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- As John McCain's prospects for becoming president fade more every day, it's clear he's going to go out hitting the wingnut trifecta, insinuating Obama and ACORN are committing vote fraud (actually, it's registration fraud), using Bill Ayers to explain why Obama is responsible for the financial meltdown (seriously), and of course blaming Obama for being ambitious, to which I second Tim's thoughts. The RNC has decided to go with the Chicago corruption angle in their new ad, tying Obama not only to Ayers, but William Daley and Tony Rezko.
- The Wall Street Journal invites us to mourn with McCain campaign staffers who lament the negative turn taken by the candidate but it's difficult to muster any sympathy when we learn from Bill Keller that the McCain campaign bullied The New York Times into doing its Ayers story last weekend. It does feel like an era is ending in American politics, to which I again second Tim's remarks.
- You can't make this stuff up. The Alaska legislature is releasing it's report today on the state trooper firing probe, and the McCain-Palin campaign releases their own report which, astonishingly, absolves Palin of any wrongdoing. Palin's essential corruption -- and I don't mean the type of quid-pro-quo corruption that infects politicians -- is her utter lack of a sense of the duty holding a public office entails. Indeed, her rapid rise, we learn from The Washington Post, was one big PR campaign designed to sell the GOP on her "energy expertise" bona fides. And speaking of PR, Palin will appear on Saturday Night Live on October 25.
- Barack Obama is purchasing a half hour of airtime for October 29, less than one week before Election Day. The campaign has not said what the content of the buy will be, but my hunch is that it will contain something much more substantive than a final pitch for his presidential campaign.
- It's probably a futile exercise, but I'm transfixed by trying to understand the mind of professional conservatives who are so committed to their interpretation of real world events that any sense of cause and effect utterly disappears. Renowned historian of American liberalism's fascist past, Jonah Goldberg, passes along an email -- which he admits to having "no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit," -- arguing Obama's rise in the polls is responsible for the market tanking. Shortly thereafter, Goldberg finds another correlation (this time with graphs!) to which he writes "Still, I think Pethokoukis' point that Obama's success may makeinvestors more pessimistic about the future has some plausibility to it."
- Cindy McCain sure knows how to win over the veteran vote. Responding to a question about John McCain's time spent as a POW and whether he still experiences trauma as a result, she observed that "my husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing."
- Quote of the day (well, yesterday) from Joe Biden, responding to Sarah Palin's "I was in the second grade when he [Biden] was elected to the Senate" line: "That’s true, but she was in sixth grade the last time John had a new idea." I think that one deserves a rare "oh, snap!" from me.
- It's a good thing Connecticut now allows same-sex marriage, because it gives Charles Keating one more place to express his long-held, deeply-felt love for John McCain.
--Mori Dinauer
