When Obama was falling behind in the polls, Morning Joe was all over it.  The questions each morning?

 - What is wrong with the Obama campaign?
 - When is the media going to stop focusing on Sarah Palin, which only serves to help McCain?

Now that Obama is surging back (pun intended), Morning Joe is again all over it.  The questions this morning?

 - How biased is the media against John McCain?
 - How hypocritical is this bias as they once loved McCain?

Fascinating.  Instead of asking what is the McCain campaign doing wrong, as they were doing last week with Obama, they switch to Junior High School gossip cafeteria conversation...who dumped who for whom...and can you believe what they are saying about him.  I thought we were a country in financial crisis, a country at war.  Seems like that would call for a hard-hitting national discourse on the best path forward out of these crises.  Right?

Well maybe not on Morning Joe.

What is truly pathetic about Morning Joe's anti-media rant this morning is that they indirectly portray McCain as victim, leaving what he is saying, what his campaign is doing completely out of the picture:

 - Are they suggesting his campaign lies should not have been called out? 

 - Should McCain's gaffes on the economy being strong when it is clearly not be ignored? 

 - Should the MSM simply play along when the man who describes himself as fundamentally a de-regulator suddenly says he is fired up and ready to take on the old boy network on Wall Street? 

 - Should the media look the other way when the person he chose to be "a heart beat away" shamelessly makes stuff up and moves to shut down an investigation into her own misconduct?

Is the point that if the media is NOT carrying McCain's water the senior senator from Arizona is incapable of doing it himself?  Not exactly a vote of confidence for the man the RNC held up as tried, tested and ready to be our president.

Come on Joe, can't you do any better than that?

New Battleground state numbers out from Time/CNN.

Note that all but WI were red states in 2004.

Seems like a lot is still in play and, unlike some of the MSM messaging we have been heatring lately, if you add VA, CO, and NV to this list then we are still talking a potential redrawing of the map in 2008.

For details click here

You could feel it coming, a message sharpening, the media waking up to its mission to inform...a tide turning...

And it has!

Hot Line - Obama ahead
R2000 - Obama ahead
Zogby - Obama ahead
Rasmussen - Obama closing, McCain clinging by +1

And now...drumroll please...here's Gallup.

Obama leads, +2  link.

But just because the bounce up for McCain has bounced back down, don't back down on your committment to change.  We make the numbers move.  Isn't it fun!

Share this:  Link

Then think on it. 

Here is a conservative columnist in Alaska, not a liberal blogger in some big city, asking his neighbors a simple question cutting to the core of  more than this campaign - it gets at the nature of our civil society:

Does the truth matter?

This is not just about Sarah Palin, her lack of candor, her brazen claims to have nixed the "Bridge to Nowhere" when she campaigned as a proponent, her stonewalling troopergate and trashing a public servant  to shield from public view her abuses of power.  Palin is a sideshow, a symptom.  The disease is deception.  Its carrier is our willingness to be deceived. 

If we the American people once again fall for even the most outrageously obvious repackaging of the same bad ideas and self-interested non-leadership that got us where we are, then shame on us.  We are not talking about "new and improved" being slapped on the same old soap claiming to be better at cleaning than its competitor.  We are talking the fate of the world and our place in it.

Really.

They lied us into a war.  Thousands are dead.

They lied to us about the environment.  Our planet's climate is in crisis.

They lied to us about how cutting taxes and deregulating everything was just what our economy needed.

Millions have lost their jobs, their homes and Wall Street's bastions are falling like dominoes.

Now they are lying about:
 - their record
 - their past misconduct
 - their platform
 - their opponent's past and future positions
 - basically everything

I ask you, will we let them get away with this again?

Jimmy Carter once said Americans deserve a government as good as our people.  Perhaps that is just what we have.

That is what they are counting on.  They are counting on you, buying the packaging, buying the lies...buying into four more years.

But I sense they are afraid, even desparate.

When they hear voices rising, even from conservative corners...crying "Enough!"...they fear something is changing, something in us.  When the media starts looking at them and saying "no, that is not what you said" or "no, that is not really your opponent's policy," what do they do then?
So they are lying harder - and louder - because it is all that they know to do.  At some point it becomes too flagrant, even for what passes as our national discourse.  And they start getting called out - even by their own "true believers."

This could be the opening we are looking for - maybe people are beyond a mere yearning for the truth, they are ready to insist on it, to fight for it.

"Change always comes," a great man has said, "from the bottom up."

If this time is our time then it is high time we take action.
 
We must demonstrate with more than words who we are and to what model of society and its governance we aspire.

Our forefathers and mothers risked their lives for freedom from tyranny.  What are we prepared to do?

Jesus said "The truth will set us free."
Paul enjoined us:  "Speak the truth to each other."

Get informed.  Get involved.  Get people to the polls.

Get going.