Thank God for Frank Rich. If the media points out precisely what John McCain is doing, he may have no choice but to stop it. Not because McCain has any great love for America or fear of where his words may lead but because he has to fear falling below 40% in the polls (and on election day).

I've done some research. No major party nominee in our history has ever run a campaign like McCain's. FDR was excoriated by the right -- called every vicious thing possible -- but neither Hoover, nor Landon, nor Willkie, nor Dewey ever incited crowds to scream violent epithets and threats. The filth was spewed by independent outfits allied with the Republicans, not by the nominees.

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There is a great deal of hand-wringing going on inside the Republican Party right now. The potential of a landslide blowout by Obama and the Democrats is inevitably leading to a battle over which faction will control the Republican Party after the election. On one side are the Limbaugh shock-troops, the loud angry social conservatives that have dominated the base for 25 years. These people are completely embarrassing to the intellectual movement conservatives like David Brooks.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission -- because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission -- by telling members of that class to go away.

Chris Buckley, son of the founder of modern conservative thought William Buckley, just announced he was going to vote for Obama, partly because the right wing kooks scared the bejesus out of him.

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Now that the greatest threat to America has been revealed to be some shadowy organization called ACORN, a little background should be helpful. ACORN springs from the philosophy of a fellow named Saul Alinsky, whose Rules For Radicals was one of the reads, back in the day. Alinsky's philosophy was to avoid philosophy. Assorted political bigs in the Democratic Party have been associated with ACORN, usually in very weak terms.

As a student radical I hated Alinsky. He was anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, and anti-political. He was in no way part of the New Left or the old left. What this fellow was purveying as "radical" was, and is, anything but. I wouldn't go so far as to call it liberal. That would be giving it too much credit. The reason is that Alinskyism is anti-ideological and anti-political.

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I hate this economic crash. I've lost money. And I know that poor people are hurting the most.

The only good news out of all this is that terrible rich people who bankroll some of the worst causes in the world are also being hit hard. For instance, the anti-union casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has lost more money than anyone on earth.

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One of the best ways to gauge the state of public opinion is to watch the late night comedy shows and see what comedians like Jon Stewart and the SNL team are joking about.

This year the Jewish community's supposed monomania about Israel has become a great source of merriment. Of course, it's not fair. The percentage of American Jewish voters whose primary focus is on Israel is tiny. A strong majority of Jews care deeply about Israel's well-being, but only a small number consider the Israel issue more important than domestic concerns when they vote.

According to the 2008 survey of American Jewish opinion conducted by the American Jewish Committee, the economy and opposition to the Iraq War were the most important issues for Jews when deciding whom to vote for. Israel was the deciding issue for 3 percent, tied with immigration reform. Would Jews vote for an anti-Israel candidate? No. But since no anti-Israel candidate has ever been a serious contender for the presidency, the question is moot.

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I need your help. And I'd really appreciate it if you can spare a little time for this.

As you know the current TPM commenting and blogging set up leaves a lot to be desired. And this weekend we're doing some final testing of our upgraded system that we're hoping to roll out on Monday. The features are much more robust than the current setup. And they make it easier to follow conversations you're participating.

But we need some more readers to volunteer to test the new set up before we launch. It doesn't take a lot of time. We just want you to try out the new version of the site which is currently on a non-public server as we get the final bugs out. Trying the new commenting system, do a test blog post, try out a few of the new tools.

Like I said, I'd really appreciate it if folks can help us out with this. It doesn't take much time and it will help us give you a much better experience in the time you spend on all the TPM network sites, and especially here at TPMCafe.

If you can help us tonight that's great but over the weekend will help too. If you're game please send an email to tpmbeta (at) gmail.com and we'll get you set up and ready to go.

And, again, I really appreciate it.

The man has found God, or at least the right way to deal with the banking crisis.

This week we have made a lot of progress in getting at the underlying logic of the conservative state. We have discussed the massive differences between the way conservatives talk and the way they rule, the damage they have wreaked in those branches of the state they dislike, and the means by which they have handed off public responsibilities to private companies.

We have also expressed a lot of frustration with the powerlessness of journalists or bloggers to get these things into the debate all on our own. The points we have been raising need to be made, not just by cranky scribblers like me, and not even by expert observers like Dean and Danielle, but by social movements and ultimately by political leaders. The public desperately needs to know why it is that the government built to protect them has been transformed into a mechanism for their exploitation--why government repeatedly failed during the Bush years at projects both great and small--why industry has been able to capture government so easily.

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Imagine if this character answered that 3AM phone call.

The Military Times has released a new poll saying that the troops are overwhelmingly backing John McCain. But a few weeks ago, the Center for Responsive Politics released data saying that McCain got fewer donations than the other presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Representative Ron Paul.

So who are military folks supporting? Hard to tell. What do these stories tell us about the military vote this year? Frankly, not much.

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John McCain isn't the first Presidential candidate to seek votes by appealing to hatred, racism, and fear. He won't be the last. But almost always that has been a surefire way to obtain less than 40% of the votes. The McCain-Palin approach increases the possibility that the Republican Party will be defeated down to the bottom of each statewide ticket, as most Americans find repugnant these blatant attempts to plumb the depths of the human soul.

For those who choose this walk on the wild side of politics, the usual result is electoral disaster and a lifetime gig as a talking head on the rightwing cable shows. Governor Palin, even if she is caught short by Troopergate or the Taxman, can count on television as her ticket out of Alaska. I see her going from an interview by Greta von S to a seat on Greta's side of the table. And watch out Katie Couric, the Governor may not have shown a big heart but I'm sure it's filled with revenge. Doubtlessly, Sarah Palin will play Tina Fey on SNL. Probably she will fill in for Pat Buchanan on the Rachel Maddow show -- indeed she is more or less following in that nativist's political footsteps, although she was a mere child when Buchanan began his own long odysssey through the Heart of Darkness. (Nixon and McCain have proved to have a great deal more in common than anyone would have thought.)

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My writer friend in Los Angeles, Jeff Levin, has had a vision of the next Palin news story:

PALIN AGREES TO INTERVIEW SELF

By Jeffrey Levin
Disassociated Press

WASHINGTON (DP) - Following on the heels of the McCain campaign issuing a report clearing Gov. Sarah Palin of any wrongdoing in the so-called Troopergate affair, the campaign is now dealing with the demand that Palin submit to more interviews.

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Happy Friday Caférs!

We're about to launch an extremely cool set of new community tools but first, we need your help! And quickly! It won't take much time, and it'll be fun-- we just need some testers to poke around the test site and give us some feedback. The new Cafe features are all about you and we urgently want your thoughts and critique-- ASAP-- this morning-- now!

Drop an email here: tpmbeta@gmail.com if you have any time to spare and want to be involved in creating TPM's awesome future. You know you love us.

I am not worried about Barack Obama. I trust the Secret Service and I believe it is not the same institution it was in 1963.

However, incitement is still incitement, even if it leads to no horrific consequences. John McCain and his moll is guilty of deliberate incitement and he clearly is indifferent to where it may lead.

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Almost exactly three weeks after he pronounced the fundamentals of the American economy strong, Sen. John McCain now comes forward with his first proposal to address what he concedes is the nation's worst economic crisis of his lengthy lifetime. He rightly focuses on an economic demographic uniquely imperiled by the crisis: U.S. homeowners.

Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com estimates that one-sixth of all mortgage holders now owe more than their houses are worth. That's a looming catastrophe for them, their neighbors and communities, and the economy at large.

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Just about every economist who supports bailing out the banks thinks that taking an equity stake through a direct infusion of capital is the way to go. While Secretary Paulson had pushed for his buying bad assets approach, he is now playing Hamlet and flirting with the idea of going the equity route.

This is not the time for high school drama. Doesn't Paulson remember his comments from the last two weeks when he told us that the economy would collapse if Congress didn't act immediately? Those statements were not true, and obviously Paulson didn't believe them, since it has now been a week since he got his bill and we still don't have even the outlines of his plans for buying bad assets.

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No one really knows anything for sure just now about the Paulson Plan or the markets. some uncertainty has to be accepted.

Yet the Paulson Plan, we read, was prepared over the summer and called "Break the Glass." Now that it has been authorized it turns out that it will take weeks to implement and also that its goals are not yet decided upon.

They should have broken the glass, taken it out, and finished it over the summer. It apparently wasn't so much a plan as a notion.

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The kind of Democratic corruption I was referring to in my earlier blog post was not the Monica Lewinsky BS, but the unwillingness by Clinton's Department of Interior to collect oil and gas royalties and here and here (yes that was a problem under Clinton too), and the gutting of all Pentagon oversight offices because they created too much "red tape" (and here), and the repeal of Glass-Steagall to benefit Wall St. financiers at the behest of Clinton friend and donor Sandy Weill. Many of these were anti-government initiatives to make the government utilize free market strategies. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) (www.pogo.org) has seen it all.

Don't get me wrong, much of what Obama is saying about his plans for the government looks good on the surface , albeit still a little vague.

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My son, Pete, who is a DJ on Hot97, a New York hip hop radio station, called to tell me that lots of his listeners are calling to ask if they can be kept from voting if they shop up at the polls wearing Obama shirts, hats, bling, whatever.

I said that he can go on air and tell his listeners not to worry. You can vote even if you are "festooned" in Obamawear from head to toe. But I said that I'd better check.

Good thing I did. In some states you can vote even if you are wearing partisan materials. In others, you can't. A whole lot of discretion is left to the officials at the polls.

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The gangster approach to American politics, conspicuously at work in the McCain-Palin-Hannity-Limbaugh-&-Co. air war of innuendos, insinuations, smears, slanders, lies, three-quarter lies, distortions and evasions, is also well along in the ground war.

Here's a copy of a flyer circulating in Philadelphia last weekend. A person or persons helpfully signing himself or herself as "Anonymous" claims that "an Obama supporter approached me during a rock the vote assembly" and said that on Election Day "there will be undercover officers to execute warrants on those who come to vote....He advised me if I had any outstanding warrants or traffic offenses I should clear them up prior to voting." And so on.

I wonder how much of this sort of thing is going on elsewhere in PA and other swing states.

A diarist at Daily Kos found an interesting article from the AP reporting that the Sheriff in Chicago (Cook County) has decided unilaterally to halt his foreclosures "because many people his office has helped throw out on the street are renters who did nothing wrong."

The Sheriff will not proceed on evictions unless banks can show by affidavit that the occupants of the homes in question are either the actual owners or have been properly notified as to the foreclosure procedures against them. The Sheriff, Tom Dart, indicates that a 120 day notification period prior to eviction for renters is often ignored by banks. Often, tenants have no idea that the home or building they live in has been foreclosed prior to their eviction:

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Bill Burton, Obama's spokesman is a class act. He is one of the unsung heroes of the campaign. He is always effective and, unlike pretty much all previous spokespersons for Presidential candidates, he does not put himself forward. It's never about him. Always, Obama and the country.

Anyway, listen to the measured way he addresses Andrea Mitchell's worries about the incitement rhetoric coming from the McCain-Palin camp. For obvious reasons, he plays it down although he is clearly concerned. Mitchell, however, is clearly worried about this.

I am too, and not just about Obama but about the GOP stirring up dangerous hate against minorities and liberals.

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I don't want to pick fights that are not really there. I know that Tom sees the right as pushing class biased policies, and agree completely that this is the issue.

However, I don't think the point is always clear to readers that the right is not anti-government, they are just against government policies that help the vast majority of middle class and poor people. I think it is important to emphasize the distinction perhaps a bit more than Tom does.

[My book on this topic seems to have been left off the great book list down below, but you can get a free download of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.]

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Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew is a devastating account of the massive damage that the conservative movement, its ideology, and its leaders have inflicted on the country. The same exact blurb applies as well to other excellent books published within the past year or so by such authors as James Galbraith, Robert Kuttner, Paul Krugman, Jane Mayer, Rick Perlstein, Charlie Savage, Kevin Phillips, Ron Suskind, Jared Bernstein, Steven Greenhouse, Charles Morris, Jeff Madrick, Naomi Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, Sidney Blumenthal and Greg Anrig. All of those books make the unambiguous case, from a variety of angles in a variety of styles, that conservatism produced failed government because conservatives disdain government and put self-interest above other values.

But while Republicans seem destined to be clobbered on November 4, the conservative movement will no doubt climb out of its coffin after a nap of unknown duration to bite the country in the neck again. Polls show that the share of the population self-identifying as "conservative" continues to hold steady at around the same level as it has for years. In the latest New York Times poll, for example, 36 percent self-identified as conservative, 38 percent as moderate, and 22 percent as liberal; the reading for conservative is toward the high end of the fairly narrow range the Times poll has measured since the early 1990s. Don't these people read books!?

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I'm glad Tom raised his reporting on Jack Abramoff's time running a think tank that served as a front for the Apartheid government of South Africa. For my money, it's the best chapter in the book and one of the most damning indictments of the moral turpitude of the modern conservative movement. It's worth the price of admission alone. (For a longer exchange between Tom and I about his book, you can read this interview.)

I think Tom and Dean are onto something that really gets at the heart of where we find ourselves right now, in terms of the end of an entire era of global political economy. In the past year, there are three books I've read, Tom's, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Jamie Gailbraith's The Predator State that each highlight a different side of the right-wing cube, but all come to a similar fundamental conclusion . (I should add Dean's excellent The Conservative Nanny State to this list as well, though it was published a few years ago.) That is, the actual real-world result of the ascendancy of a putative "free-market" philosophy has resulted in a larger, more coercive state, one that uses the power of Big Government to benefit the interests of Big Capital.

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From their flag lapel pins to their yellow ribbon bumper stickers, every politician in America wants you to believe they "support the troops." But actions speak louder than words. When veterans' issues actually came to a vote in Washington, what did your representatives do?

Now, it's easy to find out, thanks to IAVA Action Fund's 2008 Congressional Report Card. At IAVA Action Fund, we tracked every bill and vote on veterans' issues. We've crunched the numbers, and today we're releasing letter grades for every single Senator and Representative on Capitol Hill (including McCain, Obama and Biden). In just a few clicks, you can find out how your representatives voted.

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Pity the African-American TV cameraman assigned to cover a Sarah Palin brownshirt rally. He should be getting hazardous duty pay.

From Jacksonville in the northeast to Pensacola in the Panhandle, the fiery crowds gathered to jeer at any hint of liberalism, boo loudly at the mere mention of Senator Barack Obama's name and heckle the traveling press corps (at a rally in Clearwater, one man hurled a racial epithet at a television cameraman).

If there were undecideds, independents or swing voters among them, they were awfully hard to spot.

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Dean Baker makes the important point that while conservatives talk free markets, they act persistently in the interests of a particular class. This is undeniably so, and Dean has many excellent examples to illustrate. It is strange that he thinks I'm unaware of it, however. The grand theme of The Wrecking Crew is that conservatives don't want small government; they want captured government, government run in the service of industry. In particular, their faithlessness to free-market theory is also a theme that runs throughout my discussion of Jack Abramoff's apartheid-backed thinktank, the International Freedom Foundation, which shifted its arguments all about (it was anti-communist, it was libertarian, it was whatever) but consistently labored in the service of money.

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Dean Baker's post this morning discusses about how Gordon Brown's government in the UK is handling the economic/banking crisis. It was fascinating to be in London during the past weeks to see the fall of the Tory Party and the rise (practically from the dead) of Gordon Brown, surrounded by Tony Blair's new Labourites, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell among others.

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DRUDGE's headline this morning says it all "BORING."

Just yesterday the creationists, racial paranoids, mindless hawks, neocons and gay-bashers were psyched. Bill Ayers! Rev. Wright! "Rezko."

Today they are in the dumpster. Johnny Mac dropped the ball. After sending out the cheerleader to race-bait and incite violence all week, Johnny Mac could not do it face-to-face. He feared, rightly, that if he did, Obama would remind voters of the Keating 5 or of any of the other scandals (public and personal) in McCain's record.

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The British government announced this morning that it is bailing out its banks by directly injecting capital through the purchase of preferred shares. It announced that the banks will suspend dividends and that top executives will get pay cuts.

This is what many economists advocated be done in the United States, but apparently the Bush administration never considered this route. We'll see which bailout works better.

Did McCain suggest he was going to reduce Social Security benefits?

If McCain thinks Treasury should buy all bad mortgages, then why didn't he say so last week? What is a bad mortgage? If that refers to homes whose value is less than the mortgage debt, then that may amount to as many as 10 to 20 million homes before prices hit bottom. So does McCain imagine that Treasury will spend another two to four trillion dollars -- perhaps what it would take to fulfill his commitment? And would Treasury then be the creditor of millions of Americans, forcing foreclosures and auctioning houses? Does Paulson support this plan? Does anyone? Will McCain support or explain it tomorrow?

Does McCain really not have any prioritization of his goals?

It has been amazing to watch Barack and Michelle Obama visit with everyone in the crowd, chat, give photo ops, for now twenty minutes after the debate and still counting....while apparently the McCains left the scene.

I've been watching these debates since 1960 and this is the first time I haven't been frustrated by all the opportunities the Democrat missed.

This time, my nominee, and our next President, dotted every i and crossed every t. McCain needed a game changer. In stead, Obama solidified his lead.

I'm proud of Obama. (And, boy, he has sure improved since the Democratic primary debates).

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Let the discussing begin!

One of the lesser noticed shifts that has taken place during this Presidential election campaign is that everyone now favors some kind of diplomatic engagement with Iran: Obama, of course; President Bush since earlier this summer, when Undersecretary of State Burns joined the Geneva P5+1 talks; and as of late, John McCain. The big challenge now becomes what type of engagement, and Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann have just released the most powerful case made so far for America to go for a 'grand bargain' with Iran and what the agenda for such an effort might look like.

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The old saying goes: "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your enemies." But my inner dialectician likes to ignore this saying. I like to imagine a dominant conservative movement emerging in the 1950's that was different from the one we eventually saw. A movement that focused on intelligent and selective restraint of statism, seeking to apply market power creatively and harmoniously with the government, and dedicated to its conservative rhetoric of equal opportunity, to the point where it took responsibility for its actual occurrence. A movement without the nativism, dogma, and racist undertones of the Nixon era and beyond. And one in which, had it been around in the 1960's, could actually challenge and improve the Great Society in a productive and synthetic way.

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Okay, we need to take a deep breath. Do readers really believe corruption is owned by either side of the aisle? The anti-government and pro-big business philosophy was alive and well during the Clinton Administration, as best illustrated by its Reinventing Government catastrophe (and here), and of course embraced with both arms and legs by the Bush Administration.

In The Wrecking Crew, Tom does a terrific job unraveling the insidious impact of the cynical conservative anti-government movement, most clearly seen in political appointees who do not believe in the mission of their agency. He also shows that this disease really infects both parties, although a more virulent strain has inflamed the Republican party. But in his blog, Tom is, I think, letting the Dems off too easily. On the Wall St. collapse, for example, the Center for Responsive Politics' analysis showed the biggest Senate recipients of Wall St. money were Democrats, after all.

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Jim Rutenberg has a piece in the morning NYT on the Hannity loonfest that graced Fox News Sunday night.

It's good that the Times found Hannity's garbage pail newsworthy. But the piece bends over backwards to give Andy Martin, of whom I wrote Sunday night, the benefit of the doubt. He tells Rutenberg that the anti-Semitic sentiments were forged. By whom? With what motive? Why were these remarks reported in the Washington Times, and never retracted?

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Have you seen McCain' and Palin's latest attacks on Obama?

Because what they are doing is nothing less than incitement. Saying that we don't know where Obama came from or who he is or what he would do to America is to say that, as President, he would pose a threat to America.

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Tom has written a great book that should help drive more nails into the coffin of the conservative movement. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that he doesn't quite put the stake through the heart, which is really what we have to do with this monster.

The problem is that Tom still accepts too much conservative rhetoric at face value. Conservatives do not dislike government or want small government. They just dislike government policies that are designed to help the bulk of the population. They want the government to redistribute income upward and they are happy to have a government that is as big as necessary to accomplish this task. The stuff about small government and leaving things to the market is just pretty rhetoric they use to fool the kids (i.e. us).

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Everyone's a change-bringer this year. Everyone's a reformer. Even the improbable Sarah Palin tells us she intends to clean up not only Washington but to "stop the greed and corruption on Wall Street" itself. What's more, she wants to do it on behalf of--her own term--the "working class."

There are several reasons to cheer for this development. With the Republican standard-bearers now tacitly acknowledging that the Bush administration and the Republican congress were episodes of unexampled misgovernment, much of the right's exculpatory rhetoric can now be dispensed with. The verdict has hereby been reached on Bush, DeLay, Gingrich, and maybe even on Ronald Reagan himself. The case is closed. All that remains is to understand the causes of the catastrophe.

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Happy Monday Caférs,

With 106 days of the current debacle administration to go, Tom Frank joins us for book club this week to talk The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

The book takes a long hard look at the conservative revolution-- deregulation, lobbying, and institutionalized incompetence-- and the considerable aftermath. Joining Frank to talk shop will be Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), Dean Baker, the economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Chris Hayes, Washington editor for The Nation, and Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation and writer.

We have yet to have a more timely discussion at Café-- please join us.

I can think of few nice things to say about John McCain. Actually there are exactly two. The first is that when the great Arizona liberal Congressman, Mo Udall, was dying of Parkinson's disease, Mc Cain was one of the few of Udall's former colleagues who ever bothered to visit. There was no political gain in sitting with a dying man, but Mc Cain did it anyway.

The other was when he accepted the apologiy of David Ifshin, a 60's radical who had gone to Hanoi to support the Viet Cong and who recorded messages to imprisoned GI's urging them to give up. One of the POW's who was subjected to Ifshin's diatribes was John Mc Cain.

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Now Lieberman is invoking the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to elect Sarah Palin. "She's so strong, she's so capable, she's so competent," Lieberman told a crowd in Florida. "With God's help, she will be Vice President.

Read this from New Republic and bear in mind that Barack Obama and Joe Biden supported Joementum in his '06 Senate race out of loyalty which has turned out to be misplaced.

Good thing the Day of Atonement is coming up.

Strange winds are blowing in economic policy land. After failing to privatize social insurance, the Bush Treasury is now socializing private insurance. The Democratic presidential candidate is running on a tax reform platform that provides three times greater tax cuts for middle class families than the Republican candidate's platform. And the Republican candidate, after advocating deregulatory policies for 26 years in Congress, has now embraced the rhetoric of a populist regulatory reformer.

But the most unlikely wind of all is Senator McCain's health care proposal which by the end of his first term would increase taxes by $1362 for middle-income American families, while raising marginal tax rates on labor income by more than President Bush's tax cuts have reduced them.

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According to the Washington Post, after the initial defeat of the bailout package in the House last Monday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went to see President Bush in the White House. The Post reports that President Bush asked Paulson about "Plan B." According to the Washington Post, Paulson told Bush "there is no Plan B."

Of course this was not true. Paulson could have easily designed a bailout plan that was centered on the direct infusion of capital in the banking system, as was suggested by George Soros in a Financial Time column later in the week. Virtually every economist who has written on the bailout argued that a direct infusion of capital is a far more effective approach to dealing with the financial crisis than the approach outlined by Paulson.

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""If we are going to go down this road -- you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers," he said. "At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating." --
Rahm Emanuel on Sunday.

Along these lines: here is are places to go for your John McCain primer. First a short Rolling Stone video on the 5 myths that define Mc Cain. Even by the standards of politicians, he is a dishonorable man.

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Palin regaled the cheering crowd with a story about how she was reading her Starbucks mocha cup yesterday, which featured a quotation from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

"Now she said it, I didn't," Palin said of Albright. "She said, 'There's a place in Hell reserved for women who don't support other women.'"

The crowd roared its approval, but according to several sources, Albright actually said, "there's a place in Hell reserved for women who don't help other women."

"OK, now thank you so much for receiving that well--I didn't know how that was going to go over," Palin told the southern California crowd. "And now California, let's see what a comment that I just made how that is turned into whatever it'll be turned into tomorrow in the newspaper."

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Every day until November -- and in person in next Tuesday's debate -- McCain and his people are going to raise one smear of Obama after another. Will Obama respond effectively and keep his lead? A lot is at stake here: the 2008 election and the future of American politics, its capacity to cut off the kind of vicious falsehoods that have worked so well in the past. Are we going to want to live in the kind of polity we will end up with if Obama fails to respond with sufficient strength and specificity?

Certainly Obama needs to keep the focus on major issues and talk directly to voters about their economic needs and concerns. In Tuesday's debate, he should do much less responding to McCain's agenda and mostly look at voters through the camera and speak of their real-life concerns. And he should ask voters practical questions -- such as "how will it be for your family to try to pay new taxes on your health plan, or deal with insurance companies that can deny you coverage if you get sick, or find a new plan costing $12,000 or more with less than half that much to spend?" If you cannot afford that on top of all the other rising costs and worries you face, then you cannot afford John McCain."

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Calling the Anti-Defamation League, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and other defenders of Jewish people against slime artists of all political persuasions:

Sean Hannity's Fox News Sunday night kitchen-sink sewer job on Barack Obama, complete with a sound-track cribbed from C- porn flicks, features prominently, as witness of Obama's iniquity, one Andy Martin, "author and journalist," and, though not identified as such on Fox News, perennial political candidate in four states.

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The AP calls McCain/Palin out for running a racist campaign. The AP!

It raises an issue I have never considered. If McCain wins by race-baiting Obama, would it even be possible for him to govern? Think about it. Half the country will be enraged. African-Americans, in particular, will feel (rightly) that racism triumphed. And liberal Democrats control Congress.

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Sarah Palin in Colorado yesterday:

I was reading my copy of today's New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago....Turns out one of Barack's earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that quote launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and US Capitol. Wow.

As Gov. Palin would say, Wow. You betcha she's off message. The paper that's hardly ever wrong was accused two weeks ago of being "an Obama advocacy organization" that perpetrated "a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news." Oh, but that reckless accuser was, let's see, was it, yes, the McCain campaign.

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