by A Siegel - posted with permission

For much of this year, the US Chamber of Commerce has been engaged in a public campaign related to energy issues. Early in the year, the Chamber aligned themselves with the National Association of Manufacturing in battling against any meaningful action on global warming, including running ads against action strongly reminiscent of the infamous Harry and Louise anti-health care advertising. In mid-2008, the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, under the direction of General James Jones, USMC (retired) began to take a more prominent role in energy discussions.

To put it simply, the USCOC's 21st Century Energy's work lays out a path and recommendations that are recklessly dangerous in the face of the energy, financial, and global warming perfect storm.

A week after voters had repudiated him for the second election in a row, George W. Bush was interviewed by his sister, Doro, on behalf of StoryCorps. The subject was Bush's legacy as president. The White House has now selected and posted some excerpts of the more interesting, or possibly coherent, parts of the interview. This apparently is George Bush at his most reflective.

The other day during the local news broadcast on the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia, the weather forecast dwelt lovingly on the conditions that would prevail today at each of the major shopping malls in the region, in turn. I kid you not.

Meanwhile at a sanctuary of Mammon on Long Island, the traditional throng of early-morning worshippers has led to disaster.

Paul Krugman talks of economists' dismay that they didn't foresee the impending collapse of US financial institutions. The truth is, however, that it was foreseen by people who hadn't taken leave of their senses.

Some people say that the current crisis is unprecedented, but the truth is that there were plenty of precedents, some of them of very recent vintage. Yet these precedents were ignored.

Just as regularly occurs every generation, an irrational exuberance brought with it complacency. Whether it was deregulation, or the housing bubble, or the mortgage Ponzi scheme built upon it, or the substitution of leveraging for reserves, or the ability of the Federal Reserve to act as a firewall, or the supposed "resilience" of the financial system – financial wise guys saw only what they wanted to see. Whatever evidence didn't fit into their complacent view of unlimited horizons of wealth, got ignored or dismissed.

Second of the issues often complained about is NLRB delay. So lets take a look at the facts. Part 1 is here.

It is disheartening to hear many in labor claim that unions would be better off without the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). I’ve been shouted at by more union representatives than I could shake a stick at – if I were the sort of person who shook sticks at people. But let me give a few reasons why I think this position needs to be reconsidered. I am not asking those who feel strongly about this issue to have a complete change of heart. What I am asking for is a reality check on some of the charges made against the NLRA and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). I’m going to talk about charges of delay (in part two) and imagining what life would be like for unions without the NLRA here.

[This gracious essay by shirah was published at unbossed on Thanksgiving three years ago. In that long ago time I wasn't even aware of 'Fort Ancient', and perhaps some of you still have never seen this thoughtful tribute to the people who made us who we are.]

Some may call me a self-made person. They’ll tell me I should be proud I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. And maybe I could feel that way about myself, but I’d be a liar, if I did. The only way I could feel that way would be if I were blind.

This is as good a demonstration as you could want of what is wrong with French cinema. It's a newly compiled list of the 100 best movies of all time, drawn up by 76 French film critics for the Cahiers du Cinéma. The result is about as random a collection of movies as you could imagine being published.

It tends to favor European, especially French pictures. Yet it's not remotely as parochial as the (moronic) list compiled in 1998 by the American Film Institute. So the Cahiers list doesn't even have national pride as an organizing principle. Indeed, the inclusions and exclusions of French pictures seem pretty arbitrary. Three Godards but only a single Becker? C'mon. Is there anybody who'd take Pierrot le Fou in preference to Grisbi?

It feels like a core of brilliance has been surrounded with a menagerie of stray bits and bobs, as if far too little thought was put into what the goal was and how to achieve it. In that sense, it's a splendid representation of so much modern French film-making.

In the Wall Street Journal today James Conway, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, makes a contribution to the Not News file:

"Al Qaeda's Focus Is Pakistan, U.S. Senior Commander Says"

Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, offers appallingly bad advice about what to do in regard to "the Bush administration's harsh, abusive and illegal interrogation program". His solution: Let whatever investigations now going on run their course and then forget the whole matter. No Congressional hearings, no special commission, no DOJ task force, no special prosecutor. Just wind down the pitiful few investigations that have occurred, publish some of the documents they turn up, but make sure to turn the lights off when you're done.

The main reason that law-breakers should not be prosecuted, in his estimation, is that the people involved won't take it well. They're already quite unhappy at the prospect of being held accountable, you see, given that they were just following orders.

Kevin Hayden posts another in his series of interviews with attorneys representing Guantanamo prisoners, this time with Buz Eisenberg. Like the others, it's a must read for all who'd like to know what's actually involved in George Bush's detention and interrogation policies. The defense lawyers have all manner of shocking information that never seems to make its way into the traditional media's accounts of what transpires at Gitmo (and other prisons in the spiderweb).

In this interview, Eisenberg passes along a striking letter written one month ago by another attorney, Sabin Willett. In it Willett asks that the US government begin to treat his clients with a modicum of dignity now that a federal court has ordered their release.

The FDA just can't get its story straight on how much melamine is in the U.S. food supply and how much of a threat it poses to Americans. According to the Associated Press, the FDA has been sitting on test results that reveal low levels of melamine in infant formula produced by U.S. companies. Melamine contamination of milk produced in China caused the deaths of four Chinese infants and hospitalized more than 50,000 infants.

I wonder if this good news will help to convince some Democrats that hard-nosed advocacy is more effective than silent hand-wringing or wishful thinking or worst of all, mere cheerleading for Democratic rule? That demanding reform is a mark of loyalty to their principles, rather than an embrace of the opposite? That the time to raise one's voice is before, not after, disastrous 'compromises' have been set in stone? That Democratic politicians respond to pressure, not to its absence?

John Brennan, the deputy to George Tenet when the CIA was forging and implementing an array of illegal practices including the Bush administration's torture regime, a man who has since then defended and justified Bush's rendition, detention, and interrogation policies, was being widely touted as a likely choice to head the CIA under Barack Obama. This and several other liberal blogs decried the possibility, arguing that the next administration needed to break with the past and be seen to be doing so. And voila. Today Brennan announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for any intelligence posts in the next administration because of the opposition he has aroused. He did not want to be a distraction, he said.

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics consider torture.

No doubt by now you've seen the reports that say New Orleans is the city with the highest crime rate in America, with 19,000 reported crimes in 2007 according to FBI statistics. Among large cities, the three with the worst crime rates reportedly were Detroit, Baltimore, and Memphis, in that order.

Proverbial damned lies and statistics. These rankings are calculated based on just 6 categories of crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft). Hence they neglect most categories of crime and in particular many of the most severe kinds of criminal activity. If these were included, one city would stand head and shoulders above the others in its single-minded devotion to criminal enterprises: Washington, DC.

What sorts of major crimes have been excluded from consideration? For starters, all manner of war crimes – things like invading a sovereign country without justification and then neglecting its internal security, killing or driving into exile millions in the process. That's a criminal enterprise on a vast scale, isn't it? All of it headquartered in Washington.

But that's just the beginning of the list, whose outer limits are unknown and probably unquantifiable.

crossposted by permission of gjohnsit

39 years ago the first UnThanksgiving Day happened.

Oh, it wasn't called that then. Nor was it called that the following year. You see, it wasn't about Thanksgiving at all. It was about the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and federal policy for native Americans.

What follows is a post written in the week after the election. Because it concerns an anomaly in election results that were then provisional, I delayed publishing it. As it turned out, the final results erased that anomaly – but in a way that suggests my original concerns may have been on target. An update at the end explains what I mean by that.

Are you certain that your vote was recorded and counted properly on November 4? If you live in Pennsylvania your answer may be "not at all".

On primary day in April, I happened to hear a poll worker comment that the Diebold AccuVote TSx machines at our precinct in Lehigh County (PA) aren't very credible. So I asked whether she trusted paperless DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines. She didn't. As it turned out neither did any of the other poll workers there - nor the other voters waiting in line. Nobody seems to trust them. That in itself is reason enough to get rid of these damnable black box systems. Without trust, what is left of democracy?

Ultimately there's no way of knowing whether those machines counted votes accurately in the April primary, or whether those votes were tabulated correctly. The very technology makes accountability impossible. As if that's not bad enough, the (ironically named) AccuVote has a history of flawed performance. What's more it can be hacked rather easily.

In fact, I see evidence that on Election Day one or more of these touch-screen machines in a local precinct may have failed to record as many as a few hundred votes in the presidential race.

Just about three years ago, Secretary of Labor Chao was crowing that the Department of Labor was the first government agency to have gotten all green on their No Federal Agency Left Behind report cards - and that the way DOL had clawed its way to the top was by privatizing DOL employee’s jobs.

But as it turns out . . . the picture in DOL privation land is not especially rosy . . . when the truth comes out . . . as it often does when the Government Accountability Office starts checking into things.

Over and over the Bush administration has been caught engaging in illegal domestic propaganda. To generate public support for the invasion of Iraq, they paid retired military officers to repeat administration talking points as pundits on TV. They paid newspaper columnists to parrot administration policy positions. They distributed free fake "news reports" to local TV and radio stations. All of it covert domestic propaganda, all of it patently illegal however much the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel doth protest.

Now we learn of another element in this propaganda machine (h/t). A program manager at a right-wing talk radio station in Milwaukee, Dan Shelley, reveals that the Bush White House sent out propaganda daily to talk-radio contacts. That's entirely and sadly predictable, as well as illegal.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is unhappy about losing the first two Guantanamo habeas corpus reviews. Yesterday's defeat was especially galling because the judge responsible for saying that the government's evidence against the prisoners was garbage, Richard Leon, is himself a reliable Republican partisan. In fact Leon's on record as being opposed to giving habeas review to Gitmo prisoners at all. Things must look pretty bleak for the Bush administration's Cuban dungeon policy when they're losing cases even before staunch national-security ideologues.

So today in the Republican propaganda flagship, the Wall Street Journal, Mukasey issued a call to action. Congress, he believes, needs to act quickly to pull Bush's ashes out of the fire. Otherwise courts will continue to interpret literally the Supreme Court's ruling (Boumediene v Bush) that Gitmo prisoners may appeal for their release – by actually releasing those prisoners!

Of course Mukasey's opinion is essentially worthless. He's the man who still can't determine whether waterboarding constitutes torture, and doesn't care to find out. But what is he up to in this op-ed?

Today the Bush administration suffered its fourth major defeat since June in litigation over detentions at Guantanamo. This ruling by US District Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, is the most devastating yet. He'd been expected to favor the government, not least because in 2005 Leon had ruled that the detainees have no habeas rights. And these are not low-profile prisoners. In his 2002 State of the Union address, George Bush had accused them of planning to bomb the US embassy building in Sarajevo. (As with other such garish accusations, the Bush administration subsequently and very quietly changed its allegations to something considerably more mundane – planning to fight in Afghanistan.)

Yet Leon rejected the administration's argument that five Algerian nationals formerly resident in Bosnia are enemy combatants and ordered their release "forthwith".

Health insurers have announced that they'll support a new requirement that they must accept all applicants, including those who are ill or disabled, as long as everybody is required to purchase health insurance. In other words, while acknowledging the intense public pressure for real health care reform, they're advancing a scheme to insure universal employment for health insurers.

The insurers do not however support a flat rate for both healthy and sick applicants - without which their apparent concession really is just another ploy coming out of the industry's bottomless bag of tricks.

So, you might think, who better to carry water for agriculture on the Obama transition team than a George Washington University Research Professor in the Department of Health Policy? Someone with past appointments at USDA and the FDA? Someone with think tank experience.

Oh, yes, and someone who was Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Corporation.

How many have waited for how long to read that headline.

There's truth in the old saying that bad coinage chases out the good. When mediocre coinage gets passed off so easily that it becomes current, all the rest becomes debased down to a level with the worst. Very quickly people attach no particular value to what ought to be the more authentic specie.

Historical writings are subject to similar forces. What turns out to be popular and widely accepted very often is nearly the flimsiest stuff around. If they're not actually counterfeit or hollow, popular histories may have the thinnest veneer of authentic learning applied over a core of semi-useless junk. The better histories, though hoarded by specialists, get undervalued and therefore pushed aside from public discourse. Undeterred by norms of accountability, myriad hackers churn out junk history at a phenomenal rate and thus pull the market standard down to their level.

So I wish good luck to Matthew Pinsker as he attempts to reverse the sudden devaluation of the histories of Abraham Lincoln's administration.

On October 18, 2008, unbossed reviewed congressional testimony on corruption in Iraq that reaches well into the al-Maliki government and has meant that billions of US dollars has been lost.

Yesterday the New York Times report in Premier of Iraq Is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors reported on events related to the testimony at that hearing.

Historians and political scientists argue endlessly about the merits of their disciplines. Each side claims to be empirically-based while challenging the usefulness of the other's methods and approaches. But the difference between political science and history can be summed it more easily, it seems. Historians recognize the futility of playing with counter-factual history.

At the New Republic political scientist David W. Rohde (not the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter at the NYT) would have us believe that John Kerry's defeat in 2004 was "the luckiest break" the Democrats have caught in more than 40 years. Had the Democrats not lost that election, Rohde claims, they would have been dragged under by the quagmire of the succeeding four years. It's as if Democrats have no real ability to chart a new course.

To find a vocal critic of the Bush administration's torture regime stumbling around while discussing its components is a little disconcerting. It confirms what I've long suspected - that even as bits of the torture program have been exposed little by little, the Bush administration managed never the less to sow confusion over those revelations. People really need to sort this out before the Obama administration comes to grip with its predecessor's vile record.

Either Barack Obama will show strength by adopting the core of Bush's policy regarding the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and continue to detain them without trial, or the next president will give in to political pressure from crazy civil libertarians, release known terrorists and endanger the US.

That's the message of much of the commentary on Gitmo churned out in the traditional media since the election, including this NYT report by William Glaberson. It has relied not so much on the staunchest critics of Bush's detention and torture policies – no surprise that - but instead on Washington establishment types with axes to grind or interests to protect. Their notion is that, while Obama remains most malleable, he needs to be gulled into thinking that the central issues concern political leadership and the need to protect America from dangerous terrorists.

They don't. The central issue is whether to restore the rule of law. Much to their regret, that's not a very complicated issue.

So who would be about the worst person the Obama administration could be talking to about heading the U.S. Department of Agriculture? Besides the CEO of Monsanto? How about PA Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff? The Dennis Wolff otherwise known as the Monsanto shill who approved a stealth milk labeling ban last year to help out his buddies at Monsanto?

"Couldn’t be!" You say? Think again!!

The ways some folks talk you would think that the National Labor Relations Board was headed by Satan and that the National Labor Relations Act was written by satanic hordes out to destroy workers. So let's see what this spawn of the damned was up to this past fiscal year. Then you can decide: Spawn of Satan or Agency trying to do its job of protecting worker rights to organize and bargain collectively?

Sarah Palin today:

Speaking at her first formal news conference before the national media since the GOP presidential ticket lost last week, the former vice presidential nominee argued that her fellow Republican governors "don't let obsessive, extreme partisanship ... get in the way of doing what's right."

Senate Democrats may have decided finally that Joe Lieberman (CT - Connecticut-for-Lieberman), who still caucuses with Democrats, needs to pay a heavy penalty. There's organized opposition however to taking away Lieberman's highly coveted chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“The message here is that we don’t want to start off a new era with retribution.”

We tend to think of AARP as representing the interests of retirees, though they start their recruitment campaigns when you are in your 50s. If anything should have disabused us of their role with regard to retirees it was their support for the very expensive and very flawed Medicare Part D program that saw many people with higher costs and far less coverage than they had been led to believe.

Now, the AARP is the subject of an investigation into other practices harmful to the well being of our older citizens.

Yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, according to our Prez and Wall Street Insiders, the answer to the current recession is to get rid of those pesky regulations that have prevented us from having full freedom of the market. The drums are beating to continue on with the Bush Free Market agenda. The Administration continues to make stealth changes via hidden and recondite regulations.

We are now a couple years into Medicare Part D. And to observe that auspicious date, it is time for an Inspector General’s report to assess how well the plan is doing at ensuring those covered by Medicare are receiving value for money and that the program has lowered health care costs.

The new report finds . . . . serious problems in oversight and accountability. What? You actually expected there to be a Bush Administration agency that could actually do its work properly, including oversight of private contractors?

Here is a lightly revised version of a piece published two years ago on Veterans' Day.

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

You'd see me with my puffy, petulant face,

Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

Reading the Roll of Honour. 'Poor young chap,

'I'd say --- 'I used to know his father well;

Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'

And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

I'd toddle safely home and die --- in bed.

-Seigfreid Sassoon, WWI vet

Armistice Day, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, Poppy Day: Name changes should never efface the memory of the terrible origins of this holiday. November 11 marks the armistice in World War One, a pointless conflict that was allowed to drag on for years because of its very pointlessness. Leaders saw no advantage to themselves in acknowledging the stupidity of the war by calling it off. Instead, they preferred to keep expanding it.

Just a brief summary.

Votes continue to be counted and thus states have not released figures for the turnout for this election. Yet we see analyses like this one at Politico asserting confidently that turnout was no higher than in 2004. The point is to call into question the success of the Obama campaign's strategy to increase voter participation.

The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama's popularity.

The argument is based on a painfully obvious fallacy, however.

That might seem to be the mantrum of our oil and gas companies. It was a poorly kept secret - but one completely ignored by some - that there are lots and lots of oil and gas leases out there owned by groups that are doing nothing to use those rights. Meanwhile, the industry as a whole has been whining that they MUST be able to drill off our coasts. Not that they plan to drill there. They just want to be able to drill there.

But it doesn't have to be that way. And we all could be better off if changes in leasing were made, according to a new GAO report. GAO finds that proven incentives to make use of the rights they have are available.

Good question! I mean, a really, really, really good question. Are you sure you want to know the answer, though?

The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report - which covers 2007 - finds that women’s pay is now 80% that of men, up from 62% in 1979 when the BLS first began collecting this data. An 18 percentage point rise over 28 years comes to slightly more than 1/2% increase per year. You haven’t come a long way, Baby. It’s just been a long way.

I am going to assume that spammers have a theory about who we are and what we want, and they use that theory to get us to click through, reply, link to or download a virus, or otherwise do what they want us to do.

So, given that assumption, let me review who they seem to think I am.

This evening James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action sent out a fundraising email to members that likened the victories of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in Tuesday's election to the Nazi bombing of England during World War II. The author of this vile letter is Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Focus on the Family Action. It was nearly inevitable that anger over losing the 2008 election would soon provoke right-wing extremists to violate Godwin's Law. Obama's victory in Colorado may have been particularly galling for the Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family, which has been heavily involved in the political campaign this year advocating for conservative issues. James Dobson personally endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket this fall.

Among the conventional wisdoms two years ago was the conventional wisdom that, in order to win, the Democratic primaries must end as early as possible. This would give the frontrunner plenty of time to raise money, get ready for the big push for November, etc etc.

As part of this conventional wisdom and as a result of this conventional wisdom, states started leapfrogging over one another to get first in the primary line or closer to the front of the line, even, as in the cases of Michigan and Florida, at the risk of losing delegates.

While this argument for an early end to the primaries was going on, I argued that this was a crazy strategy. Here is why I was telling you so. And now that we have seen a long primary season come to a successful end - heck, an astoundingly successful end - it's worth considering again why the strategy argued for by the conventional wisdom was wrong.

smintheus recounted serious problems at the polling place where he worked on election day. His seemed to be the result of deliberate malice. I too experienced seriously problems where I worked many, many miles away. These were problems that meant that nearly 10% of voters may have been disenfranchised. They were not caused by malice but, rather, by poor training and sheer incompetence.

And I heard of similar happenings all over my area and even though we had huge numbers of voter protection volunteers.

If we want high quality elections - or even if we just want to avoid bad things happening at the polls - then we need to take responsibility.

I've been working this morning at a rural polling place in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania. Old hands say that turnout is the highest they've ever seen. For about two hours, the line extended to some hundred voters. That's remarkable for such a small town.

The problem was that the line simply wasn't moving for more than an hour. Eventually some voters came out and explained that a worker was screwing up the voting procedures. Whether deliberately or not, she'd shown up (nattily attired) mid-morning and began assigning multiple people to the same machines, sowing chaos as it were. The voters said she told people she was "working for the Republicans". After the line had ground to a halt for about an hour, the constable stepped in and told her to get out of the way. The trouble-maker raised a fuss, declaring that she was going to call her lawyer, but eventually someone else took charge of assigning machines and the line began to move again.

I have to wonder whether this came out of the GOP's 2008 bag of tricks. Every cycle there seem to be new stunts the national party devises to frustrate voters in ways that few could predict. In 2004, for example, we received calls on Election Day from the George Bush re-election campaign that attempted to send us to the wrong polling place in another town altogether. If voters cast a provisional ballot at the wrong polling place, the idea evidently was, then it would not be counted; hence mission accomplished, a Democratic vote nullified. The Lehigh County (PA) Clerk of Elections told me that she'd received hundreds of complaints that day about exactly the same stunt, all of them connected to the Bush campaign. Clearly something that was cooked up on the sly by the national party.

Is today's episode was an isolated incident of incompetence, or part of a national strategy to slow down the voting process and manufacture long lines?

It's a classic question to ask voters in a presidential election: Are you better off now than you were 4 (or 8) years ago?

Usually voters understand that to mean "better off economically", and this year even before the country's precipitous financial meltdown voters resoundingly were saying "no". A Pew poll in April found that "fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they're moving forward in life". They're right. Since 2000 and 2007 the median household income in the US actually declined slightly (in terms of 2007 dollars).

The question cuts against John McCain. Consistently this fall, voters who feel insecure financially have favored Barack Obama over McCain. It's an especially awkward question for Republicans because the vast majority of swing states have seen a decline in the median household income under George W. Bush.

On the very eve of the presidential election, George Bush & Co. finally got to unveil a conviction of somebody accused of having at least some role in the September 11, 2001 attack. They've spent years paying little attention to Bin Laden himself and doing nothing to charge the hundreds of alleged terrorists they've locked up without trial at Guantanamo Bay - and in who knows how many other secret prisons around the world.

But as the election approached, almost miraculously, they've been able to ramp up the (unconstitutional) Military Commissions in order to generate some fizz for the electorate.

In as much as the massive early voting in Colorado seems to be going heavily for Barack Obama, it seems very likely he'll win that state. Thus unless John McCain can win Pennsylvania, there's almost no chance he can reach 270 electoral votes. McCain has been acting as if he's positioned to win in PA, but then how could he do otherwise? Democrats who've caught a sudden case of the jitters ought to take a close look at the latest polls from PA, the most credible of which give Obama a 6 to 8 point lead in the state.

One of the issues related to tax rates that most Americans probably do not understand is how the McCain health care plan would work.

To understand its impact, you need to know how taxes affect our current medical care system.

To hear the Republicans tell it, Barack Obama’s tax plan will involve jackbooted thugs looting every dime our small business people earn, destroying jobs all in the name of transferring that wealth to the . . . well, we’re not certain who would get it. The story stops with hurting small businesses.

But when you look at realities of Obama’s plan it comes down to paying $4.60 more tax per each $100 over $350,000 earned. Yep, that’s what John McCain and his mendacious Fellow Travelers are raising a fuss about.

Now if that is socialism, it’s a socialism that we’ve had more of under the past century’s Republican presidents.

McCain and the Republican Party in general seem to think that calling Obama a Socialist and accusing him of wanting to “spread the wealth” around are winning tactics. But according to a new Gallup Poll, that is exactly what a large majority of Americans want.

Despite John McCain's earlier declaration that he would not make a political issue of Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, the Pennsylvania GOP as well as a Republican 527 group have started to run TV ads in PA using Wright to bash Obama.

What's notably absent from the ads are any references at all to John McCain's embrace of a surprising number of hate-filled pastors, televangelists with a national audience, whom only a few years ago McCain described as "agents of intolerance".

A CBS poll finds that approximately 20% of voters have already cast their votes, and that among these early voters Obama leads 57% to 38%. Around 49% of early voters are Democrats, 30% are Republicans. That seems in line with the partial results being tabulated here for early voting state by state. Everywhere that statistics are available with voters' party ID, the Dems are ahead of Republicans in pre-Election-Day turnout.

At the WaPo blog, Jennifer Agiesta writes that McCain's task now is to make up a 9 point deficit (the WaPo-ABC tracking poll puts Obama ahead 53% to 44%) during the next 56 hours before Election Day. Some other polls make the gap larger. CBS for example gives Obama a 13% lead among all likely voters.

In any case, McCain's problem is much graver than a 9% deficit if he does trail Obama by about 19% among the one-fifth of voters who've already voted. It means - even if the final turnout reaches as high as 80% - that McCain will need to win the remaining voters by a margin of at least 6% if he's to come close to Obama's popular vote total.

The scariest thing about right blogtopia is that it's increasingly difficult to differentiate clearly between its personnel with their peculiar "ideas" and perky obsessions, and those of mainstream Republican elites in Washington DC. Not long ago the GOP adapted itself with alacrity to its new spectrum of nutty radio ranters, so perhaps its not surprising now to find someone as debased as blogger Michael Goldfarb acting as a spokesman for the Republican presidential candidate. The real question is how quickly the worst elements of rightopia will be melded into what's left of the bastions of Republican power, and how low together they will stoop.

The Associated Press reports that two federal officials anonymously and illegally revealed confidential information about one of Barack Obama's half-sisters from Kenya, Zeituni Onyango. The sister has been living in Boston for several years. The officials told the AP late on Friday that Onyango applied for asylum and that her application was denied by an immigration judge. It's illegal to reveal information about asylum applications without the permission of the applicant.

Thus federal officials rifled through confidential files and then leaked information about them to the AP. The intent clearly was to embarrass Obama shortly before the election. It's reminiscent of Passportgate, the October 1992 scandal in which the elder Bush's administration rifled confidential files for Bill Clinton and his mother, and then leaked to the press various innuendo and smears regarding Bush's rival.

It is no secret that the Bush Administration is no friend of science or the reality-based world of facts. It’s about, way, way more than fudging the facts on climate change. It’s about destroying the core mission of many government agencies and about silencing those who have spoken out.

No matter who wins the election, it’s NOT over. We can expect them to continue to on this trajectory and to hollow out as much of government as possible and to pillage whatever is valuable. So consider this a walk down memory lane – assuming your memory lane has just a twist of the Hallowe’en about it – just so we keep the need for vigilance in mind. And consider this a brief status report on where we stand on various issues at this point.