she admits. "She's 44? She's got none of that droopy [expletive]. She's keeping it tight!"

All right, so that comment isn't as dignified as the one from Michaels, but it does come from Palin's tormenter-in-chief, and a woman who would have much to gain in her political circles for slamming Sarah publicly.

Such compliments from those who would gladly ridicule her, on or off the set, illustrate her power as a performer and a political figure moving forward. It's something the Republican Party and conservatism must figure out how to harness, no matter what happens November 4. As Fred Barnes puts it, in this week's print edition:

Republicans, even some McCain advisers, have yet to realize the enormous asset they have in Palin: She's the party's most crowd-pleasing and exciting figure since Ronald Reagan. Okay, she's not a "new Reagan." That role will remain eternally unfilled. Palin lacks Reagan's decades of political involvement, his knowledge, and especially his grounding in conservative thought.

Sarah Palin, to "People" Magazine, in an entertaining interview with the Palins. She also reveals they are done having children now that they have their "starting five," she's reading "The Looming Tower" right now, and the "kill him" myth lives on:

"I haven't heard anyone yell 'kill him' at a rally. ...If I heard someone say something like "Kill him," I would certainly not condone that, and I would say something."

As the Secret Service has found upon investigation, no one can recall having heard the fateful shout heard only by a Scranton newspaper reporter.

But hey, why should "People" refrain from propagating this falsehood when Obama referenced it the last presidential debate himself, even after being informed of the Secret Service's findings? Who knew there was such thing as playing the assassination card?

But even before Obama cited "reports" of the threats at the debate, the U.S. Secret Service had told media outlets, including NEWSWEEK, that it was unable to corroborate accounts of the "kill him" remarks—and according to a law-enforcement official, who asked for anonymity when discussing a political matter, the Obama campaign knew as much. Now some officials are disgruntled that Obama gave added credence to the threat by mentioning it in front of 60 million viewers. At this point in the campaign, said one, candidates will "say anything to make a particular point."

The reporter with whom the report originated now says that "kill him" was uttered casually, not yelled angrily, and admits he was unable to identify its source, either.

He may appear on SNL Nov. 1, which if it's anything like his last appearance, will feature him expertly standing, smiling, accepting applause, and delivering stump speech lines without nearly enough irony. Truly, it was electrifying.

Looking back at all four of the major political cameos on SNL this year— Obama, Hillary, McCain, and now Palin— it's clear that, despite their vaunted "cool" quotient the Democrats were given much less responsibility on the show, and delivered far blander performances.

Obama stands around acting like himself, the height of his performance coming at the moment he takes off his mask, the impact of which can be credited to the reveal and the adoration of the audience, but not any particular ability. Though his "Live from New York" is the best of the bunch.

Hillary almost literally delivered a stump speech from a desk, the height of her performance coming at the moment Amy Poehler joined her on stage in a matching outfit and hairdo. Hillary's best line, "Why? What have you heard?" is funnier than anything Obama managed, though stilted.

McCain was given an entire skit to handle, during which he argues for a presidential candidate that's "experienced enough to be president, but most importantly, old enough. It's important to have a president that's very, very old."

Palin was asked to deliver plenty of lines and react appropriately to Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, and the SNL rap. She did so with charm, humor, and pretty good timing. Just imagine Hillary trying to pull off all three of those scenes, if you will.

Obama's performance will undoubtedly be heralded as ground-shatteringly great, if he does indeed appear. He got at least some practice at self-deprecation last week, at the Al Smith Dinner, and perhaps learned a few things from McCain's more comfortable act. I wonder if SNL will take any decent whacks at him, or make him make fun of himself.

It's only polite of them to afford each politician a couple gags that play to their political strengths, though they didn't do too many favors for Palin. What she gained from the appearance, she earned on her own. One hopes The One will be subjected to at least some substantial razzing (please, Jim Downey?), but we're more likely in for a barrage of knee-slapping pseudo-parodic exaggerations of Obama's total awesomeness.

But who knows? SNL has surprised us a couple times this year. Here's hoping they've got some kind of minor comic wedgie prepared for Obama.

Below the fold are Obama's, Hillary's, and McCain's performances, for comparison. Palin's performances are here, and here. McCain's scene is nowhere to be found on NBC's site (Hmmm....) but I grabbed a YouTube video that features it.

If even Dan Rather thinks you're in the tank...just, wow.

"Certainly, if Sarah Palin had said this, it would be above the fold in most newspapers."

Guy Benson, Ed Morrissey and I decided it was time to put together a one-stop shop for legitimate, sober arguments against Obama.

At Hot Air, Ed is hosting the finished product, which I encourage you to send to allies to arm them, and skeptics to convince them. We've addressed abortion, taxes, foreign policy, disdain for small-town America, radical associations (yes, including Rev. Jeremiah Wright), and lack of concrete accomplishments, with plenty of links and lots of video.

Below are the videos I produced, using Obama's own words as often as I could, to illustrate his troublesome positions on all these issues. I tried to be fair and entertaining. I tried not to take his frequent spin at face value, but I also tried not to take him out of context. Luckily, he makes the case against himself without manipulation, and I hope folks will find selections from this little library useful in sending to friends as we go down to the wire. Below the fold are all the videos (each about 1-2 min):

Breaking news from Newsweek's Jon Meacham:

"Contrary to caricature, to be conservative is not necessarily to be racist, or retrograde, or close-minded."

Whew. Glad we got that cleared up. (Though you gotta love that "not necessarily," don't ya?)

Update: The McCain campaign hasn't heard anything about the report of a bus being attacked. This makes the following report seem highly unlikely. Neither Raton police nor state police have received reports about such an incident.

The blog item below was posted by Mark Williams, former talk-radio host turned spokesman for Our Country Deserves Better PAC, a group committed to working against an Obama quest for the presidency. He has been on the group's Stop Obama tour, which arrived in Raton about a day after a McCain/Palin bus came through, he said. Williams said he heard the story from several residents of Raton, who said the bus had a shattered window when it arrived in town, and that it had been shattered by some kind of shot during its trip up from southern New Mexico, but he never saw the bus.

A Raton Police spokesperson, who said he's been on his phone all day long with reporters, said if the incident happened, it happened far south of Raton. Several calls to offices south, such as Chavez County Sheriff's Department and the Roswell Police, however, turned up nothing. Looks like this one is firmly in the debunked rumor pile for now, and not likely to move anytime soon.

A report from New Mexico:

We learned at this morning’s Stop Obama Rally here that the McCain/Palin Straight Talk Express came through town yesterday. It arrived with a window shattered by a .22 caliber weapon. It had also been hit by an unknown number of paint balls from a paint ball gun or guns. There were reportedly no injuries and neither candidate was on board.

Get ready for the media saturation! The wringing of hands, the concern about "incitement," the indictment of Obama and Biden for daring to criticize McCain and Palin in such a way that would drive their supporters to this.

H/t Hot Air.

Update: More rage you won't hear about on TV: Obama supporter steals McCain supporter's sign in NYC and bashes her over the head with it.

Update: Don't look now, but here's another one. If only we conservatives would just follow Jon Stewart's example and treat our political adversaries kindly, we wouldn't be in this position.

Michael Tomasky, the liberal editor of Guardian America and a regular contributor to the New York Review, had a fascinating piece in the fortieth anniversary issue of New York magazine last week. It's called "The Day Everything Changed," meaning, the day everything changed for the better in New York. And, perhaps surprisingly (though pleasantly so), Tomasky says that day was January 1, 1994. The day Rudolph W. Giuliani was inaugurated as the mayor of New York City:

By the end of Giuliani’s first year, the city was a visibly different place - made safe, Toronto-ized, starting down the road toward being Olive Garden–ized (yes, there were downsides!); a place that suddenly was no longer the city where Travis Bickle prayed to God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk and where - in real life, not the movies - display ads for porn films actually ran in the Post right alongside the display ads for Smokey and the Bandit (it’s true; a few years ago I went to the Post’s morgue and looked through old issues and saw the ads, and their blurbs screaming 'Full Erection!,' with my own disbelieving eyes). That is inconceivable to us now. But it, and a score of cankers like it, used to be the reality in New York. Lots of forces combined to change that, but the biggest force of all was Rudy.

It's worth noting, of course, that the economic boom of the late 1990s also played a major role in New York's transformation. Which means that the economic downturn will probably have worrisome consequences for America's greatest city (though not worrisome enough to change the laws to satisfy power-hungry billionaires!).

Here's senior Obama military adviser Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.), to The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann:

Gration was impatient with the idea that conflict is the natural state of the world, to be managed rather than resolved. “People are more alike than their cultures and religions,” he said. “When Obama talks about global citizens, it’s the same framework. You see, religion and culture - they’re the way people communicate their values. They want stability, order, education. This is just humanness. Then you add on your religion, your culture - that’s how you execute it.” His implication was that if we can get past the religious and cultural identities that serve as host organisms for conflict, and deal with people at the level of their humanity and their basic needs, then we can make real progress - especially if Obama personally holds an office that permits him to set the tone and lead the effort.

Coming soon to an Oval Office near you: the return of Kumbaya foreign policy.

Anger at a McCain-Palin rally, for the press:

“Are you going to check my license, too?” he asked me. “Are you going to check my immigration status? I’m ready, I have everything here. Whatever you want, I have it. I have my green card, I have my passport — “

I was a little surprised. Did Munoz really bring his papers with him to a McCain rally? I asked.

“Yeah, I have my papers right here,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. Right here, right here.” With that, he produced a U.S. passport, turned it to the page with his picture on it, and thrust it about an inch from my nose. “Right here,” he said. “In your face.”

Munoz said he owned a small construction business. “I have a license, if you guys want to check,” he said.

Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. “I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys because I’m disgusted with you guys,” he said. “Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.”

The scene turned into a mini-fracas when David Corn, of Mother Jones, defended press coverage. Munoz was having none of it. Why, he asked, would the press whack Joe the Plumber when it didn’t want to report on Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber? “How come that’s not in the news all the time?” Munoz said. “How come Joe the Plumber is every second? I’m talking about NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN.”

A black woman with a strong Caribbean accent jumped in the fray. “Tell me,” she said to Corn, “why is it you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber’s tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can’t tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!”

“I am Joe the Plumber!” Munoz chimed in. “You’re attacking me.”

Corn then decided to tell the woman she was better than Joe the Plumber because she pays her taxes. Brilliant move, Dave. Read the whole thing. Many Americans simply don't believe what Obama is serving on taxes.

Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has a brilliant new piece in the CRB's fall issue outlining Barack Obama's political thought.

Kesler explains Obama's estimation of his ability to change the world:

Eager to find himself by finding a community to which he could belong, he was struck, nonetheless, by the flaws or limits of every race, culture, and country he encountered. Unlike other intelligent human beings who have made the same discovery, Obama did not lower his expectations but decided that, just as he could and did choose to refashion his own identity, communities could do the same, with a little help.

Kesler is especially critical of Obama's interpretation of the American Founding:

Obama soon makes clear that Jefferson and the other founders were less than faithful to the universal principles they proclaimed. Like a good law professor, he lines up evidence and argument on both sides before concluding that, in fact, the founders probably did not understand those principles as universal but rather as confined to the white race. The "spirit of liberty," he writes, "didn't extend, in the minds of the founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children." In the end, then, Obama's interpretation is the opposite of Lincoln's, who devoted some of his finest pages to proving that the founders regarded slavery as a moral and political evil because it violated the rights of man.

As it happens, Sen. Obama's understanding of the Founders' political thought on the slavery question isn't entirely unlike another Illinois senator from long ago.

And, on the audacity of hope:

Audacity is a curious word with two meanings, which reflect a genuine moral ambiguity. It means both boldness, daring, confidence--and reckless daring, rashness, foolhardiness. It can be a good or a bad thing, a virtue or a vice. Hope, by contrast, is a passion; in the language of the medieval schools, hope aims at a future, arduous, and possible good. It doesn't always attain that good, however. There is also hope as a theological virtue, but presumably Obama doesn't mean to offer eternal happiness to his followers. His vision is of earthly happiness, wholeness, and justice. As he explained to Americans in 2004, in his debut at the Democratic National Convention, his name, Barack, means "blessed."

Kesler also takes a look at Obama's health care dreams for the day when Americans are able to come together in unity and elect large majorities of Democrats in Congress with a Democratic president. Read the whole thing.

Speaking to a college audience in Boston, Mass. Friday, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart used his stand-up routine to respond to Sarah Palin's comments about "pro-America" parts of the country, shedding the profanity restrictions that govern his Comedy Central show.

"She said that small towns, that's the part of the country she really likes going to because that's the pro-America part of the country. You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly: [expletive] you," Stewart said to raucous applause.

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn’t pro-America?"

Stewart didn't let his own harsh language stop him from criticizing John McCain and Palin for divisiveness.

"I can't take it anymore...After eight years of this divisiveness, we're back to this idea that only small-town America is the real America," he said.

The Manhattan native accused the Republicans of "writing off whole swaths of the country," saying "cities are just a lot of towns piled on top of each other in one place. "

During the same routine, however, he seemed to write off Palin's rural swath of the country, referring to the governor's home not as Alaska, Wasilla, or Juneau, but as "the woods."

"McCain made an interesting vice presidential choice," he said. "I like the woods...I just don't know if I would pull my vice president out of the woods randomly."

Stewart also joked about Palin's recent statements on Barack Obama's links to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and Obama's abortion stances, distorting her statements:

"I've never seen someone with a greater disparity between how cute they sound when they're saying something and how terrible what they're saying is," he said, launching into an impression of Palin. "Don'tcha know, Obama, by golly, he just is a terrorist?... Oh, you know, he just, gosh, kills babies, you know."

Palin has referred to the relationship between Obama and Ayers by saying Obama "pals around with terrorists." She has also attacked his opposition to a state version of the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act during his time in the Illinois senate, which would have required that medical care be given to infants born alive during attempted abortions.

The media has devoted hundreds of stories of late to the tenor of audience comments at McCain-Palin rallies, fretting about "rage" and "incitement" by the campaign, but the only account of Stewart's appearance is a one-sentence mention in the Boston Globe, and his abusive Palin comments are not included.

Below is video of Stewart's comments, with the audio improved as much as possible (earphones may help). A rough transcript of the video is after the jump. Please observe a content warning for bad language and some crass jokes:

You can tell she's a Republican. They were meaner to her than they have been to other candidates— Alec Baldwin calling her "that horrible woman"— and did little to lift her up aside from Alec Baldwin calling her "way hotter in person." Palin performed very well, though, reacting appropriately to Baldwin's razzing rather than standing there vacantly, as most politicians would. Her close on "Weekend Update" is also expertly done. Anyone can say what they will about her— the woman is a performer.

They should have done her a solid by adding a "spreading the wealth" joke that would have played to her political strengths. It's the least they can do for pounding on her.

The rap is funny, ridiculous, SNL fare, and Palin does Republicans proud by finding the beat as she dances along and "raising the roof" more than respectably. The reaction moment when Fey and Palin cross paths in the first scene is totally wasted, but that's SNL's fault for not writing it longer.

Despite the legendary "cool" quotient of Democratic candidates, McCain and Palin perform worlds better than either the stilted Hillary or the humorless Obama have on SNL. I bet even Fey would have to admit it after last night.

In Miami, Fla:

You may have noticed -- there was a lot of talk about Senator Obama's tax increases and Joe the Plumber. Last weekend, Senator Obama showed up in Joe's driveway to ask for his vote, and Joe asked Senator Obama a tough question. I'm glad he did; I think Senator Obama could use a few more tough questions.

The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn't ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn't recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

The question Joe asked about our economy is important, because Senator Obama's plan would raise taxes on small businesses that employ 16 million Americans. Senator Obama's plan will kill those jobs at just the time when we need to be creating more jobs. My plan will create jobs, and that's what America needs.

Good for him. Meanwhile, Obama's out there mocking Joe:

“A plumber is the guy he’s fighting for.”

The crowd laughs at Joe the Plumber.

Obama: “How many plumbers you know are making a quarter-million dollars are year?”

Update: Allah Pundit's post on this exchange has a more full quote than the above, which he suggests changes the nature of the exchange. I don't think it gets Obama off the hook, as the second part of the quote was just as offensive as the first part could have been considered, but here's the whole quote, nonetheless.

“He’s trying to suggest that a plumber is the guy he’s fighting for,” Obama said. “How many plumbers you know that are making a quarter-million dollars a year?”

While the media and Left blogs continue to dig into Joe's personal life and affairs for asking The One a question.

If Obama were truly a purveyor of a new kind of politics or a decent leader, in any sense of the word, he'd stick a different sentence into his stump speech. Something like, "Hey, everyone chill out. Joe is a man who asked me a question. As presidential candidates, John McCain and I have faced plenty of tough questions. The good citizens who ask those questions don't deserve to be torn down for their efforts."

Obama's frowning upon the practice would go a long way toward quelling the bad practice of vetting every townhall and ropeline questioner as if he were a Supreme Court justice.

But you see, Obama is not a man of new politics or leadership. He is a man who endorses raising the cost of free speech for everyone who disagrees with him. He is a man who sends out Action WIre alerts to mobilize voters to shout down detractors who appear on the radio. He is a man who sends letters to the Department of Justice to ask it to investigate political ads that aren't even inaccurate, much less criminal.

Joe's experience is making every sensible American voter wonder whether it's worth asking their representatives that question they have on their minds. The man who talks endlessly about the value of getting new Americans involved in the democratic process is allowing their intimidation without comment.

It seems Obama only approves of getting dead people, cartoons, and the Dallas Cowboys involved, via voter registration fraud. Mickey Mouse just don't talk back like Joe the Plumber does.

Barack Obama has improved his standing among a variety of voter subgroups since mid-September based on Gallup’s recent polling. I noted his positive move among seniors in a post last week. The latest subgroup analysis released from Gallup reveals another interesting shift: a notable swing toward Obama since mid-September among men. But in this highly volatile economic and political environment, it’s possible these numbers might have shifted back toward McCain in the last week.

Looking at the Gallup tracking since early August, McCain consistently led among men by 5-8 points (he also trailed among women by double digits expect for a week or two after the GOP convention when the gap narrowed, but Obama now leads among women by 14 points).

But in the most recent voter analysis, McCain trails Obama among men by 5 points, the first time he has not led this subgroup in the Gallup tracking.

These numbers, however, are only based on data from October 6-12, and don’t include the most recent tracking data Gallup released last night.

The newest Gallup numbers show Obama leading the horserace matchup by 6 points (51%-45%) using their “expanded” turnout model that assumes higher than normal turnout among minorities and younger voters. It also shows a 2-point difference (Obama 49%-McCain 47%) using Gallup’s traditional turnout model.

While Gallup won’t post the gender breakdown of the most recent tracking until next week, I assume McCain has closed the gap again among men within the last week if McCain has indeed turned this into a 2-6 point race overall.

You can read Gallup’s full subgroup analysis here.

It's more volatile than the stock market!

Yesterday, western Pennsylvania was a "racist area" according to its Congressman John Murtha.

Today, it's no longer racist. Whew!

He issued the following statement today: “I apologize for making the comment that ‘Western Pennsylvania is a racist area.’

“While we cannot deny that race is a factor in this election, I believe we’ve been able to look beyond race these past few months, and that voters today are concerned with the policy differences of our two candidates and their vision for the future of our great country.

I have to leave town before Sarah Palin speaks near Greensboro today, at Elon College, which is a shame because she's appearing with Hank Williams, Jr.

Her visit will be the third this week from the candidates in what has been a solidly Republican state in presidential elections for decades. John McCain will be here again on Saturday.

It's by no means a good sign that they're having to spend this much time in the Tarheel State just a couple weeks before Election Day, but I'm heartened by the fact that they're still spending significant time in Pennsylvania, and popping up in Maine and N.H.

Barack Obama still faces challenges in North Carolina. Parts of the Sandhills and the Appalachians are full of blue-collar Democrats who have been in play in presidential politics since Reagan turned them into Reagan Democrats. The polls are close here, but they were also close pre-Democratic primary, when Obama beat Hillary by 14 points.

It's not inconceivable that Obama's support is being underestimated once again, but in a tour of several counties that fit the blue-collar, Southern Democrat profile this week, the Obama apathy was palpable. These places went for Kerry in 2004, though not happily or overwhelmingly, but the number of signs and stickers posted for the Democratic candidate this time around were far fewer than I remember in the last presidential election year.

"The lesser of two evils again," they griped. "I don't see what people see in him (Obama). He's an empty suit."

Most of the folks in these counties will likely vote for Democrats for governor, but they haven't been reliable Democrats for presidential candidates for years. Obama's liberalism and his well-publicized comments about rural voters combined with McCain as a known and admired quantity made for much more overt support for him than Obama among people I spoke with, and along the roads I drove.

Survey USA now reports the number of people who say they have “already voted” in many of its pre-election polls. This is an important tool to gauge how the presidential race is unfolding among those who have already cast their ballots.

Nate Silver looks at these results from five states (NC, GA, OH, NM and IA). It appears Obama’s efforts to boost turnout through a strong ground game are paying off. The Survey USA polls show large double-digit leads for the Democratic nominee in four of the five states (NM +23, OH +18, IA +34 and NC +34). Obama holds his “smallest” lead among early voters in Georgia, +6.

A few important caveats are in order. First, these are poll results, not actual vote counts. So like with any survey, there are issues such as sampling problems and margin of error. Second, as Silver notes, early voters are staunch partisans, which means John McCain is probably not losing a big share of the “persuadable” universe. Very few of those who already voted would have changed their minds in the last three weeks of the campaign.

You might also ask if Democrats traditionally make up the biggest proportion of the early voting universe. Not so, writes Silver:

According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry

Here’s the bottom line according to Silver:

What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers; the question is whether the Republicans will be able to do the same.

Good question….

Joe's all over the place today. On "Nightline" last night, he told Terry Moran:

"To be honest with you, that infuriates me," plumber Joe Wurzelbacher told Nightline's Terry Moran. "It's not right for someone to decide you made too much---that you've done too good and now we're going to take some of it back."

"That's just completely wrong," he added.

He went on to rail against progressive taxation further:

"I don't like it," said Wurzelbacher. "You know, me or -- you know, Bill Gates, I don't care who you are. If you worked for it, if it was your idea, and you implemented it, it's not right for someone to decide you made too much."

Joe Biden kept it classy by questioning the motives and honesty of Joe Wurzelbacher:

Our friends on the Left show their respect for the working men who happen to ask them inconvenient questions by putting up "crack" pictures, alleging he's a McCain plant, and devoting multiple discussion threads to tearing him down on DU.

Ben Smith is looking into whether Joe is registered to vote.

God speed, Joe. The national election arena can be a rough one to be thrown into. Just ask Sarah Palin. But all the hassle, background checking, and even abuse is in a politician's job description, not a plumber's.

Update: He is registered, as a Republican:

Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said a Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher, whose address and age match Joe the Plumber’s, registered in Lucas County on Sept. 10, 1992. He voted in his first primary on March 4, 2008, registering as a Republican.

All those on the Left who have been touting Obama's ability to pull Republican voters will now suddenly decide that being a Republican invalidates Joe's criticism entirely.

Joe's feeling the spotlight's heat:

"There's a lot more important issues than me, and I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable with it," he said. "Everyone's more worried about what Joe the Plumber has to say than what Obama or McCain has to say."

I guess it's heartening that they disagree with me, and totally unexpected:

This time, John McCain kept Barack Obama on the defensive.

The feisty Republican tried hard to find a lifeline Wednesday night, challenging his Democratic rival at every turn over his truthfulness, associations and record.

By that measure, McCain won the last debate of the 2008 campaign.

But that may not be enough.

The account pulls out some more good moments on McCain's part:

Again and again, McCain looked directly at Obama and let him have it.

_"You have to tell me one time when you have stood up with the leaders of your party on one single major issue."

_"You're running ads right now that say that I oppose federal funding for stem cell research. I don't. You're running ads that misportray completely my position on immigration."

_"You don't tell countries you're going to unilaterally renegotiate agreements with them."

For Obama's part, I thought he lied frequently and flagrantly, but he was eloquent and moderate sounding. His downfall, if there was one, was the smirking, smiling, and laughing he was doing on his side of the screen as McCain spoke. It betrayed the off-putting arrogance that is the young senator's default attitude if he's not keeping it in check.

I don't buy the idea that McCain had to do something phenomenal tonight to pull this race out. Debates, especially this cycle, aren't made for game-changing, and his margin is small enough that slow and steady could conceivably pull him out.

But a better performance than he gave tonight would have been extremely helpful. I thought McCain clearly won the first debate, both on performance and points. I thought McCain was righter than Obama in the second debate, but not as effective. Tonight, I thought he was about the same as the second debate, but higher stakes and more urgency made the performance more problematic.

That's not to say McCain wasn't good. He was. He continues to carry the right message on taxes, on health care, on foreign policy, and economic growth. But did he carry it well enough?

Joe the Plumber will certainly be a centerpiece of the cable network discussions this week, which means that particular YouTube will be played and played again, both on TV and by voters. This is an unquestionably good thing for McCain, as many Americans don't much like the idea of "spreading the wealth around" after they've worked hard to earn it.

McCain seemed almost to drop the ball by declining to mention "spreading the wealth" in his first go-round, but he came back around to it after Obama's dishonest retort, which included an answer he never even came close to giving Joe:

Now, the conversation I had with Joe the plumber, what I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you were in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then. And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn't yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now. And that requires us to make some important choices.

On vouchers and his own record of bipartisan work, McCain was forceful, hitting Obama over the head with the success of the D.C. vouchers and offering a very serious list of bipartisan compromises to Obama's empty claims of the same.

Whether it be bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time; whether it be opposition to spending and earmarks; whether it be the issue of torture; whether it be the conduct of the war in Iraq, which I vigorously opposed; whether it be on fighting the pharmaceutical companies on Medicare -- on prescription drugs, importation; whether it be fighting for an HMO patients bill of rights; whether it be the establishment of the 9/11 commission, I have a long record of reform and fighting through on the floor of the United States Senate...Senator Obama, your argument for standing up to the leaders of your party isn't very convincing.

McCain was proudly pro-life, but his attacks on Obama's abortion record lacked fire, allowing Obama to utter this utter falsehood unchallenged:

If -- if it sounds incredible that I would vote to withhold lifesaving treatment from an infant, that's because it's not true.

His argument on judges, and the bipartisan compromise required to get confirmations (which Obama did not join), was very strong, but he stopped short of saying, "The next president may have the responsibility of appointing three or more judges to the Supreme Court who will affect the law of the land for many, many years to come. I have a record on this issue, and have been honest about the judicial philosophy my appointees would represent. Judging by his description, Mr. Obama wants judges to be lawmakers, social workers, and therapists. With all due respect, Sen. Obama, that is not their job, and the American people aren't up for lifetime appointments for judges who misunderstand that."

"That's for me and a button to know," he said.

Raleigh, N.C.— As a fellow Washington veteran running up against a young, fairly inexperienced candidate in a surprisingly close race, I thought Sen. Elizabeth Dole might have some perspective on what John McCain can do to change the game tonight.

"I think he's probably got to be a little more forceful, aggressive, and passionate," she said, but declined to say on which points, except that she thinks the experience message remains important. "The most important job of the President of the United States is serving as Commander-In-Chief. There's just no question that that kind of experience matters."

Everyone's trying to answer that question today, except for Ana Marie Cox and Tucker Carlson, who have both rightly observed that any attempt by McCain to regain the momentum in this race would be self-evidently racist:

Ana Marie Cox: This is the $55 million dollar question. ($55M being about what McCain has left to spend on the campaign.) I am not sure if there's anything McCain can do to leverage a good debate performance into come-from-behind momentum. At best, he could change the narrative or make news (which doesn't necessarily change the narrative). I think his best bet is to somehow highlight one of the areas of nagging concern about Obama that will resonate even with those that like him: His arrogance or presumption, his apparent ease with power.

But of course that would be racist.

Tucker Carlson: I agree with Ana on both points: There's virtually nothing McCain can do to change what seems like the inevitable course of the election. Debates are always oversold as decisive moments, I think. Plus, at this point it would be racist for McCain even to try to win the election.

Only Obama can stop his own campagin at this point.

A couple of things I'd like to hear from a newly "forceful, aggressive, passionate" McCain tonight:

1) Push-back on Fannie and Freddie and the causal myth of "deregulation." Honest reporters and McCain's limited discussion of Democrats' complicity in the mortgage crisis have reached voters here in North Carolina, judging by the discussions I hear in bars, restaurants, and campaign events. Not surprisingly, the results of such an attack would likely be very good for McCain.

Beyond Fannie and Freddie, though, McCain should channel his inner Milton Friedman to fight back explicitly against the idea that it was deregulation that caused the crisis. Try these facts on for size, about who bought toxic assets and who did not:

Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part -- though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.

Or, the more sound bite friendly: "There's been deregulation in our economy over the last decades, but none of it has been in the financial sector. Furthermore, while I was sponsoring bills and speaking on the floor about the very kind of regulation of Freddie and Fannie that might have made a difference in this disaster, you were silent in the Senate, as you have often been on important issues that require going against your party or their cash cows."

2) Sen. Obama's tax cut? Yeah, that's welfare. He would take money from people who do pay taxes to give it to those who pay no income tax, and he has very cleverly renamed that a "tax cut." Here's the thing, Sen. Obama: You can't give a tax cut to 95 percent of Americans when 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes at all. The money that Obama will call a tax cut when he gives it to someone else is more accurately known to you hard-working folks out there as "Tuesday's paycheck" or "the four dinners I would have taken my wife to" or "the little pink bike I would have bought my daughter." Which brings us to...

3) The Plumber. Joe, the plumber. Joe Wurzelbacher, the plumber: conduit for the life-giving flow of common sense-induced concern from normal Americans and small businessmen fearful of Obama's tax plan and unlucky recipient of Obama's college digestion of Marxism. Obama revealed to Joe exactly what he is, and McCain should make that clear to Americans without lacing it with any Senatorial niceties.

4) The end of Mr. Nice Senator. Tell America that Obama's tax-and-spending plans would crush an already crippled economy, that his protectionism would close markets to our products, that his health care mandates and tax hikes would force small businesses to let people go. Tell America that he has horrible enough judgment to hang out with a domestic terrorist, and then facilitate that radical's work in the public school system your children attend, and then asks voters to trust him representing them across the table from Ahmadinejad. Tell America that he is a product of machine politics who pays a well-known voter fraud organization to get out the vote for him, repeatedly lies about the association, and wipes his website of the evidence of his lie, all while presenting himself as a pristine pillar of the new politics. These arguments are not out-of-bounds (nor is Wright, for that matter), and McCain should not be ashamed of voicing them, and doing it with passion. Every second wasted on being overly kind to Barack Obama tonight is just that: wasted. He's got the press to love on him. No need for McCain to do it.

A group of concerned squirrels is now spreading the word for the GOP about rampant voter registration fraud and impending voter fraud by ACORN.

They showed up at CBS' "Early Show" this morning, crashing Harry Smith's shot.

In addition to the savvy guerrilla marketing, the Squirrels have their own blog. And, the GOP is bolstering the message with a new site, ObamaAcornTree.com, which illustrates Obama's many connections to the group, including an endorsement from ACORN's political arm, numerous grants he steered to them throughout his career, and the $800,000 his campaign paid ACORN for get-out-the-vote efforts (and then tried to conceal in FEC reports).

I'm in North Carolina this week, where the voter-fraud message has made some inroads with voters. At an event for Sen. Elizabeth Dole in Democratic-leaning Richmond County yesterday, Dole had time for about five questions from voters, and two of them were about voter fraud.

If you think ACORN has caused trouble at this point, just remember the potential for mischief once GOTV gets underway. The state of North Carolina's General Assembly passed a same-day registration bill in 2007, which allows citizens to walk into polling places, register in person, and cast a ballot on the same day starting tomorrow and up to three days before Election Day.

Up until last year, a voter had to register 25 days in advance of the election. The new law requires one of several types of identification:

* A North Carolina driver’s license with current address
* A utility bill with name and current address
o A telephone or mobile phone bill
o An electric or gas bill
o A cable television bill
o A water or sewage bill
* A document with name and current address from a local, state, or U.S. government agency, such as:
o A passport
o A government-issued photo ID
o U.S. military ID
o A license to hunt, fish, own a gun, etc.
o A property or other tax bill
o Automotive or vehicle registration
o Certified documentation of naturalization
o A public housing or Social Service Agency document
o A check, invoice, or letter from a government agency
o A birth certificate
* A student photo ID along with a document from the school showing the student’s name and current address
* A paycheck or paycheck stub from an employer or a W-2 statement
* A bank statement or bank-issued credit card statement

I talked to a woman yesterday who trained to be a poll watcher, who said she asked how recent the utility bill had to be to be valid, and was told the law didn't specify. A quick read of the bill suggests that's true.

"What do you think? Three months?," she posited. Her instructor said that sounded reasonable.

"Then, doesn't that mean someone could easily have moved to Virginia, use old documentation in North Carolina, and vote in both states," she asked.

The instructor had to concede that was probably the case. I'm reading up on same-day registration here, but it seems clear that at the very least, the unclear identification requirements would cause problems for poll-watchers, even if ACORN weren't trying anything squirrelly.

When credit-card fraud is out there, too?

Steve and Rachel Larman say a strange credit card charge appeared on their statement this month -- a $2300 donation to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The Larman's say they don't want this to be about their political affiliation, but they say they're not about to give the Obama campaign any help from their pocketbook.

They said they notified Chase, their credit card bank, to report the fraud.

"(They) said that they had seen-they were familiar with this," said Steve Larman. "It was fraud, they believe through telemarketing but they were going to be doing some more investigations."

The Larman's don't want their politics to enter into what is essentially just a fraudulent charge. But they say that the charge involves the Obama campaign adds insult to injury for the registered Republicans.

"They (Chase) kept on asking me 'are you sure you wouldnt have gone to a site in support of Obama'," said Rachel Larman. "And I repeatedly said 'Im voting for McCain - I would not be going to an Obama site'."

Chase removed the charges from their card.

This rotten:

Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board.

Also, we evil Republicans are once again trying to disenfranchise the likes of "Mickey Mouse.", having no respect, of course, for the generations of mice who fought for the right to voice their opinions at the ballot box.

A look back at the original language used by Palin at the rally in question makes it nearly impossible for the exclamation to be misunderstood as an attack on Obama unless you happen to be a MSM member just dying to think the worst of the Right.

Here's the original account from the Washington Post of the Florida rally by Dana Milbank:

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

The subject of Palin's sentence is never in doubt. It's William Ayers, not Barack Obama. Predictably, the story of the man who allegedly yelled "kill him" about Barack Obama has found its way into an AP story, and then found its way into a thousand iterations of the story of the McCain-Palin rage McCain and Palin are allegedly inciting.

If someone had wanted to yell "kill him" about Obama, he would likely have yelled it in response to Palin's preceding sentence:

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" said the crowd.

At least then, there would have been a chance it could have been directed at Obama, as both Obama and Ayers are present in Palin's sentence.

But the liberal media, which has at times ignored and at times applauded as high art the assassination fetishism of the last eight years on the Left, is now projecting it onto all McCain-Palin supporters, using several outbursts and one decidedly misinterpreted "kill him" as their hook.

Best case, they're betraying a deep misunderstanding of conservatives. In the worst cases, a deep desire to think and broadcast the worst about them, even when it's unrepresentative or untrue. I was in the McCain-Palin mob yesterday at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., and it was filled with small businessmen fearing an Obama tax increase, Army and Marine wives yelling twice as loud to stand in for their husbands fighting overseas, smiling 20-something women with "Read my lipstick" buttons.

The only nastiness I heard during the day was an outburst, apparently provoked by Obama supporters who wandered into the crowd outside just as I had to leave. I was too far away to hear the exact exchange, so I couldn't write it up—although clearly such limitations don't limit the MSMers who repeat the "kill him" myth—but others were closer and able to report on the friendly, tolerant rhetoric of the Left, whose members were calling McCain a "murderer."

The conservative response, as reported by a local newspaper, was tame, reminding the protesters that McCain had fought for their right to dissent and throwing off a more colorful, "Free speech for freaks."

Elsewhere, I saw three older men speaking with a gesticulating protester who was ranting about the evils of the two-party system and capitalism and every other lefty canard you could imagine. They patiently listened, tried to teach her a little bit about how the real world works in between her soliloquies, and she remained the only one yelling throughout the entire exchange.

The media will never report about the fringe members and hateful activities of lefty rallies. Upside-down flags at pro-immigration rallies are studiously ignored. Rampant violence, black supremacy messages, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism are watercolored in MSM features as the young, sexy, drive of the counter-culture, reignited in a younger generation and pushed to its breaking point by a Republican president and the injustice of war. "Sarah Palin is a ****" t-shirts never become part of a meme about the "angry," "mob-like" tendencies of Obama supporters.

I get that. But is it too much to ask that, if the media is going to unfairly magnify and broadcast isolated incidents, that the incidents actually have happened?

Wilmington, N.C.— The press I'm sitting near is atwitter about a lone sign found outside, leaning against a planter, that mentioned Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden.

No such signs made it inside, as far as I could tell, and the rally was standard, patriotic fare, as McCain-Palin fans chanted "U-S-A" and "John McCain."

Cindy McCain started off with a crowd pleaser, referencing a "Read my lipstick" sign in the stands, saying "I'm wearing lipstick, too. I love it." Someone shouted, "Lipstick!"

As McCain began his remarks, a woman shouted, "Fight back, John!"

McCain listed many of the nation's challenges, referring to these as "hard times," and someone in the audience shouted, "That's why we need you!"

"We have to fight and we will fight, my friends," he said to a shout of "Thank you!"

As McCain talked about his desire to keep taxes low for small businesses, a man shouted, "God bless you!"

He delivered a line about not sending $700 billion to countries that don't like us very much, and was overwhelmed by "Drill, baby, drill," and stomping.

When McCain went over the state of the race, and the national media writing the campaign off, the media earned the biggest boo of the day, while supporters shouted, "You're a fighter, John!," and "You're a hero!"

McCain closed by imploring voters to fight for their country, to be courageous, and not to give up, and a woman shouted, "Freedom!"

Scary, angry, mob-like stuff, this.

Wilmington, N.C.— John McCain continued to avoid direct attacks on opponent Barack Obama's unsavory associations Monday at a rally, instead focusing on Obama's potential to team with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to raise taxes and enact economic "Hooverism" while portraying himself as a "fighter for America."

"The last President to raise taxes and restrict trade in a bad economy as Senator Obama proposes was Herbert Hoover. That didn't turn out too well. They say those who don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Well, my friends, I know my history lessons, and I sure won't make the mistakes Senator Obama will," he said.

McCain reiterated the message, delivered in Virginia Beach this morning, that hard times call for an experienced leader with good judgment, who can pick up the baton and run with it without needing time to "get used to the office."

After a very brief introduction by Cindy McCain, the senator appeared without his running mate Sarah Palin, who is campaigning elsewhere. He did not mention ACORN, Bill Ayers, or any of Barack Obama's other associations. He also refrained from any colorful promises about his debate performance, after recently saying he'd "whip" Obama's "you-know-what" Wednesday. He suggested before his speech that he might take questions from audience members at what was billed as a town hall, but left without doing so.

He ended his speech, delivered to a full gymnasium at the Cape Fear Community College, with a rallying cry tailored to North Carolinians who unexpectedly find themselves living a swing state for the first time in decades.

"In the next 22 days, I ask you to get out and do what's necessary to win in the state of North Carolina...I know very well that we can win this victory," he said, drawing huge cheers as he asked them to "stand up, stand up, stand up and fight."

Don't give up hope. Be strong. Have courage. And fight.

Fight for a new direction for our country.

Fight for what's right for America.

Fight to clean up the mess of corruption, infighting and selfishness in Washington.

Fight to get our economy out of the ditch and back in the lead.

Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

Fight for our children's future.

Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.

Only a month ago, Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman was starting to pull away in his reelection bid for the U.S. Senate. Democratic comedian-turned-politician Al Franken's edgy humor was being made known to unamused Minnesotans.

Aside from the harm the financial crisis has caused nearly all Republicans in competitive congressional races, Coleman has had a particularly bad week of media coverage. On Monday, facing accusations of not reporting Neiman Marcus suits as gifts to the Senate ethics committee, the campaign's initial response only fanned the flames of the controversy.

Then there was the revelation that a NRSC ad portraying Franken as an angry maniac--however angry he may be--was taken out of context. Franken hadn't lost his temper; he was sharing a story about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone cheering on his son David, a cross-country runner, from the sidelines. Franken's campaign is now running an ad playing the clip in context.

Now, with polls showing a Franken lead and a third-party candidate attracting more than 15 percent of Minnesota voters, Coleman has decided to do the only thing any politician determined to win would do. Backed into a corner, he announced this morning that his campaign will be ... going positive.

Said Coleman:

At times like this, politics should not add to negativity – it should lift people up with hope and a confident vision for the future.

And second, I decided that I was not all that interested in returning to Washington for six years based on the judgment of voters that I was not as bad as the other two guys. I want folks to vote for me, not against the other guys.

Maybe Coleman's new strategy will work with the nice people of Minnesota.

Blackfive zeroes in on the suspiciously close links between the Obama campaign and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a group that bills itself as non-partisan and recently released a scorecard giving Obama and Biden Bs on veterans' issues, while McCain scored a D, resulting in headlines like this.

The Secret Service doesn't call him "Pheonix" for nothin'. Jen Rubin lays out what the American people need to hear from John McCain over the next weeks to convince them to send him to the White House.

Aside from all of the arguments, likely well known to every McCain senior advisor and staffer, the great challenge for McCain is to say these things forcefully and in the only setting where everyone will make one final gut check: the last presidential debate. Whatever the question is in that final meeting his answer should be one of the six arguments above. Every moment spent on bear DNA or rules of hot pursuit for Pakistan is time wasted. There is nothing unseemly or inappropriate about any of these lines of argument, yet McCain often seems unwilling or unable to make them in a sustained way. He needs to get over it.

Republican senator Saxby Chambliss will face a much tougher battle than previously expected in his reelection bid in Georgia, according to recent polls.

Chambliss leads former state representative Jim Martin by only three points in a Strategic Vision poll of likely voters taken Oct. 5-7.

Three other polls show a tight race:

Rasmussen (Oct. 7, LV)
Chambliss 50
Martin 44

Research 2000/Daily Kos (Sept. 29-Oct. 1, LV)
Chambliss 45
Martin 44

SurveyUSA (Sept. 28-29, LV)
Chambliss 46
Martin 44

This is a huge shift from two weeks ago, when SurveyUSA had Chambliss ahead by 17 points. Martin has capitalized on the financial crisis and Chambliss's support of the bailout bill, saying that he would have opposed the bill because it didn't include enough protections for homeowners. So far, the DSCC hasn't put very much money into this race.

On Wednesday, DSCC chairman Chuck Schumer expressed optimism that the Democratic ranks in the Senate will expand in the next congress. Polls in Minnesota and North Carolina are also showing closer-than-expected Senate races with Republican incumbents. Bad economic news for the country seems to be translating into good political news for the Democratic Party. As Schumer said yesterday, “The wind is more strongly at our back than ever before.”

Are we sure this isn't one of those situations where, if they're in the same room together, the space-time continuum is disturbed? Someone's hearing rumors...

Some key McCain staffers are content with Palin joking about the "SNL" routines on the campaign trail -- as when she scribbled "I'm not Tina Fey" on a supporter's cell phone and said she'd dressed as Fey on Halloween. But others -- including the governor herself -- think a return punch on the NBC airwaves is what's needed.

I'm hearing some sort of Palin tweak of Fey's American Express commercials is in the works.

While next weekend's ''Saturday Night Live'' will be a rerun, it is possible Palin could appear Thursday on the first of NBC's ''Weekend Update'' specials in prime time.

Otherwise, the next orginal "SNL'' show will be broadcast Oct. 18, a little more than two weeks before the election.

Many speculated that McCain's internals must have indicated this line of attack wasn't working, or he would have brought it up at the debate. There goes that theory.

The way they're selling this tactic is a little odd. Nicolle Wallace, McCain spokesperson, has been on two shows this morning explicitly saying, "No one sitting around their kitchen table dealing with economic problems cares about Obama's relationship with a washed-up old terrorist."

She was saying the same thing several days ago. I suppose the idea is to hit that notion head-on, and segue into the issue of Obama's trustworthiness, but it seems like an awfully convenient sound bite for Team Obama.

John Murtagh, victim of Ayers' violence, is also making the rounds as a surrogate this morning. When's the ad featuring him rolling out?

Rev. Wright is still the more telling of the relationships, but McCain is hesitant to go there, with good reason. He's already being accused of racism for connecting Obama to a white guy. Of course, if they do want to go there, Obama himself provided an awfully convenient sound bite for Camp McCain: "I think that people were legitimately offended by some of the comments that he had made in the past," he said. "The fact that he's my former pastor I think makes it a legitimate political issue."

After referring to McCain as an "angry man lurching from one position to another," and a dear, dear friend, Joe Biden offered this gem:

"You know, the idea here that somehow these guys are once again injecting fear and loathing into this campaign is ... I think it's mildly dangerous," Biden said. "Here you have out there these kinds of, you know, incitements out there -- guy introducing Barack using his middle name as if it's some epitaph or something," Biden told a crowd more than a thousand at a rally in Tampa, apparently meaning to use the word "epithet."

McCain campaign to "make news" tomorrow morning.

Perhaps they'll be handing out official McCain campaign air fresheners to Obama's traveling press corps. Maybe they're holding the introductory speech and press conference for McCain's Homeowner Resurgence plan that they should have held before the debate. Maybe Jeremiah Wright and Lynn Forester de Rothschild will be holding the most theatrical joint press conference of our time.

Stay tuned. On a more serious note, will they announce a prospective Cabinet member?

Turns out traveling with The One can be an uncomfortable, pungent experience. How long before Dean Reynolds gets left behind ala Ryan Lizza?

Listen, Dean, no one ever said being an apostle would be easy, but verily I say to you there will be a reward in the administration.

Keep in mind that Obama assures us that his executive experience as head of his campaign is a large part of his qualification for president. Reynolds compares and contrasts the Obama charter plane with the McCain camp's:

Obama's campaign schedule is fuller, more hectic and seemingly improvisational. The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and un-informed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it's all for security reasons.

If so, I would love to have someone from Obama's campaign explain why the entire press corps, the Secret Service, and the local police idled for two hours in a Miami hotel parking lot recently because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was not an isolated case...

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

The other day in Albuquerque, N.M., the reporters were given almost no time to file their reports after McCain spoke. It was an important, aggressive speech, lambasting Obama's past associations. When we asked for more time to write up his remarks and prepare our reports, the campaign readily agreed to it. They understood.

Similar requests are often denied or ignored by the Obama campaign aides, apparently terrified that the candidate may have to wait 20 minutes to allow reporters to chronicle what he's just said.

This morning an image of this button graced by Google Reader inbox:

And now, there’s another:

When McCain cut his gaze over at Obama last night and gruffly called him “that one,” I had one wish: that Latin was still with us.

You see, there’s a silver dollar Latin word McCain could have pulled out of his pocket: the great demonstrative pronoun, iste. It’s my favorite word in Latin, second only to urceatim, an adverb meaning “by the bucketfull.” The indispensable Latin grammar guide, Allen and Greenough, notes the following: “Iste …especially refers to one’s opponent (in court, etc.), and frequently implies antagonism or contempt.”

So, the next time the Nobama spirit rises in you at the sight of an Obama bumper sticker or an “I Heart Obama” dog collar, try out that brave weapon-word, iste. After all, there’s little more beautiful than well-played Latin invective.

In fairness, Joe Biden did once say he'd be glad to be on a ticket with John McCain:

It is 20-year-old David Kernell, son of state representive and Memphis Democrat Mike Kernell:

David Kernell...was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge C. Clifford Shirley, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

David Kernell was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Knoxville for intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of Palin, Alaska's governor, the Justice Department said.

Kernell, an economics major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release.

They'd never stoop to "distracting" the American people with anything other than economic and national security issues.

He's at The Heritage Foundation today, speaking now, and it's streaming here.

As my mother used to say, and she had many occasions to say it, "This room ain't gonna clean itself."

Barack Obama ain't gonna make himself unacceptable as a presidential candidate. John McCain has to do it for him.

Obama is too skilled a speaker and presenter, his disciplined performance tonight showing newfound mastery of his tendency to ramble into dangerous rhetorical territory. He is operating with a built-in advantage as the "change" candidate from the minority party, a huge party ID advantage, and plenty of money to spend, which he's using at a 3-to-1 ratio on TV against McCain.

The current state of the race finds the two candidates in what should be comfortable roles: Obama, standing back, sounding calm, and avoiding major pitfalls by virtue of avoiding decisive action. McCain, running uphill, facing a huge obstacle, and having to act in decisive (and yes, sometimes risky) ways to prevail.

The problem seems to be that McCain doesn't want to act in the way that most agree is necessary to overcome Obama's lead. Tonight, McCain looked sincere, offered concrete solutions, cracked a couple jokes, and was generally more correct than Obama on a host of issues, foreign and domestic.

But at the end of the night, Obama didn't look much more (if any more) unacceptable or risky as a presidential candidate than he did before the debate started. McCain accomplished the positive half of his goal by touting his record vs. Obama's rhetoric on 14 occasions. This is a distinction that must be made, and it's where McCain likes to argue, but Obama must be portrayed as dangerous, not just do-nothing. The conspicuous absence of Obama's associations from the discussion suggest McCain just doesn't want to go there. If that's the case, his other arguments need to be much more forceful than they were tonight.

McCain successfully offered solutions —a spending freeze on everything but military, veteran, and entitlement spending and a new mortgage buy-up plan that will be the talk of the next couple of news cycles (though at first blush it seems to undercut his spending argument)— and proved he's delivered on promises in the past ("I saved the taxpayers $6.8 billion in a deal for an Air Force tanker that was done in a corrupt fashion.")

McCain did what conservatives have been wanting him to do for a month, going after Obama for being silent while Freddie and Fannie grew, and striking Democrats and Obama for getting fat at the Fannie/Freddie trough instead of battling the problem. I appreciated the mildly Joe Bidenesque repetition of this point: "Senator Obama was the second highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history, in history."

Left unsaid, however, is the fact that Jim Johnson was Obama's pick to head up his veep search and that Obama's vaunted letter came in 2007 as a response to headlines, not as a warning.

On tax cuts, McCain threw Obama's own backtracking in his face: "You know, he said some time ago -- he said he would forego his tax increases if the economy was bad. I got some news, Senator Obama: the news is bad." And, effectively used Obama's record from Illinois against him: "When he ran for the United States Senate from Illinois, he said he would have a middle-income tax cut. You know, he came to the Senate and never once proposed legislation to do that?"

Everyone in the McCain campaign should repeat both points ad nauseum, but with more passion next time around.

On foreign policy, John McCain was undoubtedly right, but Obama has become comfortable enough on these issues to fake it effectively. McCain could have used an emotional moment ala last debate's incredulous lecture on negotiating with Ahmadinejad. When Obama was arguing that we need to fight al Qaeda in Pakistan, and move troops to Afghanistan, McCain correctly pointed out that it is the surge Obama opposed that crushed al Qaeda in Iraq and now allows us to deploy troops elsewhere. McCain's allowed to get self-righteous about Obama's attempt to piggy-back on the success of a strategy he actively fought against, and he should.

I listen to Obama's policy prescriptions, and I hear the unacceptable and risky elements through the rhetoric. When I hear him talk about health care, I know he's incentivizing an involuntary shift to government-funded health care for millions of Americans, while expertly dressing the pitch in empowerment. McCain always touches on this, but doesn't illustrate the result: "Imagine the United States Congress or the postal service running your health care, if you will."

McCain performed well tonight, but many thought it was his last chance to change the game. A tightening in two polls— 47-43 in a CBS poll, 47-45 in a Zogby poll— suggests we may have counted him out too soon. I sincerely hope that's the case, but if he's got a chance at winning, he's got to make every argument he made tonight (and more), and do it more effectively.

McCain may be right more of the time, but he lets Obama get away with entirely too much, and Obama, to use a sports term, converts. I understand McCain's concerned about how both his temperament and his honor will be portrayed, but Obama is a man who's happy to run the clock out on this. McCain's got to be lunging for the steal.

Most of the McCain surrogates I've seen have studiously avoided mentioning him in the list of Obama's associates. Sarah Palin has been the only one I've heard go there.

Thompson on Fox: "This has to do with his tolerance level for radicals," he said, mentioning Ayers and the Rev. Wright as his unsavory associates.

Unfortunately, I think the McCain camp's chance to make these arguments against Obama was tonight, and they needed to come from John McCain's own mouth. They lose their gravitas when they come only from surrogates, and the candidate himself is so obviously unwilling to make them.

This is not a parody:

"Barack Obama is gifted in birth by a wonderful smile...

John McCain, when he smiles, has a somewhat menacing quality. It may not be purposeful, but when he smiles, you wonder what he's really thinking.

Barack Obama, for whatever reason, comes off as debonaire, even under attack."

Update: Olbermann keeps it classy: "McCain, and I'm trying to say this as nicely as possible, didn't look like a well man wandering around on that stage tonight."

Let us get this straight:

McCain: Of course we would come to their aid without waiting for the UN. Obama: We would use "all our tools" and "sanctions" and "cost-benefit analysis." So let me get this straight: Obama wants to preemptively attack a country without provocation in Pakistan, but refuses to commit to use military force to defend an ally after THEY have been invaded.

Got it.

I'm pretty sure I could Google all night long and never find a formula that would make Barack Obama's public statements indicate that his administration would represent a "net spending cut."

McCain should have just handed Obama a note card and said, "Hey, you put together some back-of-the-envelope figures that show me that's possible, and I'm gonna go talk about my tax cuts for small-business owners."

As I was just saying... the Obama campaign is making this more advantageous than it necessarily should be for camp McCain.

Now, how to segue from the Obama camp's arguments into a McCain economic message?

High off of the Redskins' improbable 4-1 start, Daniel Snyder is monkeying around even more with D.C. talk radio. Snyder's company, Red Zebra Broadcasting, owns two news-talk stations in the area, the conservative TNT 570 and the liberal WRC 1260. Now Michael Calderone reports that for the duration of the race, the stations are being renamed "McCain 570" and "Obama 1260."

How will you know which is which? Well, the talk show hosts are conservative on one station and liberal on another. But even the hourly national news updates will be different. One station will get its news from Fox News and Dow Jones. The other will use packages from CNN and CNBC. You can guess which is which.

The McCain campaign is trying to take the Ayers connection beyond mere association to an issue of judgment and trustworthiness, which is one step closer to whether you can trust Obama on issues like the economy.

On the trust issue, the Obama campaign seems willing to oblige McCain. After first denying and downplaying Obama's connections with the unrepentant terrorist, even in the NYT's estimation, the line from the Obama camp became that he didn't know of Ayers' radical and violent past (and presumably his unrepentant present) when he was over at Ayers' house in 1995.

That seemed an odd defense considering he never deployed the "this is not the Bill Ayers I thought I knew" excuse back in April when he was first confronted with the issue, and considering he would have had to avoid all local media during their association to have missed that Ayers had a yen for American government, exploded.

It also became irrelevant today, when the evolving Obama defense ran up against the inevitable question: "When exactly did he figure out who Ayers was?"

Today Robert Gibbs of the Obama campaign has been asked three times about Obama and Ayers, and it's apparent he doesn't know what he should know and what he can safely claim he doesn't:

He's most forthcoming with Mark Halperin:

Halperin: "Is it fair to say that [Barack Obama] continued to associate with [Bill Ayers] professionally -- and personally on a casual basis -- even after he learned?"

Robert Gibbs: "He continued to serve on a charitable board and an educational grant board with money supplied by Walter Annenberg, a Republican who was an ambassador under Richard Nixon. Yes."

Halperin: "But with the knowledge of Ayers' past?"

Gibbs: "Yes."

You can see him parsing in his head before he answers. Halperin goes on to stymie Gibbs by pressing him on the notion that a future president having professional connections with a known and unrepentant terrorist might just be an issue with voters. Gibbs repeatedly refuses to say whether Obama thinks it's all right to associate with someone who has been involved with such acts, as his association with Ayers implies, then says he may be able to get Halperin an answer on when Obama figured out Ayers was a terrorist "at the next debate."

On Fox & Friends this morning:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: He wrote the foreword or a blurb at least for Bill Ayers' book. if you don't know somebody very well, do you participate in their book?

GIBBS: I don't know all the details of this. I know what I read in the newspapers, and I know what I've seen throughout any number of publications that looked at this this weekend.

On America's Election HQ:

"I don't know exactly when he knew."

Mr. Gibbs, call your office. No, seriously. That's how you would get an answer to these questions, as a spokesman who is paid to have answers. The Ayers issue is a hard one to sell to voters who are very worried about the economy, but the Obama campaign's inept response to it (a full six months after it first came up) is making it much easier.

In an ad set to run during the debate tonight, McGovern takes aim at legislation that would deprive potential labor union members of private votes on union organization. The longtime liberal blasts "card check" as tantamount to a "sacrifice of democracy," saying working people deserve a private vote.

The Employee Free Choice Act (which involves neither freedom nor choice..discuss) would make it possible for employees to unionize by simply signing a card instead of by secret ballot, opening the door to bullying and arm-twisting of those voting "no" at the hands of union bosses, both before and after a vote succeeds.

Democrats, licking their chops at the prospects of controlling the Senate, House and Presidency, would like to reward the labor unions with such a measure, which would constitute the biggest change in labor laws since the 1940s.

Unions, faltering in the face of falling memberships, have been pushing EFCA for several years during the Bush administration, gaining ground slowly, but always falling short of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed for an up-or-down vote. Even if the act had passed both houses, it would surely have met with a Bush veto.

Many will be surprised by McGovern's reasonable take on this issue, as a self-proclaimed supporter of unions, but Dave Weigel reminds us that of late, McGovern's liberalism hasn't been what it used to be.

In this case, McGovern is exactly what unions claim to be, but often aren't in practice— pro-worker.

And, Sarah Palin wept.

Ouch. John McCain goes after Obama as an old-style politician more harshly than he has in the past in a new ad, "Hypo:"

The problem is it may be enough to be a relatively unknown old-style politician, as long as everyone's talking about the economy, and the unknown is not a Republican. It may have become as simple as that, unless McCain can find a way to connect concerns about Obama's past associations, far Left liberalism, and lack of leadership to voters' concerns about the economy.

The controversial new election law, which allows a week-long window for anyone in the battleground state to register and vote on the same day at the polls without proof of residency, may not have been the fraudulent voting bonanza Republicans were fearing and Democrats were hoping for.

Only about 4-5,000 voters in the state's largest counties availed themselves of the new law, which underwhelmed election officials:

"With all the hoopla we were anticipating a whole lot more," said Steve Harsman, the elections director in Montgomery County, home to Dayton.

Overall, between 20,000 and 25,000 people were expected to have voted early in person in the four counties, beginning Sept. 30. The four counties include the state's largest urban areas — Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton — and the focal points of campaign get-out-the-vote efforts.

There was this instance of exemplary Democratic efforts to prevent voter fraud, in Cleveland:

Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency...

"I never voted before," Woods said, because of a felony conviction that previously barred him from the polls. "Without this service, I would have had no way to get here."

Karl Rove thinks the relatively low turn-out should worry Obama supporters, especially because Ohio State University was included in the early-voting tallies. Democrats are counting on more successful efforts in other battleground states, with poor, homeless, and college voters:

ROVE: It didn't prove out. At least — they've got one more day, but I don't — you know, look. There are — four one-hundredths of 1 percent of the voters in Cuyahoga County showed up and availed themselves of the opportunity for same day registration and voting in Cuyahoga County...

ROVE: If I were the Obama campaign, I'd be worried about it. They had a big hoopla about all those buses and being able to turn out lots of people and bank a lot of early votes.

They may have just simply taken people who voted — who would have otherwise voted on Election Day. They didn't add a lot of new registrants to the roll.

The Lucas County Republican Party Chairman gets the award for most creative slightly awkward use of the word "windbag" in mocking the Obama campaign:

Jon Stainbrook, who is the Lucas County Republican Party chairman, said the Obama effort fell short.

"The Obama campaign has been a windbag, saying that they're going to bring in all these people and it obviously has fallen way short of where it should have," Mr. Stainbrook said.

And, Cuba Gooding, Jr. gets recognition for doing celebrity GOTV without the requisite celebrity obnoxiousness:

"I have made a point in my career not to talk politics. It is your constitutional right to vote. Our forefathers died for us to have this opportunity," Mr. Gooding said.

Update: Helpful volunteer groups registering the homeless are also helpfully helping them push the buttons on the computerized voting screens. How helpful of them!

“They made me feel like a family member, like a brother,” Melvin said after voting. “They helped me, too. I was nervous doing the voting with the new (computer) system, because I’m used to just poking holes in the paper ballot.”

The volunteers helped him read the ballot language, sign paperwork and find buttons on the touch-screen voting machine.

Many of the homeless said they were voting for Democratic candidates because they feel that will provide jobs, which means they will have a better chance of going back to work.

You don't say.

Eight politicians who adopted the Democratic contender's name while running for office Brazil didn't fare so well:

"The name Obama definitely helped," said Claudio Henrique dos Anjos, who used it to run for mayor of Belford Roxo on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. "It opened the doors for me to talk about projects. It brought a positive result."

But official results show he didn't get a single vote, though he disputes the count.

"I'll still keep the political name Obama," Dos Anjos said. "Not only because of the admiration I have for him, but also because it is the nickname the people gave to me. It's how they know me."

I, for one, blame the Bradley Effect.

Joe Nocera reports:

"'There is no liquidity anywhere,' one hedge fund manager told me. 'No lending available. No interbank lending available. The fixed-income market is completely shut down. There is no activity going on anywhere.' (He asked me not to use his name because he didn’t want to spook his investors.)"

You're not misreading the headline. The poll puts Obama up six points, overall, but McCain is inexplicably closing a gap on two key issues:

After closing in on Obama's lead yesterday, McCain has now taken the lead on handling of two key issues. The GOP nominee holds 43-42% leads over Obama on both the economy and energy policy -- McCain's first leads on handling of the economy since 9/10 and first on energy policy since 9/23.

Most other polls, of course, are not showing anything near parity on the economy issue, which is the leading issue in voters' minds right now, but worth keeping an eye on this one (if only to keep your spirits up).

Q: When does NPR get squeamish about an aggressive voter registration and GOTV effort in a swing state targeted at young voters who don't often participate at high rates, which makes it easy for them to get to the polls and even facilitates travel to the polls?

A: When the registration is being done at Liberty University, a conservative, Christian college founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

On Sept. 10, Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. delivered a high-minded message to the students at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The son of the late evangelical leader spoke of the students' civic responsibility to vote. Then he made an announcement.

"We are planning to cancel classes on Election Day," he said, his voice instantly drowned out by wild cheering. "Now I know what you care about," he observed, laughing.

It's part of a grand strategy to get Liberty's 10,000 students to vote in Virginia. The university will bus students to the polls, stage an all-day concert complete with food, and lift curfew so they can watch the results on a giant-screen TV.

Falwell specifies that he's not telling anyone which way to vote, but concedes that the campus of Liberty is probably 80-90 percent conservative/Republican. He has focused his pitch to students on the fact that a very small number of votes can make a difference in very big elections in swing states. Sen. George Allen, for instance, lost his re-election bid for the Senate in 2006 by fewer votes than the Liberty student population.

Combing the NPR archives for such (even mildly) skeptical reporting on ACORN, a liberal voter-registration group embroiled in many a voter-fraud controversy, I found "Republicans attack ACORN's voter registrations," "Voter registrations could face legal challenges," and "ACORN's registration practices draw RNC criticism."

The gloves are now officially packed away in that back corner of the coat closet, wedged between a crate of Meghan McCain's third-grade artwork and a dust buster. From McCain's remarks in a speech in New Mexico today:

Rather than answer his critics, Senator Obama will try to distract you from noticing that he never answers the serious and legitimate questions he has been asked. But let me reply in the plainest terms I know. I don’t need lessons about telling the truth to American people. And were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn’t seek advice from a Chicago politician.

McCain also goes after Obama on his Fannie/Freddie connections in the same speech (emphasis mine):

This crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them. Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread. This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.

Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, “a good idea.” Well, Senator Obama, that “good idea” has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A 527 called Right Change has jumped into the fray also, offering two ads on frequent rotation in Virginia, which take Democrats to task for inaction where Fannie and Freddie are concerned (thus ensuring that SNL won't be the only place voters hear this narrative):

The tracking poll shows Obama at 52 percent to McCain's 44. It's the highest level of support for Obama ever, and is the 25th day in a row without a decline for the Democrat.

Take the gloves off, says Palin:

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Pivoting from his customary "distraction" protestations, Obama is now going after McCain's connection to the Keating Five scandal of 1989.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Retaliating for what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign is using the economic situation to justify the attacks: “The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. ... The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today's credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules.”

But he opened the door for this tactic long before the current crisis' culmination, in May of this year:

Senator Barack Obama said today that a scandal from Senator John McCain’s past – the Keating Five – was just as relevant to the presidential campaign as questions about who Mr. Obama has associated with over the years.

In a news conference here, Mr. Obama was asked whether his campaign intended to raise the banking scandal from the 1980s, which Mr. McCain has apologized for. Every piece of every candidate’s public record, Mr. Obama said, is “germane to the presidency.”

“I was just asked previously about a whole host of issues and associations that are a lot more flimsy than John McCain’s relationship to Keating Five,” Mr. Obama said. “What I said, I can’t quarrel with the American people wanting to know more about that and me having to answer questions about it.”

While, in true Obama fashion, he simultaneously distanced himself from the exact argument he's making today, which at the time was delivered by superdelegate Rep. Peter DeFazio introducing him at a rally:

Obama today was asked if he believes McCain’s association with Keating Five is fair game.

“Congressman DeFazio obviously delivered a speech that wasn’t my speech,” Obama said instantaneously, trying to separate DeFazio’s comments from his own.

He does love to have it both ways.

As long as he "can't quarrel with the American people wanting to know more about that" and him "having to ask questions about it," Bill Ayers sounds like a dandy topic for the debate Tuesday.

The McCain campaign should offer Obama a deal. They'll stop talking about Bill Ayers as soon as Barack Obama apologizes for associating with him, the Nexis search for Ayers reaches "more than 3000 results," and he offers 20 years of public and legislative penance for perceived misdeeds. 'Round about 2028, he'll be free and clear.

Obama will release a mini-documentary of the scandal, here, at noon today.

I'm guessing it won't emphasize the fact that only McCain and John Glenn were found not guilty of violating any Senate rules.

In the mid 1980s Mr. Keating had engineered $1.3 million in campaign contributions to the five lawmakers. In return he expected the senators to lean on federal bank regulators to back off from their investigation into his shaky institution, which was crippled by poor junk-bond investments and real-estate speculation. The central event came in April 1987, when the senators met twice with Federal Home Loan Bank Board examiners, who charge that the senators pressured them to leave Lincoln alone. Sensing impropriety, Senators McCain and Glenn quickly withdrew (as Mr. Bennett recognized when he recommended last September that they be dropped from the probe). Senators Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle, however, continued to press Mr. Keating's case. Eventually the government was forced to seize Lincoln anyway, at a bailout cost to taxpayers of $2 billion.

Well, I think we can safely say Sarah has been freed. Freed to read the New York Times and comment on revelations of a relationship between Barack Obama and an unrepentant domestic terrorist, which the paper has finally seen fit to report upon:

Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."

Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them."

He's not kidding. In a poetic turn of events, the New York Times' belated reporting on the Obama-Ayers connection, told in a "nothing-to-see-here" tone, has given Palin a hook to tweak her critics in the media and go after Obama for his associations. She's doing it again in remarks at a Colorado rally today:

There's been a lot of interest in what I read lately. Well, I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago.

Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.’

These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. This is not a man who sees America as you and I do - as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country. This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in - not my kids and not your kids. The only man who can take on Washington is John McCain.

The Obama campaign is predictably whiny:

Governor Palin’s comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign’s statement this morning that they would be launching Swiftboat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation’s economic ills. In fact, the very newspaper story Governor Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Senator Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less ‘pals,’ and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was eight. What’s clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy.

Condemned him strongly, that is, during any time when he wasn't attending cocktail parties at Ayers' house, serving as head of Ayers' non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge, calling Ayers "mainstream," and remaining silent when he said he wished he'd done more in his efforts to bomb domestic targets in the 1960s.

The best chance you'll have to see conservatives on the big screen, barring the unlikely production of an Arthur Branch biopic, is this weekend's release of "An American Carol."

It's directed by David Zucker, the self-proclaimed "master of questionable taste," and maker of unquestionable classics such as Airplane! and the Naked Gun series. For those of us nerds who only get pop-culture references when they're related to electoral politics, he also directed a bunch of funny ads in 2004 and 2006 for Club for Growth and the RNC.

He and Kelsey Grammer, John Voight, James Woods, Dennis Hopper, Robert Davi, and Kevin Farley, among others, have declared that if conservative is the "new gay" in Hollywood, they are out of the closet, despite Hollywood's legendary inability to live up to its own tolerant ideals when it comes to political differences.

It's not a decision without costs, or a declaration without risks. I'm going to see it this weekend, partly in appreciation, and partly because I'm a sucker for immature, inappropriate, slapstick send-ups (Ed. Hey, doesn't that make you a Biden voter?). Although I won't put a bailout-style hard sell on you about it, it would certainly be helpful to future endeavors for the few Hollywood conservatives—current and aspiring— if this did well in its opening weekend.

The trailer is below the fold. Michael Moore learns painful lesson in patriotism from Gen. Patton? You can't resist that.

I understand that he didn't want to get overly partisan while a delicate measure he thought was necessary was just barely making it through both houses of Congress. But there's no excuse for letting a false narrative lie, and letting Obama and Biden continue to lie about the roots of this crisis.

It was not simply Wall Street greed that caused this problem, but government intervention that incentivized self-interested industries to offer and buy up high-risk loans they thought were backed by a government promise because they were backed by government-sponsored entities. If the American public gets only one side of this argument, the free market is in some serious trouble. There are plenty of respectful (even bipartisan) ways to articulate this, and Bill Clinton is the guide for the message.

And, yet it sounds like McCain is unwilling to go there. The financial crisis is what has driven his numbers down; a little distancing from the root causes of that crisis, and placing blame where it belongs, would be helpful.

Nope, that is not going to happen Why not? 1) It is a complicated argument, and McCain is not good at making complicated arguments, not even about earmarks. (Note, additionally, his lack of defense of the war in Iraq during his debate with Obama. Amazing.)

2) There is a racial component to criticism of the Community Reinvestment Act that can make it sound like you are scapegoating minorities for Wall Street's problems.

3) The campaign believes McCain's time is better spent talking about taxes and energy and healthcare. Really.

Really? This is the perfect illustration of McCain as prescient reformer while Obama is nothing but petulant rhetoric, and it happens to distinguish his position from Obama's on the most important issue of the day.

I realize the campaign would like this to just go away, but I don't think that's going to happen. Repeating the same talking points as the Obama camp about Wall Street does not help close the gap on economic issues. The truth just might.

He was the best of candidates. She was the worst of candidates. And, usually for doing the same things.

The most flexible man in political reporting offers a truly remarkable display of October contortion between judging the presidential debate Sept. 26 and the vice presidential debate Thursday. Hey, at least fighting media bias comes with some laughs.

On politics as performance:

Last week:

MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk TV values, because, in many ways, subconsciously, when you pick a candidate for president, you only pick him on not just on issues, but who do you want to listen to for four to eight years... I mean it really is part of the way we look at these things...Do you think—let‘s start with John McCain. Do you think he was too troll-like tonight? You know too much of a troll?"

This week:

MATTHEWS: But did you get the sense that for an hour and a half you were watching a director say, "Cue the energy speech, cue the tax part, cue the...

SIMON: But that's what politics is! It's a performance.

MATTHEWS: You're so cynical, Roger. Let's step back into the world of substance. Did we learn anything about her except for her ability to recite tonight?"

On the role of expectations:

Last week:

Ironically, when they got to foreign policy, I thought Barack Obama was quite able to defend himself, quite able to debate a man who‘s been in public life for many more decades than he has. He showed equality in terms of the debate. Maybe on the points you could disagree with him.

This week:

(Roger) SIMON: Joe Biden went through like, what, 20 primary debates. He's pretty experienced at this. Sarah Palin, this is her first national debate.

MATTHEWS: Right.

(Roger) SIMON: You're honestly going to say...

MATTHEWS: You like people that, when you ask them a question, turn to the camera like this, like it's candidates' night?

On the importance of style, even over the scoring of debate points:

Last week:

(Eugene) ROBINSON: There one was confrontational, one, you know, seeking consensus. And, you know, I mean, I think, I frankly think Obama did well tonight, even though, initially, we didn‘t think he scored as many points as McCain.

MATTHEWS: You know, Pat, you and Gene, I remember the boxing days, just to go for stylistic.

This week:

Look, let me ask you about the style question. The winking, the "Let me call you Joe," the-the manner of the whole thing about bringing the baby up at the end, I mean, all that stuff, I mean, it's 11:00 at night, and she's got the baby out, hugging it.

I mean, excuse me, those were stylistic points, weren't they?

On talking about the future:

Last week:

ROBINSON: That, no, his better tactic was, you know, to play his game and to look forward and to be more optimistic and, you know, perhaps visionary...

MATTHEWS: I know, I think very time he used the word future he was killing his opponent."

This week:

MATTHEWS: Well, she said that was looking backward, that was backward finger-pointing.

(Howard) FINEMAN: That's not going to sell. That's not going to sell, I don't think.

MATTHEWS: In other words, you can't get out of the trap of being a Republican by saying, that's backwards."

On Jerusalem:

This week:

MATTHEWS: When she talks about recognizing Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of Israel... does she know that-and she put it together in a couple sentences. And I really question if she knows what she's talking about.

She talked very persuasively about Israel having put together a very good treaty with Jordan, the kingdom of Jordan... and, of course, the Egyptian country as well...

Doesn't she know that, if you move the capital, by the United States' standards, and move our embassy down there, that that breaks apart both those treaties? Does she really know what she's talking about, Pat?...Does she know what she would-that she would vitiate those two bilateral arrangements?

On the week of June 5, when Barack Obama flip-flopped on the basic foreign-policy concept of an undivided Jerusalem within 24 hours of supporting it in front of an AIPAC audience:

June 5: Um.
June 6: Err.
June 9: Uhh.
June 10: What?
June 11: Hey, who wants to talk about how great Barack Obama is? Huh?

Speaking about the bailout bill, which will likely be voted on around 12:30 p.m.:

“We’re not going to take a bill to the floor that doesn’t have the votes. I’m optimistic we’ll be able to take a bill to the floor.”

Brilliant strategy, Nance.

It looks to be gaining momentum, with Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) saying the Democrats have increased their numbers. Republicans, too, have had folks switch to probable "yes," including conservative stalwart Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.)

On the House floor, there is a dramatic mix of Kucinich supplications, inter-house bashing (“utter disgust and frustration with the way [the bill] was handled in the other body”), and at least one switched Republican vote from Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), who makes what sounds like a slightly exaggerated claim:

...says he had received an overwhelming number of calls urging him to vote down the bill before Monday’s vote. Since then, he says, the calls are “still overwhelming,” but this time in favor of the bill. He says constituent input, coupled with a number of changes in the rescue package, have convinced him to vote in favor of the bill today.

What I've heard is the tone of calls has changed on the Hill, from "if you vote for this, I will never support you again" to "all right, if you have to do this, but make sure it protects me." But I'm somehow doubting the phone is ringing off the hook in favor of this thing.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), a prominent opponent, appearing on Fox, conceded that the bill will likely pass the House today, partly with the support of principled conservatives who believe this is the best option of several very bad options. Hensarling will vote against the bill, but is also touting the improvements made to it— mark-to-market rules, and FDIC changes.

That's the headline on Roger Simon's column. He appeared on the late edition of "Hardball," last night where he argued heatedly for his thesis against the combined boorishness of Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman. Fineman compared Palin to a "wolverine chewing through plywood," (yeah, I don't get it either) while Matthews said her tactic of looking straight into the camera made her a "dolt." Thanks for the professional take, guys. Here's video of the nonsense.

Back to Simon:

She went out of her way to talk in everyday terms, saying things like “I betcha” and “We have a heckuva opportunity to learn” and “Darn right we need tax relief.”

Biden was somber, serious and knowledgeable. And he seemed to think that debates are about facts. He had a ton of them.

Criticizing John McCain’s health care plan, Biden said that McCain would tax health care and “then you’re going to have to replace a $12,000 — that’s the average cost of the plan you get through your employer; it costs $12,000 — you’re going to have to pay — replace a $12,000 plan, because 20 million of you are going to be dropped. So you’re going to have to place — replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you’ve just given to the insurance company.”

Got that?

Palin was a lot more direct in her attacks on Obama and a lot more simple. Criticizing Obama for saying he would meet with some foreign leaders who are hostile to the United States, Palin said: “Some of these dictators hate America and what we stand for. They cannot be met with. That is beyond bad judgment. That is dangerous.”

She also said: “An issue like that taken up by a presidential candidate goes beyond naiveté and goes beyond poor judgment.”

Sarah Palin accusing Barack Obama of being naive? Yep. And she was unabashed about it. And so what if Joe Biden has been in the Senate approximately forever and knows a lot more about a lot more stuff than she does? She doesn’t care.

Come on, you know you want to watch. It's cathartic, and instructive for a certain presidential and VP candidate who need to make this part of their stump speeches (with a slightly more measured tone, perhaps).

Watch her bring both sides together, the little Maverick.

Hey, don't take it from me. Take it from Kos:

Sarah Palin won! Actually, she survived, since she had no "deer in headlight" moments.

Oddly enough, Sarah Palin was masterful tonight at exactly what she was incapable of doing in the Gibson and Couric interviews. Tonight, she was able to answer questions the way she wanted to answer them instead of doing it the way Ifill wanted her to. In particular, when asked what her Achilles heel was, she simply chose to talk about her strengths instead. It was the classic job interview, "What's your greatest weakness" moment, and she reacted correctly. By the time she was done talking, no one remembered that the question was about a weakness. (Suddenly, the media that has argued her inability to do this was a handicap will decide her newfound ability to do it is dishonest obfuscation.)

Palin left a good impression with voters despite her relative inexperience on foreign affairs, even feeling bold enough to direct the conversation back to Afghanistan at one point. She missed some counterpunches, but she offered connection, sensitivity, substance, and not a gaffe in sight.

By the end (and I'm trying very hard not to exaggerate), I was kind of hoping she might say, "Hey, Joe, it was so nice meeting you. What are you doin' next Thursday?" I got the distinct feeling she'd warm up and really kick some tail.

Tonight could have been a bleed-out for the McCain campaign, and Sarah Palin may have made it a boon. I've been scanning the cable networks, and even Keith Olbermann can only ask desperately, "So, she didn't do anything to help McCain, right?" because she didn't offer him a convenient gaffe to pounce upon.

The CNN insta-poll taken of voters who were watching the debate found that 84 percent thought Palin did better than expected and only seven percent though she did worse.

David Plouffe of the Obama campaign: "Stylistically, Sarah Palin did have a very good night," he said, arguing only that Biden won the night on points. Last week, even though many conceded McCain won on points, all that mattered to many pundits was that Obama didn't fall on his face, and therefore won. Suddenly, that's not what matters to some pundits (ahem, CNN).

The McCain camp rejoices:

Tonight, Governor Palin proved beyond any doubt that she is ready to lead as Vice President of the United States. She won this debate, putting Joe Biden on defense on energy, foreign policy, taxes and the definition of change. Governor Palin laid bare Barack Obama’s record of voting to raise taxes, opposing the surge in Iraq, and proposing to meet unconditionally with the leaders of state sponsors of terror. The differences between the Obama-Biden ticket and the McCain-Palin ticket could not have been clearer. The American people saw stark contrasts in style and worldview. They saw Joe Biden, a Washington insider and a 36-year Senator, and Governor Palin, a Washington outsider and a maverick reformer. Governor Palin was direct, forceful and a breath of fresh air.” –Jill Hazelbaker, McCain-Palin 2008 Communications Director

Here's video of the Luntz focus group.

Well, that's about as real a moment as you're going to get from a candidate, giving a "hello" to her brother's third-grade class, which is watching for extra credit.

Jonathan Martin pegs it as a moment her haters will hate, and Ben Smith compares "shout out" to the Gen-X language Obama's been using on the stump for two years.

In her closing statement, Palin also uses the phrase "back in the day."

The two candidates have tried desperately to out-regular-guy each other, with Palin several times making reference to her families and their small businesses, and Biden even tearing up over the struggle to raise children on his own.

Sound bite of the night: "Oh, say it ain't so, Joe. There you go again. Your whole question is premised on the Bush administration, and doggone it, we need to look forward."

Update: The Frank Luntz focus group on Fox is overwhelmingly in favor of Palin. Most of them are even saying they now think she's "qualified," when they did not before the debate. The focus-group dials went off the charts during Palin's discussion about personal responsibility, and Luntz predicts the debate will really make a difference among voters in either moving independents to McCain, and at least stopping the McCain fall in polls.

Palin picks up on the talking point I thought McCain should have employed at the debate with Obama: "For a ticket that talks about the future and change, there sure is a lot of finger-pointing into the past."

She brings out this pretty devastating quote on Afghanistan from Obama: "We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there."

Speaking of the past, Palin has a Joe Six-Pack moment: "You know, it's times like these it's so obvious that I'm a Washington outsider. I just have trouble understanding how you supported the war and now you oppose the war. That's something a lot of your Washington friends do, where you vote for something before you vote against it, I guess."

Harkening back to John Kerry can't hurt the cause.

Palin gets a couple good shots in, here, about Iraq and funding for troops. She notes that Biden voted the opposite of Barack Obama the time Obama voted against troop funding.

"You even said you'd be honored to be on the same ticket with him. That's an indication of the support I think you had for him, at least before you became the running mate."

"I don't know how you can defend that position now," she said of Obama's vote against troop funding.

She called the Obama/Biden plan a "white flag of surrender in Iraq," and correctly noted that al-Qaeda thinks Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.

She's looking pretty good, here. She missed an opportunity to go after the Dems on culpability on the financial crisis, but that's the inexplicable tack the McCain campaign is taking. She did point out that McCain supported more regulation for Fannie/Freddie two years ago and was unsupported by Senate colleagues, but she didn't mention Obama by name.

The populist talking point about greed and corruption on Wall St. is killing me without some balancing talk about government meddling in the market. I would have liked to have seen her throw some of Biden's colleagues' quotes back in his face. Biden is being allowed to tout Obama's writing of a letter about Fannie/Freddie as equivalent to McCain's history of pushing for regulation of the mortgage monsters.

I quote the Washington Post:

In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- while Mr. Obama was notably silent. "If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole," Mr. McCain warned at the time.

Two great Palin-connection moments so far: Talking about the economic crisis in terms of being on the sidelines of a neighborhood soccer game. Also, using the phrase "bless their hearts," in reference to her face-offs with oil companies in Alaska.

Piper Palin, seen here taking orders from Republican candidate John McCain, has a history of candy-related scandals in her past, according to sources.

For all of you out there who think Gwen Ifill ought to disclose her authorship of her utterly dispassionate examination of "How the Age of Obama Allows for Post-Partisan Uplift in a World Once Again Mercifully and Rightfully Without Republican Leadership," perhaps you can tell me why it was that CNN had to disclose this little tidbit instead of the campaign coming clean:

On the flight to St. Louis, Piper — made famous to the nation during the Republican National Convention when she styled her baby brother's hair with her saliva — wandered back to the rear of the campaign plane to distribute licorice to reporters.

According to extensive reporting by the New York Times, this is not the first time Piper has been caught in a confectionary scandal. Speaking on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisal by the powerful Alaskan first-grader, several sources confirmed she had once brought cupcakes to her class at school, but "did not have enough for everyone."

The expectations game has been a complicated one to play this week. Liberals have darted implausibly between highlighting Sarah Palin's super-keen debating skills and creating video mash-ups comparing her to the famously incoherent Miss Teen South Carolina. In much the same way that George W. Bush is simultaneously a bumbling idiot and an evil genius in the minds of liberals, Palin is a semi-literate hick who could single-handedly crush the electoral hopes of the Democratic Party with her knack for the "glittering generality."

Conservatives have accentuated Sen. Joe Biden's 30 years of experience as a debater, but couldn't resist pointing out that the man has made awkward gaffes Delaware's No. 2 export behind unsolicited credit-card applications.

Conventional wisdom says low expectations will behoove Palin, just as a similar soft bigotry worked for Bush, but after several very shaky interviews, it may be that expectations are so low for Palin as to require resuscitation by way of a knowledgeable, confident performance. Passable alone probably won't do for a slipping ticket, especially with media primed to highlight every mistake.

Expectations would seem to set the bar high for Biden, but everyone knows there's only one thing Joe Biden does more than ride the Amtrak, and that's say spectacularly stupid things. Given the slant of the media and his reputation for political pratfalls, I wouldn't be surprised to see post-debate coverage congratulate him for getting through 90 minutes without referring to his running mate as "clean and articulate."

The McCain campaign has taken an unorthodox tack in the final hours before the debate today, pointing out Biden's consistent idiocy and simultaneously puffing up Palin. First they released a Biden's greatest-hits compilation called, "Embarrass:"

Then aides informed Politico that Sarah will indeed be freed tonight:

Tonight will be different, they say.

“This is going to finally put her back into a position where we see her like we saw her the first couple weeks,” a McCain official said. “She was herself. She was authentic, and people related to that. ... Tonight, she’ll get into a rhythm. You’re going to see her in a way that you haven’t seen her yet.”

The campaign promises Palin will whack Biden with his own words about Barack Obama, the Iraq War, and taxes. She'll go after his many wrong-headed votes and theories on foreign policy (please let the post-9/11 blank check to Iran be one of them!).

I hope to see the McCain campaign's versions of Joe and Sarah show up, as opposed to the experienced senator and the perplexed governor, but wouldn't it be better to let it be a surprise?

At any rate, I've got a new Sarah Palin theory: She stumbled with Gibson and Couric because she was playing nice. The pitbull likes to be on the attack, and she will be tonight. Looks like she's already getting warmed up.

Jim Geraghty pictures it: "I respectfully point out that you do not know what the hell you are talking about."

The Politico reported a couple days ago that the strategy is to go easy on Palin so as to avoid sounding condescending:

“If she makes a gaffe, he underplays it,” one of the people prepping Biden for his vice presidential debate told me. “At most, he says, ‘I am not sure what Gov. Palin meant there.’”

There are three reasons for this. First, Biden does not want to look condescending. For the same reason, he plans on referring to Palin as “Gov. Palin” during the debate and never as “Sarah.” (He will sometimes refer to John McCain as “John,” however, because they have been senators together for many years.)

Biden will allow the media to slam Palin for her mistakes and concentrate on going after the top of the ticket.

If an absolutely cloyingly positive 1987 profile of Biden in the Chicago Tribune is to be believed ($), there's a precedent for this strategy in high-stakes Biden debates. He claims he went easy on Sen. Caleb Boggs in his surprising bid to unseat the incumbent Republican in 1972:

Flashback: County council member Joe Biden, husband, father, senatorial candidate, stares across the stage at his debate opponent, incumbent Sen. J. Caleb Boggs. A reporter asks Boggs to explain his position on the genocide treaty. The older man pauses, fumbling, then admits he is unfamiliar with the treaty. Boggs tosses the question to the challenger. Biden hesitates, thinking about the treaty, a document that defines any act to destroy an entire ethnic group as an international crime. Why not go for the jugular?

His response, 'I'm sorry, I don't know what that is, either.'

Quote, years later, on why: "It would have been graceless."

Of course, given Biden's penchant for exaggeration, I wouldn't be surprised if he had no idea what the treaty was about, and somewhat improved the story in the retelling, turning gaffe into grace.

Palin, meanwhile, is set to be "aggressive:"

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin plans to launch aggressive attacks against her Democratic opponent Joe Biden tomorrow night, her campaign aides said, in order to remind voters of why she became popular in her home state of Alaska.

"Governor Palin is eager for the opportunity to contrast her record of reform to the hollow rhetoric of a politician who has spent the bulk of his adult life inside the confines of Washington, D.C.," said Palin spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. "Tomorrow night will address a critical question; which is more relevant to the office of the vice-presidency -- real-life results or Washington double-speak?"

Meta!

More pointedly, McCaskill said of Palin's opponent, Sen. Joe Biden, Del., that he “has a tendency to talk forever and sometimes say things that are kind of stupid.”

“He a regular guy and … he doesn’t parse his words and he’s not hyper-careful,” she said. “He’s very authentic."

H/t Hot Air.

Jim Treacher has a sneak preview of her potential questions:

Mayor Palin, Barack Obama is a handsome, charismatic demigod. How many boxes of Kleenex will you need after your crushing loss?

Never did I think there'd come a day when I'd agree with Bill Clinton this often, and yet, here I go again. As I was saying yesterday, Bill Clinton has been perhaps the strongest voice against the Obama-created meme that deregulation and the free market are at fault for a crisis actually caused by government interference.

And, here he goes again...

Bill may be attending rallies now, but he's not toeing Obama's line on the banking crisis and what caused it. On the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, which passed the senate 90-8, with the prominent support of Obama backers such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and, err Joe Biden (D-imwitted):

In BusinessWeek.com, Maria Bartiromo reports that she asked the former President last week whether he regretted signing that legislation. Mr. Clinton's reply: "No, because it wasn't a complete deregulation at all. We still have heavy regulations and insurance on bank deposits, requirements on banks for capital and for disclosure. I thought at the time that it might lead to more stable investments and a reduced pressure on Wall Street to produce quarterly profits that were always bigger than the previous quarter.

"But I have really thought about this a lot. I don't see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis. Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn't signed that bill."

One of the writers of that legislation was then-Senator Phil Gramm, who is now advising John McCain, and who Mr. Obama described last week as "the architect in the United States Senate of the deregulatory steps that helped cause this mess." Ms. Bartiromo asked Mr. Clinton if he felt Mr. Gramm had sold him "a bill of goods"?

Mr. Clinton: "Not on this bill I don't think he did. You know, Phil Gramm and I disagreed on a lot of things, but he can't possibly be wrong about everything. On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence.

"But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [commercial banks] to go into the investment banking business as Continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment."

Peter Wallison provides four reasons Barack is wrong on this, in case he and Bill never get together over ice cream sodas to talk about it:

1. There has been a great deal of deregulation in our economy over the last 30 years, but none of it has been in the financial sector or has had anything to do with the current crisis. Almost all financial legislation, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Improvement Act of 1991, adopted after the savings and loan collapse in the late 1980s, significantly tightened the regulation of banks.

2. The repeal of portions of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999--often cited by people who know nothing about that law--has no relevance whatsoever to the financial crisis, with one major exception: it permitted banks to be affiliated with firms that underwrite securities, and thus allowed Bank of America Corp. to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to buy Bear Stearns Cos. Both transactions saved the government the costs of a rescue and spared the market substantial additional turmoil.

3. Republicans have favored financial regulation where it was necessary, as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while the Democrats have opposed it. In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a tough regulatory bill for Fannie and Freddie over the unanimous opposition of committee Democrats. The opposition of the Democrats when the bill reached the full Senate made its enactment impossible.

Barack Obama did nothing; John McCain endorsed the bill in a speech on the Senate floor.

4. The subprime and other junk mortgages that Fannie and Freddie bought--and the market in these mortgages that their buying spawned--are the underlying cause of the financial crisis. These are the mortgages that the Treasury Department is asking for congressional authority to buy. If the Democrats had allowed the Fannie and Freddie reform legislation to become law in 2005, the entire financial crisis might have been avoided.

Now, if McCain could include some of these points in his stump speeches, we'd be getting somewhere. Better yet, have Sarah Palin serve them up tomorrow night. If her RNC speech was any indication, she's a delightful, entertaining attack dog, and I'd love to see her stick Biden on this.

After all, the Left has suddenly decided, after weeks of calling her the dimmest woman on Earth, that she is the greatest debater ever, so I'm confident she could pull that off.

Update: A screenshot of Huffington Post today, where just yesterday they were listing the "Top 10 reasons Palin will cancel the debate."

If she performs decently, we'll soon be hearing, ala Obama's performance in the first debate, how all Joe Biden had to do was remain upright to reassure voters, and how that pretty much constitutes a win.

From our friends at Reason ...And, you thought you were creeped out yesterday:

Her debatng history in Alaska reflects some of the seemingly split personality we've seen from Sarah Palin during her first couple of appearances— breezy, smiling and devastating at the RNC and wobbly in later interviews.

In Alaska, she'd sometimes falter on policy issues early in her races only to get more comfortable by debate time, and deliver an RNC-reminiscent performance. Opponents were frustrated by the fact that her ability to connect with audiences and deliver pointed or funny lines often outdid their extensive preparation.

Here's hoping we see this Sarah Palin on Thursday:

Palin saved her most devastating riposte for the final question of the debate, when Persily asked the three candidates whether they would hire their opponents for a state job.

Knowles and Halcro offered halting jokes. But when it was Palin's turn, she pounced.

Smiling at Halcro, who recited reams of statistics by rote, Palin observed that the businessman "would make the most awesome statistician the state could ever look for."

As the debate audience laughed, Palin pivoted to Knowles, who had owned an Anchorage restaurant. "Do they need a chef down in Juneau?" Palin asked, smiling as she twisted the verbal knife. "I know Mr. Knowles is really good at that." ...

"When you try to prove she doesn't know anything, you lose, because audiences are enraptured by her," Halcro said. "And her biting comments give you a sense of how competitive she is. Anybody who doesn't take her seriously does so at their peril."

If we can't trust her to tell the truth about her lip liner, what can we trust her on?

H/t Allahpundit, whom I am sparing the musical stylings of Hinder by not adding a "Lips of an Angel" YouTube to this post.

Regardless of whether a bailout passes, this is a message that has to get out, not just for McCain's sake, but for the sake of capitalism in our country.

In the clip used in this ad, Clinton was asked if the Democrats weren't being just a bit disingenuous by saying it was "unbridled capitalism" that caused the crisis instead of acknowledging their part in propping up Fannie and Freddie. Clinton was honest in saying that they do bear some responsibility for the conundrum we're in now.

The message of Republicans (+ Bill Clinton) and Democrats on what got us here are diametrically opposed. Democrats want to evade responsibility and are brazen enough to blame the markets for their own meddling, thereby justifying—surprise!—loads of government intervention even beyond a possible bailout. Republicans have somewhat tepidly offered the notion that it was not the market, but government intervention in the market, that caused the problem. They are right, but conservative blogs, commentators, and honest reporters have done a lot of the heavy lifting in this department, as Republicans on the Hill tried to play bipartisan softball (and got hit with a series of partisan pitches for their efforts).

McCain has not helped by following the Democrat model of blaming Wall Street greed for all of our problems. I understand his need to sound a populist note, but what would also be rather populist is to explain how liberal elites in Washington had crashed the credit markets you and I depend upon as part of another failed social engineering experiment, which by the way yielded their party millions in campaign donations. They repeatedly ignored warnings of a crisis and, in many cases, worked against greater regulation of Fannie and Freddie only to claim it was John McCain's (yes, the McCain of McCain-Feingold) strict adherence to deregulation that got us here.

The unfortunate part of the messaging has been that until this ad from McCain, Bill Clinton (ostensibly a Democrat and Obama supporter) had been one of the best political figures at articulating the truth about Fannie, Freddie and culpability of Dems.

I watched floor speeches yesterday by Republicans for and against the bailout, and saw little of it. McCain pointedly missed the opportunity to wallop Obama on the issue in the first half of the debate Friday. When Obama trumpeted his own alleged calls for reform and blamed the crisis on deregulation, McCain demurred, only saying, "I supported reform also."

Even with markets holding strong today (and let's hope things stay that way), we may be on the brink of a huge, depressing, but necessary intervention in the markets. I strain against the idea, and hope it won't be necessary in its gargantuan form, but many conservatives I trust (Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, The Heritage Foundation), have conceded that something probably must be done. McCain and Republicans cannot allow the lesson taken from this to be that if it hadn't been for those dastardly markets granted all that pesky freedom, everything would have been fine.

McCain making that argument will get more coverage than anything out of the mouths of conservative House or Senate members. I'm glad to see him going there, both on a philosophical and political level.

If he manages to get through Thursday's debate without saying something insane, I will be floored:

As he exited the hotel for his dinner break, Biden was asked “Senator, can we get your reaction to the House bill not passing?”

Biden interrupted the question with a “Hey folks,” to reporters and then said “Oh, things are going well.”

His press secretary later said he misheard the question. Here's to his mishearing a few things on Thursday.

There's an astounding admission buried in this NYT account of the failed bailout vote yesterday:

Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure. But where Mr. McCain had accused Mr. Obama of taking a hands-off approach to the financial crisis, Democratic advisers said they believed that Mr. McCain now had a role in the legislation’s failure.

Really? The man who was ostensibly working the phones such that he was confident enough to predict the passage of the bill in prepared remarks sent to reporters yesterday, in fact, made no phone calls to assure the passage of said bill. The man whose party has no particular philosophical aversion to government interference in the markets and is in control of Congress. The man who's been assuring voters of his very serious weighing in by phone from the campaign trail...didn't actually pick up a phone. This is the real Obama. He is a leader of crowds, not crises.

This won't be a story, but it should be, and Republicans and McCain should point it out. The argument against Dems is the utter lack of competent leadership by Obama and Pelosi, not whining about a Pelosi speech.

Pelosi lost more than 12 of her fellow California Democrats, close friends and allies, and Committee chairs in this vote. Obama failed to take a public position on the vote or to convince any teetering Democrats with promises of a trip to their Districts or other help from the Messiah himself, losing Dems from the Chicago area and much of the Congressional Black Caucus with whom he could have had sway.

And yet, the guy who got his hands dirty, tried to make a few things happen, and didn't quite get the ball across the goal line is the one who takes the political heat for this. Which is why, as Bill Kristol and Dean Barnett have suggested, McCain may as well go all-out on the leadership front. It's where he's comfortable working, and where Obama will never dare to walk ahead of him.

Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi willfully ignored the impending crisis for years before they suddenly saw the light and were able to blame a politically palatable entity for it—Republican embrace of "unbridled" capitalism and deregulation. They too seem to have reaped the benefits of inaction, succeeding in pinning the blame on the markets they meddled with, letting their vulnerable members oppose an unpopular bill, and possibly getting a second run at a bailout bill filled with the pork they cut out the first time around.

In Washington, sometimes "leadership" ain't all its cracked up to be. But isn't the political windfall of inaction—conveniently kvetching without responsibility—usually a privilege reserved for the minority party? Pelosi and Co. seem to be enjoying it no matter the circumstances. Maybe that's the "change" Obama's been talking about bringing to Washington.

Mark Leibovich reports:

There were a few cringes within Obama World over the weekend after Bob Shrum, the longtime Democratic operative, essentially placed Barack Obama in the White House. ...

It was Mr. Shrum who planted this memorable Election Night kiss of death onto John Kerry in 2004: 'Can I be the first to call you Mr. President' Mr. Shrum said to the Massachusetts senator after early exit polls showed him defeating George W. Bush.

After television networks called Florida for Al Gore four years earlier, Mr. Shrum declared to a group of Gore aides in Nashville that 'We’ve finally pushed the boulder up the hill,' he said, according to two people who were with him that night. He was seen hugging and offering congratulations to several people at the Loews Hotel.

Shrum is famously 0 for 8 in the presidential elections with which he's been associated. Luckily for Obama, Shrum has stayed on the sidelines this year. The Obama machine - one of the most effective and efficient campaigns in recent memory - is run by Chicago operative David Axelrod and longtime Gephardt hand David Plouffe. This may be the year the curse of Shrum is broken.

The rise of new powers in recent years has led to the theory of economic decoupling. The theory says that, as places like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and to a lesser extent Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries rise, they are less dependent on the American economy. Problems in the American economy therefore matter less to these new powers, as they can always trade with one another. They don't require American capital or even confidence in American economic power and leadership. They've "decoupled."

Interesting theory. Except recent events have exposed it to be, what's the word, totally false.

Ahem, this is not a parody entitled "The Seduction of the Swing States" (emphasis mine):

The rain pouring down, his jacket off, his white dress-shirt clinging to his body, Barack Obama played to a crowd in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964.

At this rate, how long before press accounts of Obama aren't even safe for work anymore?

After you shake that image out of your head, move onto this delightfully Freudian passage about a possible Biden slip:

As the rain began to pour harder, Obama noticed his running mate’s stool close to the edge of the slippery stage.

"I'm gonna ask Joe to move that stool up because I don't want to have to choose another vice-president," Obama joked. "I don't want him slipping over, toppling over there."

Yes, no one would want that, would they, Barack? "Nice gaffe-prone vice presidential nominee you got here...Shame if anything should happen to him."

Nancy Pelosi announced today at a Democratic press conference long on self-aggrandizement and short on self-awareness, that the deal is done, and the text is online.

Predictably, the government we're counting on to rescue world markets with a plan crafted in one week has not been able to craft a website that can handle such an announcement.

Nonetheless, keep refreshing if you want to eventually see what these guys will be voting on.

Well, this would be welcome news.

That would be in line with the new, more fiscally conservative direction of talks today, according to the Post:

Talks also focused on a new issue: how to cover the cost of the program so taxpayers don't get stuck with the bill.

As to the "Wall Street tax," which might be implemented five years into this deal if the $700 billion isn't recovered:

Paulson and some Republican lawmakers were said to be cool to the idea, though House Republicans also have expressed serious concerns about the cost of the program and have suggested other ideas for limiting taxpayer exposure.

But whether it was finally incorporated or not, it did not seem to cramp negotiations:

"While we do believe the Congress needs to act to avert this crisis, we also believe we should not be bailing out Wall Street on the backs of American taxpayers," House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

But even staunch opponents of the emerging tax plan said they expected it to pass.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, who has refused to participate in the talks, said a "critical mass" was forming behind the measure because of fears that Congress's failure to act would cripple financial markets and devastate the economy.

Secretary Paulson's statement, delivered alongside Pelosi, Frank, Blunt, and others;

Madame Speaker, Mr. Leader, let me add to what you have said, and we begin with a very important task, a task to stabilize the markets, to protect all Americans. and do it in a way in which it protects the taxpayers to the maximum length possible. And so we've been working very hard on this, and we've made great progress toward a deal which will work and will be effective in the marketplace, and, you know, effective for all Americans. So, again, I -- you know, I thank the speaker, I thank the leader, I thank, you know, all of the leaders in the Senate and the House, and we've been working on this for a long time. want we've still got more to do to finalize it. but i think we're there, and our staffs will be working all night, and, again, so far, so good.

They're reportedly in the pen-to-paper stage right now and will work through the night. They expect they may have a written deal tomorrow, and vote Sunday or Monday, although Roy Blunt sounds slightly less sanguine than others:

Well, as you all know, House Republicans were very concerned this week we do everything we could to bring free-market principles and protections for the taxpayers to the table, and other people in these negotiations wanted to do many of those same things. We need to look and see where we are on paper tomorrow, but through the day and the evening today with...others, we were talking about how we could make these things work in a way that our conference could together. We'll be looking at the final wording of this tomorrow, talking to my colleagues, and really I'm grateful -- we're where we are. I think we are going to be able to have an announcement tomorrow, but these are difficult issues, and everybody showed lots of patience. I've been involved in the last few years in a lot of these conferences that could be pretty tense and pretty complicated. and people really showed patience in this one that got us to where we are tonight. and I'm grateful for that. and look forward to what we're going to see on paper tomorrow, and presenting these ideas to my colleagues and getting the reaction from them that we'll have in the morning and during the day tomorrow.

Update: Wow, will the new taxpayer protections be enough to change this dismal 24-percent support number? If anyone can convince the public, it's the lowest-rated Congress in history, right? Although, if the bailout plan has minimal taxpayer protection and manages to help the market, most will likely be forgiven.

Reports are coming in that a deal is on the horizon, due to a marathon negotiating session that went through much of Saturday evening and into Sunday morning:

House and Senate negotiators have reached tentative agreement on a financial rescue plan after a marathon Capitol negotiating session that started Saturday afternoon and stretched into early Sunday morning.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the deal still had to be “committed to paper,” a process that will continue throughout the night.

Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the chief Republican negotiator, said he was “looking forward to what we’re going to see on paper” but said he was optimistic that it would be something House Republicans could support.

Said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: “We’ve been working very hard on this and we’ve made great progress toward a deal which will work and will be effective in the marketplace and effective for all Americans . . . .We’ve still got a lot to do to finalize it, but I think we’re there.”

In case you're wondering what Congressional negotiators eat at a time of economic crisis, it's Cosi, which was delivered around 8 p.m. Fairly reflective of the economic hard times, though it's a step above Subway.

Limitations of executive pay, more oversight than the original Bush administration plan, and the opportunity for the government to get a kick-back from a possible turn in the market are in the agreed-upon plan. Also probably included, to grab House Republican support, a concession to the insurance idea:

To help win the support of House Republicans, the deal also likely includes an option under which Paulson and future Treasury secretaries could choose to sell companies government-backed insurance to cover securities – thereby improving their value – rather than buy the assets as initially proposed.

Earlier today, Pelosi was pushing a new "Wall Street tax" that would be implemented if taxpayers got hosed on the $700 billion:

"If after five years ... the CBO decides that the American taxpayer has lost money in this, then there would be a fee on financial institutions," Pelosi said, adding that she hoped the provision could be part of a final bailout deal.

Pelosi said that the Secretary of the Treasury could determine how to assess the fee.

And, the insurance idea was apparently gaining momentum at some point during the earlier negotiating today:

The idea of charging large financial firms fees to set up an industry-funded rescue insurance fund was gaining momentum as key House and Senate negotiators continued to meet Saturday evening to iron out the final details of a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street.

Lawmakers and staff reconvened their meeting around 7:30 p.m. EDT in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), hopeful they could broker a deal on the much anticipated but exceedingly difficult-to-negotiate legislation that would have the federal government buy up billions of dolla