As I said in an earlier post, I need to do a fair amount of travel by car for work - and often through rural areas where NPR stations just don't reach.

So let me share with you more of what I heard last week on one of my trips.

Abortion does matter on Christian radio. So let me tell you about a second program I listened to recently on SRN radio.

I need to do a fair amount of travel by car for work - and often through rural areas where NPR stations just don't reach. But rightwing and Christian stations do. Even though I am not a Christian, I actually prefer listening to the latter. There is less annoying bluster accompanying the dissemination of their views, and I get a window into what they are thinking.

So let me share with you what I heard last week on one of my trips.

At the Columbia School of Journalism last week, as he discussed his decision to ask U2's Bono to write a series of columns for the New York Times, Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal made an interesting admission. The Guardian reports (with a h/t to The Sideshow):

Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times' editorial page - conservatives. "[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer," Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn't end there. "The problem with conservative columnists," Rosenthal said, "is that many of them lie in print."

Yesterday when Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted on 7 felony counts involving corruption, two questions arose concerning the presidential election. I asked one of them: What would Sarah Palin have to say about her years of palling around with Stevens? The answer, as expected, has been that she remains mum.

The Anonymous Liberal asked the other: Why did Palin and John McCain not criticize Stevens immediately after the Stevens verdict was announced? They've tried to portray themselves as reformers who buck their own party, and here was a golden opportunity to give voters the impression that there's actual substance to that claim. And yet almost as if their campaign had no plan in place in case of a guilty verdict, yesterday McCain remained silent and Palin, who's governor of Stevens' state, just mumbled vaguely about Stevens needing to do the right thing. At a minimum, this episode reinforces the aura of incompetence and lack of serious planning that McCain's campaign has exuded all year. He always seems to be a day late and a dollar short.

The acrimony on the presidential campaign trail has reached new lows in distortions, misinformation and irresponsible racially and religiously coded attacks by pundits, campaign staffers, surrogates and the candidates themselves.

One of Sarah Palin's close political associates was found guilty today in federal court of corruption charges.

In past weeks, David Brooks has been been the excited kid in school, virtually jumping up and down in his seat, waving his hand back and forth, saying, "Ooh! Ooh! Call on Me! I know the answer! I know how to save the McCain campaign." He did it in his public broadcasting pundit turn after the presidential debate. And his column has also espoused David's brilliant solution.

But what David and other McCain advisers and wanna be advisers don't realize is that the lesson for today is the Great Depression and not the Great Society.

A week ago, in The Real Cause of Our Economic Crisis - Poor Jobs I argued that pundits who are trying to sort out how to deal with our financial crisis are overlooking a factor that is so obvious it ought to be at the top of the list. And yet it appears to be on no one's list. That factor is the poverty wages that are paid to so many US workers.

Various reports about dissension within the stumbling Republican presidential campaign continue to trickle out. Anonymous insiders are whispering to reporters that relations between John McCain and Sarah Palin are growing ever more tense because of her "rogue" behavior. The tensions between the McCain and Palin factions probably go beyond standard-fare precriminations (as the principals to an impending political disaster seek to pin the blame on each other ahead of time). Repeatedly during the last month, as the Republicans' chances of victory grew dimmer, Palin has second-guessed McCain's decisions in public and contradicted his stated positions. Whether she's complaining that McCain pulled his funds out of Michigan, or pushing to expand the campaign's over-the-top attacks against Barack Obama's character, Palin appears to be intent on positioning herself so as to deflect all blame for the upcoming defeat back onto McCain. In other words, with an eye toward bolstering her own career Palin no sooner got the VP nomination than she broke faith with a man who'd wanted to be her political mentor ("I can't wait to introduce her to Washington!").

But the really curious thing is this: Why in the world does Palin's behavior come as a surprise to McCain? Or rather: What does McCain's failure to foresee it tell us about his personal judgment?

I'd have said that, given her record in Alaskan politics, it was pretty darned obvious that she'd take the first opportunity to kick McCain to the curb.

As not much of a sports fan, I have more or less been sidelines on the hat-in-hand wealthy team owners' success at wringing many, many semolians out of cities that surely have better uses for that money. Among the best, in my humble opinion, was the San Diego team that had a just incredibly winning season that for some reason left people arguing that we all just owed it to them to build them a new stadium. And then once the deal was sealed, the owners sold off all the very expensive very good players and sunk back into mediocrity. But in a nice new stadium on someone else's dime kind of mediocrity.

Fortunately, Dennis Kucinich is on the case.

Hey, you!. Yes, I mean you, the reader of a liberal blog.

Were you aware that you helped bankroll the campaigns of Republican congressional candidates . . . even if you never donated a dime to their campaigns or to the Republican Party?

You'd think that the Palin-McCain campaign would be more cautious about playing the 6 degrees of separation card and playing it so often, given her unsavory, recent, and very close relationships.

We last took this issue up October 5, 2008 in Less than Six Degrees of Separation - Who ya been pallin' around with, Palin? That piece explored her very close ties to a number of unsavory types.

Yes, journalists really do get paid to produce tripe like this: "Perceptions of Palin Grow Increasingly Negative, Poll Says".

...public perceptions of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin have fallen dramatically since she emerged on the national political scene at the GOP convention.

Gee, you think?

A crazy story has reached its predictable outcome. Today the Republican staffer working in Pittsburgh has recanted her story that a black mugger carved a "B" in her face with a knife after taking exception to her McCain bumper sticker. She made it up.

The details were scarcely credible, and in any case I could tell immediately from my own personal expertise that her story was false. That's nothing remarkable in itself, but it does underline something about blogging that can't be emphasized too often.

Reporters working in the traditional media sometimes bring a particular expertise to the job, but that's not always the case. Many are generalists who have neither the time nor inclination to become expert in any fields. A great deal of reporting is done by people who are barely competent to weigh in on the issues in question, much less control for the biases of their informants. That's rather painfully obvious in particular with political reporting. There's a reason why political reporting tends to focus on process and image rather than substance; why as Pew reported yesterday the majority of news reports about the presidential race are framed in terms of who's winning. To reporters who don't understand much about complex issues (e.g. healthcare), or how government works, or what voters are really concerned about, it seems on the face of it much easier to focus on process. And that is partly because few reporters realize how little they understand the nuts and bolts of running a campaign.

So blogging is a communications revolution in large part because it gives people from every background a chance to contribute their expertise to the national dialogue. Traditional media reporters could not possibly replicate that range of expertise. For all their myriad faults, bloggers have vastly expanded the media's base of information and competencies.

John McCain has run a campaign that is nearly all surface and very little substance. As I commented here at the time of the Republican National Convention, for example, in their speeches neither McCain nor Sarah Palin wasted much time talking about issues or explaining what they proposed to do once in office. Instead, their campaign basically has been about manipulating public perception of their images.

That's the wider issue in the story that the RNC spent $150,000 on designer clothes for the Palins in September - a damaging fact that Sarah Palin tried rather unsuccessfully to downplay in an interview with a fawning reporter. It's also the issue in Michael Luo's report today that Palin's make-up stylist, Ami Strozzi, was paid $22,800 by the McCain campaign during the first two weeks of October, far more than McCain's top advisers and staff (whose salaries typically were in the range of $4000 for that period, with a few as high as $12,000). True, the $22K probably included the costs for make-up and lipstick, but the fact remains that these kinds of expenses are revealing about what the McCain campaign prizes.

Luo doesn't happen to mention two other strikingly large payments recorded in McCain's FEC filing posted on Thursday. In addition to a make-up stylist, Palin is accompanied on campaign by a hair stylist as well, Angela Lew. Lew was paid $10,390 on October 3 for what was described, rather laughably, as "GOTV Consulting". And on October 10, McCain paid a photograhper, Kimberlee Hewitt, $7,500 for "Media Consulting".

In other words, during a two week period McCain's campaign paid more than $40,000 to keep Sarah Palin looking good. All of that in addition to the large sums spent to buy her and her family high-couture clothing. And remember that McCain's campaign is publicly financed by taxpayers.

It's fair to say that his campaign has some pretty strange priorities.

Apparently, despite the importance of keeping our SSN's confidential, it is easier to get them in bulk than it is to find arugula or inexpensive clothing on the campaign trail.

In his recent speeches, McCain claims that he can be trusted to be president because he has been tested as a pilot aboard the USS Enterprise when the carrier was dispatched to Cuba in October of 1962. Link

Fair enough. But what exactly did that experience mean in terms of preparing him for the presidency?

At The Atlantic Joshua Green adds an important new twist to the Palin "Accessorama" story broken yesterday by Jeanne Cummings. The RNC's September filings with the FEC show that they employed a personal shopper to acquire Sarah Palin's expensive new wardrobe.

But it gets worse. The PS was one Jeff Larson, a notorious Republican operative, a protege of Karl Rove, and one of the last people McCain would want to be linked to in news stories as he tries to portray himself as a new kind of Republican reformer. Larson's firm FLS Connect was behind the infamous robocalls in South Carolina in 2000 that smeared John McCain and doomed his campaign. FLS also is responsible for the nasty robocalls smearing Obama, which are drawing such bad publicity for McCain this week.

Add to that the fact that Larson stands accused of renting an apartment in DC at a steep discount to GOP Sen. Norm Coleman. Larson's wife works in Coleman's office in Minnesota. That's one of several tawdry corruption scandals swirling around Coleman that threaten his re-election. Another allegation against Coleman: that he accepted expensive clothing as a gift from a Republican backer, businessman Nasser Kazeminy. Snazzy duds seem to be an accepted perk among a certain class of Republican office-seekers.

Anyway, the McCain campaign should have had the sense to keep a sleazy operative like Larson away from their guy or at least make sure their ties to him did not become public. And yet, the RNC uses him unnecessarily as Palin's personal shopper and then names him in an FEC filing. It's both shameless and incompetent...the twin hallmarks of the McCain campaign throughout this year.

From the start it's been apparent that Sarah Palin's chief recommendation for the job of Vice President is that she accessorizes well. Several observers have noted that on the campaign trail she wears a new, high couture outfit every day; some estimated that the cost for these clothes must run into tens of thousands of dollars and have wondered who is paying for them.

This evening The Politico's Jeanne Cummings reveals that the Republican National Committee has been picking up the tab for Palin, to the tune of $150,000 during September. No doubt the RNC is paying for all the Palins' trips to high-end stores at McCain's behest; it would have been (even more) unseemly for McCain's taxpayer-funded campaign to foot the bill for Sarah's expensive new wardrobe.

This will do serious damage to what is left of Palin's public reputation.

Interesting contrasts in the news today. First we have the slick operator, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, lord of all the financial chaos he surveys. He may not be able to foresee much of anything that would serve him in doing his job, but Bernanke can sure read the political tea leaves. Now that Barack Obama has built a formidable lead in the polls, Bernanke has decided to endorse him. The Wall Street Journal observes that Bernanke "all but submitted his job application" for 4 more years at the Fed. Funny how focused the GOP movers and shakers can become in such circs.

By contrast, however, we have this story from Fox News stating baldly, and inaccurately, that "there is overwhelming support for John McCain among U.S. troops" by a margin of 3 to 1.

Usually when reading Jake Tapper I'm reminded of the political whizbangs who surround Governor Pappy O'Daniel. Today's blogpost is remarkably obtuse even by his standards, however. Tapper commits so many basic factual errors that I feel obliged to ask: Does ABC pay him for this garbage? Or is he just a nightwatchman, say, with posting privileges and free coffee?

CBS/New York Times polled 518 people before and then a second time after the presidential debates. The results confirm that Barack Obama built substantially on his lead during the period (from 46% - 41% to 53% - 41%). His favorability among these voters increased by 10%, though John McCain was able to drive up Obama's unfavorables by almost as much. More interesting, to my mind, is how little Obama's other underlying numbers moved. The race's dynamic in the last few weeks shifted mainly because people soured on McCain and Sarah Palin. The Times notes the stark disparity now between the two tickets:

Mr. Obama’s favorability [53%] is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating [41%] is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

If we want to see anything like real transformation in Washington, we won't assume that a Democratic victory in November will achieve it. We'll have to continue to demand change from the next administration and fight for it. Joe Biden nearly admitted as much on Sunday when he asked voters to "gird [their] loins" to pitch in with a task that'll be "like cleaning the Augean Stables". Meanwhile, Barack Obama gave us a clear demonstration that the problem we'll face is a status-quo-plus during the next four years. Today Obama said he plans to make a discredited former member of the Bush administration a top adviser or even an official in his own administration. Predictable, yes, and perfectly depressing. To judge by the foreign policy advisers he has surrounded himself with, it doesn't really seem to matter how thoroughly any of Washington's hawks have been discredited by their support in the past for disastrous policies and for George W. Bush, or by events of the last 8 years. If voters want an end to all that, they're going to have to demand it. Now would be a good time to start making that known, before the policy landscape has been carved up by discredited ghosts out of the past.

Sure, the nabobs and grand poohbahs of high finance, the mortgage scammers, and all their ilk are not guiltless in the economic ruin we see all around us. And, yes, Exxon and the other oily petro-scammers are in it up to their elbows. And let us not forget the CEOs with their tight little group of back scratching compensation committees with their enormous (which for these guys is too limited a word) pay packages.

But if you really want to know what got us into this fix, it's the pathetic state of the minimum wage at the federal level and even in states that have topped up the federal minimum.

The story of contractor corruption in Iraq is a continuing shame ol’ shame ol’. The harm has been almost limitless. There is the harm to our soldiers - the very guys that McCain claims to honor the service of in debates . . . to our financial security in the US as billions are funneled into the pockets of the corrupt while harming our budget . . . to Iraqi citizens . . . to their view of the US.

Will it never end?

This NY Times profile of Cindy McCain and the McCain's marriage is one of the most thorough-going hatchet jobs I've read in an American paper.

I came away from the third debate with the conclusion that Obama was winning on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Fireside Chat factor. Consider. Who would you rather have explaining life, politics, hard times, and policies to you?

Because the public's appetite for polls during the presidential election is nearly insatiable, large numbers of unreliable surveys are cranked out by outfits that have never earned much credibility or, like Zogby, have acquired a reputation for producing junk polls. Here's one example of an unreliable swing-state poll from among many ridiculously inadequate polls that keep popping up: the Ohio Newspaper Poll conducted by the University of Cincinnati. It gives McCain a slight edge over Obama, 48% to 46%, with Obama gaining 4 points since their September poll. Several bloggers and pundits have commented on this poll on the assumption that it has merit.

As the crosstabs (PDF) show, however, the poll should have been junked.

This is such a serious election - one in which nothing less than the country's fate is at stake. So, thank God for ONN - Onion Network News. Here is a sampling of two of their recent reports, one on each candidate.

Consider the fury demonstrated at McCain rallies against Barack Obama. Consider the claim that he is unknown, with un-American attitudes, frightening. Consider why people felt so immediately comfortable with Palin, even though she has only been on the national scene for about 2 months now - while for Obama who has been a national figure since at least 2004, people claim they do not know him.

Speaking to a townhall in Venice, California this morning, Iago made his sharpest attacks yet on Cassio's integrity and truthfulness. Iago also continued to call into question his rival's experience and preparation to lead during these troubled times. And for the third day in a row, Iago cast doubt on Cassio's description of his associations with a former radical, Roderigo, who belonged to the violent Cypriot Liberation Army three decades ago. At the same time Emilia told the audience once again that Cassio was "palling around with Muslim extremists".

A blog at the Moonie-owned Washington Times has a revealing document from March 1986 showing the extremely close relationship between Charles Keating and then Representative John McCain. That was a year before McCain as a new Senator attended two meetings intended to pressure bank regulators to go easy on Keating's failing bank.

McCain wrote warmly and with deference to Keating about a small matter, and Keating scrawled his response on the letter and sent it back, showing a good deal of familiarity with McCain. In fact, Keating implied that the two of them were practically married to each other.

Today ABC reports that the NSA warrantless surveillance program is every bit as far-reaching as critics have always predicted it would turn out to be. Independently of each other, two whistleblowers from the military assigned to help with the spying since 2001 have described it as obnoxious in the extreme. The revelations will be detailed in Jim Bamford's latest book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, to be published next week. The whistleblowers say that telephone calls back home of Americans living or serving in the Middle East are listened to and recorded willy nilly - without any regard for their content or whether the victims of the spying present any sort of threat of terrorism. Among the victims of spying were military personnel stationed in Iraq, journalists, and humanitarian workers. Even intimate calls to spouses were recorded (and passed around among those monitoring them, who treated the program as if it were a lark).

On Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that he would do his utmost to obstruct anything Barack Obama might try to achieve if he's elected president. It was unnoticed by bloggers, pundits and the national media, and I owe this information to Robert in a comment here at unbossed. Graham told the Charleston Post and Courier that he would serve out another full term in the Senate because he was needed there either to help a McCain presidency or undercut an Obama administration.

Like other McCain surrogates, such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, Graham frequently praises the bipartisan efforts of Senators McCain and Graham while belittling Senator Obama's ability to build consensus across party lines. Here we see as clearly as possible why they're so convinced that Obama won't be able to work with Republicans in Congress. The GOP intend to make it impossible. It's the same scorched earth strategy, in concert with the same extremist rhetoric of demonization, that the GOP adopted in 1992 with their policy of undermining the presidency of Bill Clinton at all costs.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008, Rep. George Miller chaired a hearing on the current economic crisis and its impact on retirement security. link

One of the most startling moments during the otherwise tedious presidential debate last night has garnered surprisingly little attention. Maybe I'm easily amused but I laughed out loud at John McCain's answer to Tom Brokaw's question about whom he'd appoint to take over the vastly expanded powers of the Treasury Secretary. McCain hastily anticipated what he imagined might be Barack Obama's choice, Warren Buffett, and then bumbled around trying to avoid the pitfall of naming his economic mentor, Phil Gramm. Finally McCain came up with a nominee he'd like to put in charge of salvaging the US economy – Meg Whitman, the former CEO of the online flea-market Ebay. It's not the first time he's suggested that.

What in the world would explain such an absurd choice? Before running the flea market, Whitman worked for toy-maker Hasbro. Does McCain think American voters need to be distracted like children from the economic hard times ahead? Or will we all be reduced to hawking second-hand junk just to get through this mess? Does he now identify the "fundamentals" that are so "sound" as the American yard sale? Or is the Goldman Sachs Bailout Bill to him nothing more than a giant white elephant sale?

Inquiring minds at unbossed (at least) would like to know.

McCain called for debates - and in particular for a town hall debate format. The popular understanding is that he sees that format as one he is comfortable in and in which he does well.

But did he? Did what we saw redound to his benefit? I would say no. Here is why.

This is really obtuse:

As we saw yesterday, John McCain’s latest gambit is to juice up his and Palin’s crowds into calling Obama a "terrorist", hurling racial epithets at black reporters (presumably, there aren’t many in attendance as supporters), or just random calls for murder.

A good many other bloggers who ought to know better are parroting this nonsense as if it's self-evident that McCain set out to whip up Republican crowds into threatening violence. That's almost certainly false, I'd say, and it misleads from the real point that should concern us. The widely seen video clip of McCain's reaction, as an audience member shouts that Obama is a "terrorist", shows his momentary surprise, consternation, or maybe even alarm.

No, what's shocking about McCain's tactics is that he's unleashing forces he can't control, and he's continuing down this path even after the raw reactions of his and Sarah Palin's audiences had demonstrated clearly the dangers of this demagoguery. McCain is grabbing a wolf by the ears and doesn't care to let go.

Released to the public today - one month after its issuance - this is a GAO report that has been released not a moment too soon. But maybe months too late.

Private Equity: Recent Growth in Leveraged Buyouts Exposed Risks That Warrant Continued Attention GAO-08-885, September 9, 2008

Here are GAO's findings:

by A Siegel

T Boone Pickens continues his hard sell efforts when it comes to the flawed Pickens' Plan. Yesterday, a bipartisan group of bloggers had a teleconference with T Boone. If one listens through 'the call', several points might jump out:

1. The bloggers seem have an uneven understanding of energy issues based on their comments and questions. In fact, the "right wing" bloggers seem to have basically no knowledge of energy issues. From the "left", several of the bloggers have legitimate claims to be energy/environmental experts.

2. At the end of the day, T Boone Pickens was able to get away with half-truths and untruths in the session.

A federal court has for the second time in a little over three months delivered a stunning rebuke of the US government's justification for detaining suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay prison. The first case concerned a single Uighur prisoner, Huzaifa Parhat, who brought suit under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for a habeas-like court review of his own detention at Gitmo. Today's ruling concerns all the Uighurs held at Guantanamo.

Wall Street has greeted the new Goldman Sachs Bailout Bill by dropping like a stone, even though Henry Paulson and his Congressional play-things described the bill as must-pass legislation. But never fear. Paulson is going to have that give-away operation up and running in no time. Today he named, predictably, a former Wall Street banker to hand out the loot. Just as predictably, the lucky guy comes from Goldman Sachs. Paulson, as I've noted in the past, never concerns himself with appearances of impropriety and has surrounded himself in the Treasury Department with other Goldman Sachs executives.

The Bloomberg article neglects to mention that the former Goldman Sachs VP now in charge of the $700 billion slush fund, Neel Kashkari, is only 35 years old; that his undergraduate degree is in engineering; and that he had the wisdom, with his wife, to donate $4000 to George Bush's re-election campaign. That's worked out well for Kashkari.

Alan Maimon of the Las Vegas Review-Journal documents several instances where John McCain has behaved abusively toward people, especially in Arizona. In particular, he found evidence that McCain had lied when he denied threatening to get a federal employee fired if he did not bend to McCain's will. Such threats are illegal.

Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano of the LA Times have examined unclassified military records concerning John McCain's multiple crashes while he was a naval aviator. It could hardly be clearer that McCain was known as a reckless pilot; he admits that he was clowning around and "flying too low" over Spain in 1961 when he flew into electrical wires. But the thing that stands out the most are the false excuses he gave for two incidents, which McCain blamed on mechanical malfunctions. In each case, investigators subsequently rejected McCain's story. Lying to military investigators is arguably an even more serious offense than screwing around with expensive aircraft. The Times deserves credit for exposing McCain's record.

He was able to get away with such behavior and retain his wings because, as a son and grandson of admirals, he led a charmed life in the Navy. Even as a midshipman at the Naval Academy, the rules simply didn't apply.

When it comes to traditional conservative values, I top the charts. I am fiscally conservative. I am concerned about my community and involved in its improvement. I care for my family, and I take care of my family. I attend my house of worship regularly and read and study the Bible. I am also a strong supporter of a culture of life. For all these reasons I support the Democratic Party. If you also subscribe to these values, I hope you will too.

Open CRS has posted several new studies that are relevant to the recent problems in the US economy. These are reports provided by the "Congressional Research Service, a 'think tank' that provides reports to members of Congress". Normally they are not made public. These reports bear dates of September 29 and examine financial crises in various countries as a way of providing instruction in the current crisis.

On Saturday I remarked that John McCain's apparent decision to try to smear Barack Obama by linking him to controversial Chicagoans (such as William Ayers) would backfire because it...

...practically invites Obama to respond by raising an issue he has so far assiduously avoided: John and Cindy McCain's close association with the late felon Charles Keating. Keating is the elephant in the room neither campaign wants to mention.

Sarah Palin's repeated attacks this weekend on Obama for "palling around with terrorists" have shown that McCain is indeed turning to the tactic of guilt-by-association. And just as predicted, the Obama campaign announced that on Monday it will respond by making an issue of John McCain's part in the Keating Five scandal.

Sarah Palin in a speech at a tennis stadium in southern California disclosed the existence of a heretofore unknown circle of hell. It houses women who don't support her.

In another rarity for a major party national candidate, Palin discussed a quotation she found on a cup of coffee from Starbucks Friday by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a Democrat who served in the Clinton Administration.

" `There's a place hell reserved for women who don't support other women,' " Palin quoted. "Let's see how that comment is turned into whatever it's turned into in tomorrow's papers."

That's Divine Comedy gold.

The Columbus Dispatch has the largest poll in Ohio. Today's Dispatch survey of more than 2,200 Ohians shows Obama suddenly breaking far ahead of McCain, 49% to 42%. To judge by the internals, it's more than simply a remarkable improvement in a race where until now Obama has struggled just to keep up with McCain. Obama's support in Ohio is unusually broad and there's still room for improvement. Together with McCain's withdrawal from campaigning in Michigan, this promises to be a game changer. McCain cannot realistically hope to win without winning Ohio. And not only has early voting already begun in Ohio, but all this week there's a window in which people can simultaneously register to vote and cast their vote. Both things are expected to help Democrats to bank an unusually large numbers of votes that they might not have been able to count upon otherwise on Election Day.

It takes a certain level of desperation for the McCain campaign to rush into a campaign that suggests we should be concerned about unsavory people who have passed through the periphery of the lives of our candidates. Just how many degrees of separation are enough for a relationship to matter?

Judging by Sarah's standards, she can only lose at that tactic and lose big, given her very close relationships with violent secessionists and indicted felons.

I'd like to highlight something that somehow has eluded notice in the wake of the hyper-scrutinized vice-presidential debate. Two candidates in these debates have exceeded the public's expectations of them, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Obama gained considerably in the polls as a result, whereas Palin got virtually no bounce. That has to do with how the two campaigns played the expectations game.

The McCain campaign is shifting entirely to negative advertising. In fact, McCain is so desperate that he's going to resume trying to tar Obama by linking him to more controversial Chicagoans, including people like William Ayres who are little more than acquaintances. It's not just that this tactic has sputtered out in the past, and holds little chance of success anyway when so many voters are worried about the economy and other serious issues. That would be indication enough that McCain is at a loss about how to turn his campaign around.

More remarkably, the new tactic practically invites Obama to respond by raising an issue he has so far assiduously avoided: John and Cindy McCain's close association with the late felon Charles Keating. Keating is the elephant in the room neither campaign wants to mention. If Obama decides it's finally time to remind voters about McCain's record in the Keating Five scandal, McCain will probably lose his cool once and for all and in any case it torpedoes his elaborate self-presentation as a maverick reformer.

by A Siegel

If we are going to take serious steps to change our reckless drive over the cliffs, in a sad version of Thelma & Louise but in a belching hummer rather than sexy convertible, we have to get serious about facts. And, well, the fact is that "Clean Coal" is not fact , it is powerpoint slides, promises, and 10s (probably 100s) of millions of dollars of advertising and influence efforts.

In a more honest world, it might be called "Somewhat Less Deadly Coal".

Does CNN have even the slightest idea what it's reporting here? For that matter do the people running Global Language Monitor, whom CNN relies upon, understand the 'research' they're doing? It's hard to shake the feeling that ignoramuses are getting paid good money to churn out this kind of junk.

Doubly ironic then that both of the reports linked to above seem to imply that Sarah Palin showed more intelligence in her speech patterns during the vice presidential debate than Joe Biden did. And here you thought her gibberish and cutesy patter marked Palin pretty definitely as a dope. You betcha.

In an overview of Sarah Palin's tax returns for 2006 and 2007, which she has finally released, the Associated Press reports that Palin neglected to pay the taxes due on $17,000 she received in per diem payments as Governor of Alaska. A McCain campaign official claims, falsely, that Palin owed no taxes on those payments.

The Pooch Cafe blog features a nice debate - apparently - between the local Catholic and Presbyterian Churches over whether dogs go to heaven.

This evening CBS aired another cringe-inducing interview segment with Sarah Palin. There's not even a hint of thoughtfulness on display. Asked what the worst thing the current Vice President has done, Palin replied it was his duck [sic] hunting accident. Truly. A man who pushed for a disastrous and unnecessary war, who promotes torture, who's been behind any number of illegal and unconstitutional policies to aggrandize the Executive branch - and the worst thing one associates with him is a hunting accident?

Worst thing I guess that would have been the duck hunting accident--where you know, that was an accident. And I think that was made into a caricature of him. And that was kind of unfortunate.

Another gaffe from the Palin campaign today as they try to puff up her virtually non-existent credentials in foreign policy. Her aides claimed falsely that she has met with Britain's ambassador to the US, Nigel Sheinwald. The error is pretty revealing about her campaign's methods at inflating her resume. Sheinwald's name was posted on a list of attendees at a governors' conference Palin took part in this summer. However Sheinwald never made it to the conference. It looks like Palin's staff just went trawling through records looking for foreign officials she might plausibly claim to have met.

Cross-posted from Daily Kos

Several senators reportedly are using "secret holds" to block passage of anti-corruption legislation that activists, concerned citizens and more enlightened members of Congress have been working for eight years to pass into law. The identities of the stonewallers are uncertain, but suspects include eight Republicans and the Senate Minority Leader (names provided below the fold. (UPDATE: the suspects have been reduced to three based on a fantastic public response!)

A bipartisan group of Senate offices has agreed on a reconciliation bill that they are hoping to pass and send to the House of Representatives for final passage. The bill is critical to restoring integrity and fiscal responsibility in our federal government and previous votes indicate that the bill would pass with flying colors - but only if it could be presented for a vote before Congress leaves at the end of the week.

Is it curtains for John McCain? In almost every respect his campaign is contracting inward and on the defensive. He has tried all summer to remain on the offensive, or at least to appear to be, and I've no doubt he'll lash back hard at Obama if his support continues to crumble. But his attacks will come from an almost untenable position.

The New York Times publishes several questions that various contributors suggest ought to be asked of the vice presidential candidates this evening. A few of the suggestions are quite good. For example, Mike Doogan, a representative in the Alaskan legislature, asks Sarah Palin how she proposes to work with Democrats in Congress after a campaign in which she has done nothing but deride Democrats. Author Gene Healy asks what the candidates' views are about the constitutional status of the vice president, given Dick Cheney's anomalous interpretation that the VP's office is a fourth branch of government.

But on the whole, they're not very successful as questions that might get to the heart of the candidates' views and knowledge about the central issues of our times. Below the fold, I've proposed a series of 24 questions that I think would do that somewhat more successfully. In fact, most are questions that would be appropriate for the presidential candidates as well. No doubt readers can think of other and perhaps better questions to suggest.

I don't suppose for a moment that moderators at these debates need advice. But on the chance that they might entertain suggestions from voters, blogtopia is as good a place as any to put them forward.

Among GAO's continuing outpouring of reports are two that focus on Department of Defense expenditures. Yep! Another week, another scathing GAO report on DOD's practices.

This evening CBS aired some interviews with Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin. Palin's comments are especially inept. Hilariously, she showed so little understanding of the politics of the Supreme Court that after discussing why she's opposed to Roe v. Wade, Palin said she agrees that there's a constitutional right to privacy. In fact, she was emphatic that there's a right to privacy.

I wonder: Would women new reporters being playing such a prominent role had it not been for the Republican Veep candidate? And I also wonder: What must be going through the minds of Katie Couric and Gwen Ifill.

During the past week I've been mildly amused at the consternation expressed by so many pundits that the public overwhelmingly and quickly identified Obama the winner of the first presidential debate.

Eight months ago, Kansas was one of the battle ground states in the fight to prevent the public from knowing how their milk is produced. link After estivating a few months, the issue is back. The public hearing on this proposed legislation will be conducted at 10 a.m. Tuesday, December 2. Details below.

Evidently the McCain campaign decided that it could distract attention from all the stinkers being generated by Sarah Palin if it serves them to the public on toast. And on cue, some in the media have begun to dish it in advance of the vice presidential debate. We're assured that Palin is a formidable debater because she projects enough confidence to make up for a lack of expertise. Democrats are being warned that they underestimate her at their own risk. Yet simultaneously, by a strange coincidence, Joe Biden is being warned from all sides not to show Palin up too much.

Set aside the spin. The truth is so apparent that even some Republicans have had to speak it. Palin talks gibberish about issues.