BOSTON (AP) — A person familiar with the investigation says one of three white men accused of torching a predominantly black Massachusetts church because they were angry with President Barack Obama’s election has agreed to plead guilty.

Benjamin Haskell is due for a change of plea hearing Tuesday in federal court in Springfield, Mass. The 23-year-old Haskell had pleaded not guilty to conspiracy charges.

A person informed of the change of plea tells The Associated Press that Haskell will plead guilty. The person spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the hearing.

Haskell’s attorney and federal prosecutors did not immediately return messages.

The fire destroyed the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield on Nov. 5, 2008, just hours after the election.

RELATED:

GALLERY: Top 10 Election Photos

Top 5 Obama Campaign Moments

Click here to view photos:

1. January 9, 2008: Nashua, New Hampshire
Obama, gracious as ever, beautifully concedes New Hampshire to Sen. Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries.

WATCH it here:

2. March 18, 2008: Philadelphia, PA
Obama delivers a powerful “More Perfect Union” speech on race relations that is compared, rightfully, to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s orations.

WATCH the full speech:

3. April 17, 2008: Philadelphia, PA
Obama brushes the dirt off his shoulder.

WATCH Obama brush it off:

See more of NewsOne’s BEST OF EVERYTHING 2008!!!

4. June 3, 2008: St. Paul, MN
Barack & Michelle Obama famously bump fists as he becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee for President.

WATCH it here:

5. November 4, 2008: Grant Park, Chicago, IL
Barack Obama is elected President of the United States of America, becoming the first African-American president in the nation’s history.

WATCH the full rousing & historic speech:

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Sasha Obama says, “Hi Daddy!” at the DNC, the cutest American political moment ever.

WATCH it here:

Obama draws a crowd of 200,000 people in Berlin, Germany, inspiring people worldwide that America can be the beacon of hope and progress it once was.

What are your favorite and most memorable campaign moments? TELL US in the comments!

See more of NewsOne’s BEST OF EVERYTHING 2008!!!

The campaign, with subplots emerging throughout the year, received 100 first-place votes out of 155 ballots cast for the top 10 stories. Two other political sagas — the history-making candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin — also made the list.

The vast economic crisis, plunging the U.S. into recession and ravaging many business sectors worldwide, was the No. 2 story, receiving 49 first-place votes. The precipitous rise and fall of oil prices was No. 3.

The top story of 2007 was the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech University by a mentally disturbed student gunman.

Here are 2008′s top 10 stories, as voted by AP members:

_1. U.S. ELECTION: Obama emerged from Election Night as a decisive victor and a symbol for the world of America’s democratic promise. But he reached that point only after a grueling battle with Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then an often-nasty showdown with the McCain/Palin ticket in the run-up to the election.

_2. ECONOMIC MELTDOWN: The bad news kept coming — collapses of Wall Street giants; huge stock market losses; plummeting home prices and a surge of foreclosures; desperate times for U.S. automakers. It added up to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and will cost the federal government well over $1 trillion in various rescue and stimulus packages.

_3. OIL PRICES: The global economic angst produced hyper-volatile energy markets. The price of crude soared as high as $150 a barrel in July before crashing to $33 this month. In the U.S., the average price for a gallon of regular gas peaked at $4.11, then plunged below $1.70.

_4. IRAQ: The much-debated “surge” of U.S. troops helped reduce violence after more than five years of war, but Iraq is still buffeted daily by bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and political uncertainty. A newly ratified U.S.-Iraqi security agreement sets a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal by 2012.

_5. BEIJING OLYMPICS: China hosted the Olympics for first time, drawing praise for logistical mastery and condemnation for heavy-handed security measures. The games themselves were rated a success, highlighted by the record-shattering performances of swimmer Michael Phelps and sprinter Usain Bolt.

_6. CHINESE EARTHQUAKE: A huge quake in May killed 70,000 people in Sichuan province and left 5 million homeless. Many thousands of children were among the victims — authorities said about 7,000 classrooms were destroyed in shoddily built schools.

_7. SARAH PALIN: Few Americans outside Alaska knew much about its governor when Republican John McCain picked her as his running mate. That changed rapidly. To her conservative admirers, she was a feisty, refreshing change from most politicians; to her critics, she was in over her head, and worthy of all the lampooning she endured.

_8. MUMBAI TERRORISM: Ten attackers allegedly sponsored by a Pakistan-based Islamic group terrorized India’s financial capital in November, killing 164 people in coordinated attacks on hotels, markets and a train station. India‘s perennially uneasy relations with Pakistan were badly strained.

_9. HILLARY CLINTON: She didn’t win, but Clinton came closer than any other woman in U.S. history to becoming a major party’s presidential nominee. Her determined primary campaign, waged vigorously even when it seemed a lost cause, inspired millions of women across the country — and helped persuade Obama to choose her as secretary of state.

_10. RUSSIA-GEORGIA WAR: The two nations waged a five-day war in August ignited by a Georgian artillery barrage on the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Russia responded with a drive deep into Georgian territory, causing severe economic damage and aggravating already troubled Russia-US relations.

Stories that almost made the Top 10 included Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 84,000 people in Myanmar; Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which wreaked deadly damage in the Caribbean and on the U.S. Gulf Coast; and the seesaw fate of same-sex marriage in California, where a court ruling approving it was later overturned by a ballot measure.

Several write-in votes were cast for two developments that occurred too late to be included on the AP ballot — the indictment of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the efforts of struggling U.S. automakers to get a federal bailout. The alleged financial scam involving Bernard Madoff also was revealed too late to make the ballot.

Several of the editors who voted commented on how two transcendent developments dominated the news in 2008.

“As far as I am concerned, there were only two stories this year,” wrote Linda Grist Cunningham of the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star. “Global economy collapses (sending every country into financial, political and personal chaos) and Obama elected U.S. president, changing the way the America does business — financial, political and personal.”

The former GOP presidential candidate also praised President-elect Barack Obama for some of his staff choices, including Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton, and shared Letterman’s incredulousness at Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Letterman’s “Late Show” was a land mine for McCain after the Arizona senator abruptly canceled a Sept. 24 appearance, saying he had to return to Washington to help with the nation’s economic problems. Instead, he stopped by to see Katie Couric and Letterman mocked McCain mercilessly. McCain apologized three weeks later.

McCain, whose first post-campaign talk show appearance was with Jay Leno, was asked by Letterman what the transition from a frantic campaign to a slower pace was like.

“I don’t want to talk about the bleeping campaign,” McCain said with a smile. “Understand? If you think I’m going to go back to that bleeping situation, then bleep you.”

McCain said Clinton will bring “instant credibility, a certain amount of celebrity” when she travels around the world as the nation’s top diplomat.

“She is extremely knowledgeable on the issues,” he said. “I think it’s a good team and I think it’s a very wise choice. And I would like to say that I think President-elect Obama has made a number of very wise choices which I think shows a centrist approach to government, which, obviously, the way America and the world is today, is necessary.”

He still disagrees with Obama politically, but McCain said, “I applaud his selections.”

McCain said that Blagojevich, arrested and accused of trying to sell Obama’s Illinois Senate seat to the highest bidder, once asked for a meeting and told McCain he was going to be a great reformer.

Letterman said that people consider Blagojevich either stupid or nuts.

“What do you think?” Letterman asked.

“I think it’s a rare combination of both,” McCain replied.

McCain also talked with Letterman about the times he crashed airplanes, and when he was shot down over North Vietnam and taken as a prisoner of war. He said there’s a statue at the site in Hanoi where he was taken prisoner that says “26 on October 1967 the famous air pirate was shot down. John McCain was captured.”

“You know, you don’t get a lot of statues,” McCain said. “At least before you die.”

ABC News has acquired a secret McCain campaign ad that never aired, attacking Obama’s relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many Republican pundits believe that if that narrative had been fleshed out, the outcome of the election could have been very different.

According to the report, after the election Rev. Wright sent President-elect Obama a message that said, “As long as you are presiding over policy that grinds God’s people into Earth, I am coming after you.”

Watch the video here:

Five reasons why last night was such a big deal (other than the obvious):

1) According to the exit polls, African Americans comprised thirteen percent of the electorate last night and went for Obama by an incredible 95% to 4%. In 2004, Blacks were 11% of the electorate and gave 90% of their votes to John Kerry. In absolute terms, about 13 million Blacks voted in 2004 and gave Kerry a roughly eight million vote margin over Bush. This year, roughly 16 million Blacks voted and gave Obama an incredible 15 million-plus margin over McCain. That’s a massive advantage, one that McCain had no hope of overcoming unless Obama’s white support completely collapsed.

2) One reason it didn’t collapse is the youth vote. Early exit polling indicates that 18% of the electorate was between the ages of 18-29. This is slightly higher than their share from 2004. Whereas John Kerry won 54% of the vote from this age group, Obama is estimated to have won 66% of voters under 30. This is a enormous win – by far the most one-sided election for this group since data was first collected on age cohorts in 1976. It justifies the huge bet that Obama made on youth support, as voters under thirty gave Obama a roughly seven million vote advantage over McCain.

3) Karl Rove believed strongly that the Republican Party needed to make inroads into Hispanics’ support for the Democratic Party. And, though Hispanics still supported Kerry over Bush by roughly 60-40 in 2004, this represented progress for the Republicans. The increasing right-wing tilt of the party, however, including the party base’s deep anger about illegal immigration and the more general threat that immigrants pose to America, has cost the Republicans dearly. An estimated 66% voted for Obama helping to swing Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico firmly into the Obama column. More important for the long-term, Hispanics now comprise a larger portion of the population than African Americans. At eight percent, they still do not represent as a big a share of the electorate. However, their slice of the electorate is only going to increase in subsequent years. Republicans may think they can blow off the Black vote. They cannot blow off the Black vote and the Hispanic vote and remain competitive.

4) These demographic changes have led to a re-drawing of the political map. As I mentioned last night, this is unlikely to be a one-cycle fluke. Lots can happen in two or four years, of course. And Obama and the large Democratic majorities in Congress face daunting challenges. As of right now, however, the Republican Party is speaking to an increasingly narrow slice of America, and appealing to that slice on the basis of resentment and reaction. They are no longer competitive in the Northeast, on the West Coast or in broad swaths of the industrial Midwest – areas that are worth well over 200 electoral votes. Virginia now has two Democratic Senators a Democratic governor and gave Obama a solid win last night. North Carolina is a firmly purple state. Florida and Ohio, with large and increasingly diverse populations have tipped. The Republican Party will need to develop a more inclusive, less reflexively negative vision to regain their footing. Sarah Palin, incidentally, won’t help them do that.

5) This election is a political watershed in a way that Clinton’s 1992 victory wasn’t. Ronald Reagan won a landslide in 1980 and, more than that, ushered in a period of dominance for a political movement – the New Right. That period has transformed the nation’s courts, limited the public’s sense of what public policy can do to improve people’s lives and made values conflicts central to our political struggles. Clinton’s two victories were, at best, a rearguard action that did nothing to thwart meaningfully those developments.

Last night represented, in important respects, the defeat of the New Right and its politics. An increasingly tolerant, increasingly diverse electorate rejected the politics of cultural polarization and of laissez-faire government – the two hallmarks of the New Right, all at once. While it’s true that Clinton swept to power with large Democratic majorities in Congress, those majorities were much more heavily populated with conservative and Southern Democrats. No “movement” could plausibly be said to have brought Clinton to power – just a very smart campaign waged against a deeply unpopular President.

By contrast, like Reagan, Obama’s win can be seen as a victory not only for a candidate. Instead, it is a victory for a movement – a mobilized, dedicated base of support whose aim is to remake politics, not merely decide who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama energized that movement and helped bring it to maturity. That movement has had its roots among dedicated younger Americans marinating their grievances and their visions on the internet and forward-thinking Progressives who believed a multi-cultural coalition could be a majority coalition. Sick of the politics of cultural polarization, and first given a taste of their power during the Dean campaign in 2003-04, the new progressives first got angry, then got organized.

We have not entered an era of conflict-free Obama love. John McCain won 55 million votes. Furthermore, the new progressives lack the institutional foundation of the New Right (rooted as it was in Evangelical churches). This makes it an arguably more tenuous phenomenon than the New Right has been. Dan Charnas was right when he said last night that much remains unchanged in America. Still, the New Right, 28 years lately, has been directly and decisively repudiated. And, that does mean, as Ronald Reagan liked to say – it’s morning in America.

Race was considered the least important variable to young voters, after gender and political party affiliation, which was by far the most significant factor.

The poll by rapsessions.org, which conducts town hall meetings around the country where youth talk about issues that matter most in their lives, found that 90 percent of young people 18-24 and 81 percent of young people 25-34 said that race didn’t matter in their choice for president.

The results of a nationwide survey, conducted by Knowledge Networks, Inc, were compiled from internet interviews with 302 Black, 344 White and 307 Latino 18-45 year-olds from August 22 to September 11, 2008. The poll entitled “Understanding the Hip-Hop Voting Bloc” carried a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.

Other findings include:

• 60 percent of 18-24 year olds have a friend relative or associate who has served or is serving in the US Military in Iraq or Afghanistan. (For 25-29 year-olds the figure was 51 percent, and 47 percent of 35-44 year olds).

• The issues that matter most in this election to young people are, in this order: the war in Iraq, lowering gas prices and living wage jobs.

• If the election were today, Barack Obama would lead John McCain by at least 13 percent among 18 to 24 year-old, as well as among 25-34 year olds. These percentages shift radically among 35-44 year-olds, among whom McCain would lead by 6 percentage points.

“It seems that the success the Obama campaign is enjoying with young people is a result of their effectiveness in tapping into core issues with the right messaging,” said Bakari Kitwana, CEO of Rap Sessions and the author of the forthcoming Let’s Get Free: Strategies for Organizing the Hip-Hop Voting Bloc (Third World Press, January 2009), which he co-authored with Jeff Johnson.

“We need a new language for understanding the ways race has evolved,” Kitwana said, “This is a new generation of young people for whom the old rules about American race relations no longer apply.”

Watch Nas Ask Virginia Out to Vote:

I woke up this morning in a country transformed. I woke up this morning, truly an American for the first time in my life. What happened last night, what WE, together as a nation of “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled”  did last night will stay with me forever.

I will tell my children and my grandchildren about the night that America lived up to its ideals, a night when the world’s eyes were upon us and we looked straight back at them and, with unyielding conviction said, “YES WE CAN.”

Last night, America recognized a cause bigger than itself and answered the call.

If this campaign is any indication of the power, the hope and the change this country has been thirsting for for 8 years, we have a LOT of work to do. But we will “roll up our sleeves” alongside a leader who has and will continue to inspire us beyond our own expectations.

Suddenly, the impossible is possible. The unlikeliest story has unfolded before our eyes. America, in one fell swoop, has redeemed itself to the world. The democracy that was turned into a nightclub burlesque on the global stage has turned itself inside out and granted itself an opportunity for the “new dawn of American leadership.”

We have found ourselves, quite intentionally, on the right side of history.
For everyone who was a skeptic, who thought America wasn’t ready, all those whose mantra remained “I’ll believe it when I see it,” I have only this to say:

OPEN YOUR EYES.

Why, then, should a toothless, absurd plot against him by a pair of white supremacists get so much attention in the final days before the election?

Certainly, the plot hatched by 20-year-old Daniel Cowart of Bells, Tennessee and eighteen-year-old Paul Schlesselman of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas is disturbing; violence fueled by hatred always is. That these two young men were willing to die for the sake of killing Obama is chilling, as is the ideology behind their plan.

But the plan itself, which involved killing eighty-eight blacks, fourteen by beheading-numbers that reference white supremacist numerology-and then driving toward Obama, wearing white tuxedos and top hats and firing guns out their car windows-was clearly not something the two men had any ability to execute. A home invasion they planned to obtain money to finance the plot was aborted when the two would-be assassins were scared off by a dog.

So why has it dominated news coverage? Perhaps the attention is given because it has the potential to swing votes. With McCain’s campaign in tatters, the GOP and its surrogates have to do something. The plot-which right-leaning FOX News was early to break and late to stop flogging-reminds voters that Obama is black. Calling him a socialist hasn’t worked. Nor has labeling him a ‘redistributionist,” a pal of terrorists, a “street operative.”

Time to go back to the basics: Obama is black. He’s Other. He’s from the America that’s not the “real” one, to paraphrase Sarah Palin’s recent rallying cry.

Sound stupid? It is.

Obama’s race has hardly been obscured in this election season. But this plot underlines it in neon-and if it gets enough coverage, maybe it galvanizes a few racists to go to the polls, or subconsciously makes a few voters who’ve decided that a candidate’s policies are more important than his skin color rethink.

It’s not so different, in that sense, from last week’s top FOX News story about the McCain volunteer assaulted by a 6’4″ black mugger who then carved a “B” for Barack into her face.

Until it turned out she had made the whole thing up.

The other group this assassination plot could affect, paradoxically, is black Obama supporters afraid for the candidate’s life-fearful that like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and both Kennedys, this avatar of hope does not have long to live, and electing him president will shorten his life.

Whether either of these effects is felt at the voting booth remains to be seen. But this plot, both farcical and frightening, seems destined to be little more than an election footnote: one more news item that couldn’t hold back the tide of Obama’s momentum, no matter how much dubious attention it commanded.

Watch Obama ‘pal around with terrorists’ here:

From www.ColorOfChange.com:

5 Ways to Protect Your Vote

If there’s one thing we see every election, it’s that Republicans will try to manipulate the rules any way they can to prevent some people from voting. Don’t be discouraged–be prepared. If we’re armed with the right information, we can beat most of these dirty tricks.

1. Be Prepared, and Conquer the Lines. We can’t let long lines stop anyone from voting. There are several ways you can reduce lines and make sure they don’t prevent you or anyone else from voting:

* Vote early if you can. You can find early voting times and locations at govote.org.
* Double-check your polling location before you go to vote. You can look it up at govote.org.
* Have a Plan & Have Fun. Have a plan in case there are lines. Bring some food, drinks, friends, books, games, a chair — anything that will prevent you and other voters from walking away. Have fun while you wait and encourage your friends and neighbors to stay in line so their vote is counted.
* Don’t give up–don’t walk away without voting.

2. Two numbers you should have in your phone. Put these numbers in your phone so you’re prepared to report problems and help other voters find their polling place:

* 866-OUR-VOTE is a hotline that’s been set up to collect information about problems on election day–lawyers and election protection advocates are ready to respond. It’s the best way to make sure someone addresses any problems you see.
* The number for your local election board–in case you need to tell someone where they can vote. Enter you zip code at govote.org, then look for “Contact [your county] election officials” on the right.

3. Beware of lies, misinformation and dirty tricks; spread the truth.
Republican operatives are spreading plain lies to frighten new voters. In Philadelphia, anonymous flyers in Black neighborhoods have falsely claimed that voters with unpaid traffic tickets or outstanding warrants will be arrested at the polls. If you hear a scary rumor, it’s probably a lie. Call your local election officials to check it out–and make sure your friends and neighbors know the truth.

Click here for the last 2 very IMPORTANT tips on how to protect your vote!

Watch the video here.

What does the economic downturn mean for already struggling Black families?

In part two of our Bakari Kitwana’s discussion with Cornel West, Dr. West delves into the significance of the racist incidents and responses that reared their head on the campaign trial this year-from the McCain supporter’s taunts to John Lewis’ criticism. West points to the new danger posed by citizens willing to “sow the seeds” of racism of the George Wallace variety. The conversation then turned to the current financial crisis, including the budget challenges facing states and cities, and how Blacks will fare as the country seems headed to a second Great Depression. You know the saying, when white America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu? Here West carefully critiques what he sees as the 40-year economic depression that Blacks have suffered under for the last four decades in the US. For him, the economic downturn will only make matters worse-”depression on top of depression.” Once again, he says, Black churches, mosques and community centers will have to step it up, even as a Barack Obama presidency offers hope.

Cornel West is University Professor at Princeton University in the Center for African American Studies. The author of the 1993 groundbreaking Race Matters, his new book is entitled Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (Hay House, 2008).

The results help explain why the Democrat is pressing his money and manpower advantages in a slew of traditionally GOP states, hoping not just for a win but a transcendent victory that remakes the nation’s political map. McCain is scrambling to defend states where he wouldn’t even be campaigning if the race were closer.

Less than a week before Election Day, the AP-GfK polls show Obama winning among early voters, favored on almost every issue, benefiting from the country’s sour mood and widely viewed as the winning candidate by voters in eight crucial states — Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“If you believe in miracles,” said GOP consultant Joe Gaylord of Arlington, Va., “you still believe in McCain.”

Despite a mounting chorus of Republicans predicting their nominee’s demise, McCain aides insist their internal surveys show victory is still within reach.

Indeed, polls are mere snapshots of highly fluid campaigns, and this race has been unusually volatile. McCain was written off prematurely last year, and Obama seemed poised for victory in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary just before Hillary Rodham Clinton thumped him.

Even this close to Election Day, racial tensions and the numbers of late-deciding voters identified by the AP-GfK polling leave room for doubt. But the surveys confirm what McCain aides acknowledge privately — their chances of winning are low.

The polling shows Obama holding solid leads in Ohio (7 percentage points), Nevada (12 points), Colorado (9) and Virginia (7), all red states won by Bush that collectively offer 47 electoral votes. Sweeping those four — or putting together the right combination of two or three — would almost certainly make Obama president.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the White House. Obama can earn 252 by merely reclaiming states won by John Kerry in 2004. There are only two Kerry states still in contention — Pennsylvania with 21 votes and New Hampshire with four — and AP-GfK polls show Obama leading both by double digits.

Ohio alone has 20 electoral votes. Nevada has 5, Colorado 9 and Virginia 13.

In addition, Obama is tied with McCain in North Carolina and Florida, according to the AP-GfK polling, two vote-rich states Bush carried in 2004. Obama is throwing his time and money into the Sunshine State, which has 27 votes, part of a strategy to create many routes to victory and push toward a landslide of 300 or more electoral votes. North Carolina has 15 votes.

Independent polling suggests that New Mexico and Iowa, two traditionally GOP states, are out of reach for McCain. Other red states may be creeping away from him and into contention, including Montana.

The bottom line: McCain must overtake Obama in the many red states where he is trailing or tied — a tall order. Or he needs to gain some breathing room by winning Pennsylvania, where he trails by 12 percentage points, according to the AP-GfK poll.

Many of his own supporters say the race is all but over.

“I get the sense it’s shutting down,” said Tom Rath, a GOP consultant in New Hampshire where McCain trails by 18 points.

He added, “Where there’s a week, there’s hope.”

A couple of factors might cut McCain’s way.

First, there are still a good number of voters are open to changing their minds — from as low as 4 percent in Nevada to 14 percent in New Hampshire.

Second, the impact of race is a hard-to-measure factor as Obama seeks to become the nation’s first black president.

In three states — North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania — the number of white Democrats who said the word “violent” described most blacks hit double digits in the polling.

In those same states, Obama was having trouble winning over white Democrats — 20 percent of them in North Carolina said they were voting for McCain; 12 percent in Florida and 8 percent in Pennsylvania.

A senior GOP aide in Congress, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid angering his presidential nominee, said McCain’s advisers are being asked by some Republican leaders to focus the candidate’s travel on states with close Senate races — essentially abandoning his White House ambitions to help re-elect GOP senators.

But it’s Obama who may have coattails. Democrats lead the Senate races in Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia, according to AP-GfK polls. In North Carolina, GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole is essentially tied with state Sen. Kay Hagan.

In all four of those Senate races, the Democratic candidate leads among early voters, a sign of a strong ground game driven by the top of the ticket. Obama easily outpaces McCain among early voters, holding about a 2-1 advantage in six of the states.

Obama is favored on almost every issue in every state, the polling says:

_Voters in all eight states gave him the highest marks on whom they trust to fix the economy and improve health care.

_Even on the question of “who would make the right decision about national security,” typically a strong suit for McCain, Obama holds a slight lead in Nevada and is running even against his GOP rival in Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

_By large margins, voters in each of the eight states consider Obama the likely winner Tuesday.

_Voters in each state believe McCain has run a far more negative campaign.

The political landscape tilts against McCain. Just 8 percent of voters in New Hampshire think the country is headed in the right direction. Three-quarters of voters in Pennsylvania disapprove of Bush’s job performance. Nine in 10 voters in North Carolina are worried about the economy.

“People will vote for change, and Barack Obama represents that change,” said Gaylord, the GOP consultant in Virginia. Speaking of McCain, he said: “And try as he will — and he has — to be the candidate of change, he could not. He could not overcome the weight of George Bush‘s failed policies.”

The AP-GfK Battleground State Poll was conducted from Oct. 22-26 in eight states. It involved interviews by landline telephone with likely voters in each state, ranging from 600 in Florida and New Hampshire to 628 in Nevada. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points in Colorado and Nevada, and 4 points in the other states.

But Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is not like most politicians. After his conviction Monday on charges that he lied about free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor, the 84-year-old Stevens refused to drop out of his re-election race against Democrat Mark Begich.

And while he faces long odds in a contest where polls showed a close race even before the verdict, few in Alaska were willing to count Stevens out. Democrats hope to seize the once reliably Republican seat as part of their bid for a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate.

“It’s very possible that (Stevens) is going to win the election,” said Carl Shepro, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

While Begich has run a strong campaign, “Stevens has been blanketing the airwaves too,” Shepro said. “Even though he’s not here, he’s had a lot of air time.”

Many Alaskans believe that Stevens — a 40-year senator and a legend in Alaska politics — is being unjustly attacked and that the charges against him don’t amount to real corruption, Shepro said.

“A lot of people feel the senator is completely innocent and that there are people who have been doing favors for him without him being aware of it,” Shepro said. “The senator is very popular in Alaska.”

But Anchorage-based pollster Ivan Moore said Stevens is almost certain to lose.

“I think it’s pretty much inconceivable that Ted will be able to pull it out from this point,” said Moore, who has been polling on the Alaska Senate race for more than a year. Moore’s latest poll, completed last week as trial testimony was wrapping up, showed the Senate race essentially tied.

Many voters said they were waiting for a verdict to make up their minds, and most of them are likely to be convinced that as a convicted felon Stevens must be ousted from the Senate, Moore said. A Washington jury found Stevens guilty of seven felony corruption charges of accepting home renovations and other gifts from an oil executive and then lying about it.

The verdict “is going to hurt him to the point where he can’t win,” Moore said of Stevens.

Moore predicted a relatively close race, even with the conviction.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, virtually conceded the race in the wake of the guilty verdict.

“Ted Stevens served his constituents for over 40 years, and I am disappointed to see his career end in disgrace,” Ensign said. “Sen. Stevens had his day in court, and the jury found he violated the public’s trust — as a result he is properly being held accountable. This is a reminder that no one is above the law.”

The veteran senator was in no mood for accommodation Monday night.

In a statement issued by his Senate office, Stevens said he was disappointed but not surprised at the verdict, “given the repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct in this case.”

Stevens proclaimed his innocence and said, “I will fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I have.”

He asked Alaskans and his Senate colleagues to stand with him as he pursues his legal rights and his re-election campaign.

One of the most prominent of those colleagues, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, called Tuesday for Stevens to step down because he “has broken his trust with the people.” The verdict, McCain said in a statement issued by his campaign, was “a sign of the corruption and insider-dealing that has become so pervasive in our nation’s capital.”

Begich, the mayor of Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, did not address the verdict directly.

“This has been a very difficult year for Alaskans, and a long year,” Begich said in a statement. “I believe Alaskans will move forward because we have many critical issues and challenges ahead of us to deal with.”

Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party, said Stevens should resign from the Senate. “Alaskans deserve better from their public officials. It’s time for us to elect an ethical and honest senator who will move this state forward,” she said.

McHugh Pierre, a spokesman for the Alaska Republican Party, said the party continued to support Stevens, calling him a conservative who best represents the interests and beliefs of Alaskans.

Rep. Don Young, a veteran Alaska Republican who faces a tough re-election fight amid questions about his own ethics, said he still thinks Stevens can win.

“He’s the best thing for the Senate. Alaskans know this: This is a trumped-up charge,” Young said.

The Arizona senator said Obama had added a work requirement to his proposal to grant a 10 percent universal mortgage credit. A top Obama aide said the campaign added the requirement two weeks ago to avoid charges that the proposal provided “welfare” to non-working Americans.

“Thirteen days to go, and he changed his tax plan because the American people had learned the truth about it and they didn’t like it,” McCain told a crowd at lumber yard. “It’s another example that he’ll say anything to get elected.”

An Obama spokesman accused McCain of distortion and said the Democrat’s plan always included a work requirement, although it was discussed only within the campaign or to reporters who inquired about the particulars of the plan.

“Last week, Sen. McCain called Obama’s tax cuts for working people welfare. Today he’s claiming Sen. Obama doesn’t do enough to help the unemployed,” said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. “The only thing consistent about these attacks is how dishonest they are. All of Sen. Obama’s tax credits only go to workers and they always have.”

While criticizing Obama, McCain also targeted his own party. He complained the Bush administration was not yet buying up mortgages so homeowners facing foreclosure could renegotiate them at a more favorable interest rates. The GOP nominee has proposed a $300 billion plan, but a similar one is included in the $700 billion Wall Street bailout recently passed by Congress. Both McCain and Obama voted for that plan.

“I call on the administration to act now and buy up these mortgages and keep people in their homes,” McCain said before singling out Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. “And why is the secretary of the Treasury not ordering them to do that?”

The charges came at the start of a bus tour targeting blue-collar Florida workers who are like the Ohio plumber, Joe Wurzelbacher, who has become the central thematic element in speeches by McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

From Ormond Beach on the Atlantic Coast to Sarasota on the Gulf Coast, McCain was criticizing Obama’s tax plans and promoting his own proposals to cut taxes for individuals and businesses. After his stop at All Star Building Materials, he was moving on to a doctor’s office, a restaurant and a farm.

“Whether it’s Joe the Plumber in Ohio or Joe over here,” McCain said, pointing into the crowd, “we shouldn’t be taxing our small businesses more, as Sen. Obama wants to do. We need to be helping them expand their businesses and create jobs.”

Obama, speaking Wednesday in Virginia, rebutted such criticism, arguing that his tax plan would not raise taxes on small businesses and working couples earning less than $250,000 a year.

“Let’s be clear who John McCain is fighting for. He is not fighting for Joe the Plumber. He’s fighting for Joe the Hedge Fund Manager,” Obama said. “If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year — which includes 98 percent of small-business owners — you won’t see your taxes increase one single dime.”

McCain’s route not only covered the vote-rich “I-4 Corridor” through Orlando, in central Florida, but included informal stops between the more formal rallies. The goal was to boost McCain in a state George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004 but which Obama is threatening to seize despite a strong GOP machine and the Arizona senator‘s endorsement by Gov. Charlie Crist.

Florida offers 27 electoral votes, fourth-most in the country. A total of 270 is needed to win the presidency.

Recent polls show Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, with a slight lead over McCain. Nationally, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows McCain and Obama essentially even among likely voters, possible evidence of a tightened race 12 days before the Nov. 4 election.

McCain’s first stop in Florida, for coffee with Crist and three business owners from the Daytona Beach area, proved fruitful. Mike Murray, owner of the Starlite Diner, said he was concerned about both candidates raising taxes but planned to support McCain on Election Day.

“He’s got the experience,” Murray said as the candidate sat at a nearby booth. “I’m comfortable with him. I grew up knowing his name.”

The supporters in this video seemed (rightfully) disgusted that a fellow McCain supporter would take such low and indecent blows at the Democratic candidate and many even said this made them ‘change their mind’ about supporting McCain. Watch the video after the jump.

The Alaskan governor, added to the ticket because cocky McCain operatives believed anyone with XX chromosomes could vie for Hillary Clinton’s supporters, has proved as incapable of swinging women voters as she has of telling Katie Couric how Alaska’s proximity to Russia qualifies as foreign policy experience. Her only traction comes from the conservative base, and thus, she has been redeployed to the heartland, where warmed-over attacks on Obama’s tenuous connections to Bill Ayers still spark fire.

It should come as no shock that Palin’s rallies have gotten ugly. Everything she stands for is ugly, from her abuse of executive power (confirmed by the bipartisan panel investigating Troopergate) to the ease with which she distorts the public record (her own and others). But even given the level of national tension, given the rancor endemic to late-stage presidential campaigns, the recent reports of crowd members calling for Obama’s death go beyond the pale.

Outbursts like those we’ve seen in recent weeks-including the racial epithets shouted at a black cameraman- are not spontaneous. They are the result of a constant campaign of polarization, an endless barrage of misinformation.

And when the time is ripe, “everyone” knows who is “ruining” America: blacks and Jews with their secret radical agendas; gays who want rights; immigrants stealing American jobs; liberals who want to outlaw guns and religion and mandate abortions; and of course, greedy Wall Street fat cats-despite the two hundred million dollar tax cut McCain-Palin want to give them.

Many have sounded alarms, warning that this is how fascism starts. Those alarms do need to be sounded, something even the morally defunct McCain campaign acknowledged when the Senator called for his supporters to tone down things down. But fascism starts well before political rallies turn bloodthirsty and the political pit bulls snarl.

Ignorant rally-goers stoked by the negativity of a fever-pitch campaign are an easy target.  And certainly, we need to be militant against hate speech whenever and wherever it is heard. But if we focus on the foot soldiers, we will fail to pull back the curtain on the generals and military strategists running the ‘culture war.’

They are not Joe Sixpack and his Hockey Mom wife, and they don’t live on Main Street.  They are hatemongering pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. More importantly, they are politicians like John McCain, who depend on “experts” like the aforementioned to convince Americans that the country has been overrun by liberals- despite eight years of George W. Bush and his disastrous policies.

Or Sarah Palin, who may not be able to tell Katie Couric what newspapers she reads, but now that she’s cornered, will say anything to work her pit bulls into an angry, racist frenzy.

People’s regard for the Republican presidential nominee has deteriorated across-the-board since September, an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll showed Friday, with McCain losing ground in how favorably he’s seen and in a long list of personal qualities voters seek in White House contenders.

Perceptions of Obama have improved or remained steady. Beyond views of the two rivals’ character traits, McCain faces another problem — Obama is more trusted on the economy, the contest’s commanding issue, including a 15-percentage-point edge for better grasping how the raging financial crisis is affecting people.

Obama’s image has been sturdy even as voters’ views of the overall campaign have tumbled downhill since September. The portion of people saying the contest excites them has sunk to 32 percent while those calling it frustrating have grown to 41 percent — and in both cases, six in 10 of those whose feelings have worsened are McCain backers.

Negative campaigning and a month of intense public focus on collapsing global economic and financial markets have not been kind to McCain. The new AP-Yahoo! News poll of likely voters, conducted this month by Knowledge Networks, shows more people viewing him favorably than unfavorably by just 5 percentage points, down from a 21-point difference in mid-September.

During the same period, Obama went the other way, increasing a 5-percentage-point net favorable rating to 15 points. Now, Obama is seen favorably by 57 percent and McCain by 52 percent — a close margin that masks the opposite direction the two rivals’ ratings are heading.

“He kind of scared me,” Leesa Zick, 48, an undecided Republican from Edwardsville, Ill., said of McCain’s abrupt and short-lived suspension of his campaign last month during Capitol Hill talks on a financial package. “We need a president who can deal with multiple tasks. It seemed like it overwhelmed him.”

For McCain, the poll’s good news is that despite a difficult month, his public image is not dramatically worse than Obama’s and in several areas remains better. The public still rates him higher than Obama for keeping America safe, working with both political parties, and being decisive, experienced and competent.

“He’s more qualified than Obama, definitely, because of his experience and history, ” said Richard Tosti, 67, a Republican from Rochester, N.Y.

Zick and Tosti are among about 2,000 people the AP-Yahoo! News poll has been tracking since November. By repeatedly questioning them, the survey has opened a detailed window on how individuals have reacted to the campaign’s twists and turns.

Less than three weeks from Election Day, Obama has taken a solid lead over McCain in most national and swing-state polls. The AP-Yahoo! News survey underscores the morale problem McCain faces.

Obama supporters are more than twice as likely to say they’re excited about the race and significantly more likely to say they’re interested and hopeful. McCain backers, meanwhile, more often say they feel frustrated and helpless. Underscoring a period that has seen the rival candidates trade personal attacks, about a fifth of those backing each say they’re angry.

“There’s a lot of mudslinging, which I’ve never been a fan of,” said Eric Juhl, 27, a Republican and McCain backer from Abilene, Kan. “And to me, the media seems pretty left-wing oriented. It’s kind of frustrating.”

A sour public mood is typical late in presidential campaigns as both sides’ attacks accumulate, said University of Wisconsin political scientist and polling authority Charles Franklin. This year’s disenchantment is probably magnified by worries about how the candidates would bolster the economy, he said.

Even so, Obama has staked out a clear advantage on economic concerns in the AP-Yahoo! News poll. The Illinois senator is trusted more than McCain to improve the economy by 54 percent to 44 percent, and to handle the financial crisis by 53 percent to 46 percent.

Obama also has a 56 percent to 41 percent advantage for understanding how the financial crisis affects people. Unhappily for McCain, six in 10 voters who may still change their minds, about as many independents and even one in 10 McCain backers prefer Obama on that question.

“To me his background indicates he’d be a little more sensitive to the middle class” in addressing economic problems, Peggy Chilton, 72, an independent from Los Angeles who hasn’t decided on a candidate, said of Obama.

The numbers don’t get better for McCain when it comes to personal traits.

Following debates between the two rivals in which the Arizona senator has appeared angry at times, 46 percent consider him hot-tempered, more than triple the 13 percent who say so about Obama.

“He’d be a little nerve-racking to have in the White House, jumping real fast,” Darlene Finley, 48, an Obama-leaning independent from Ossineke, Mich., said of McCain. “When you’re talking about war, that’s something you don’t want to do, jumping real fast.”

Since September, McCain has lost ground on nearly every quality tested in the poll, including lower scores for being likable, decisive, honest, competent, intelligent and inspiring.

He’s also lost ground for understanding ordinary peoples’ problems, caring about “people like you” and improving America’s international standing. Growing numbers even see him as supporting big business over the public interest and being influenced by lobbyists — despite repeated vows to do exactly the opposite.

Obama’s ratings have stayed level since last month for most qualities tested, though he has shown some improvement in whether he’s considered experienced and decisive.

Paralleling McCain’s problems are similar ones faced by his running mate, Sarah Palin.

A month ago, more people said the Alaska governor made them more likely to vote for McCain than less likely by 14 percentage points. That gap is now down to 3 points — even as growing numbers say her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, makes them more inclined to support Obama.

The AP-Yahoo! News poll included 841 likely voters was conducted from Oct. 3-13 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Included were interviews with 373 people who initially said they were Democrats, 252 Republicans and 214 independents, for whom the margins of sampling error are plus or minus 5.1, 6.2 and 6.7 percentage points, respectively.

The poll was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

nazpatel (9:01:01 PM): u ready kid?

drewricketts (9:01:42 PM): what you think of bobby schiefer?

nazpatel (9:01:44 PM): this dudes old. haha.

drewricketts (9:02:04 PM): I think he’s the most moderate of the moderator folks
drewricketts (9:02:07 PM): politically

nazpatel (9:02:07 PM): they still have the uncommitted ohio voters thing.. come on, pick a new focus group

drewricketts (9:02:20 PM): oh! I’m watching it on abc
drewricketts (9:02:27 PM): keep me filled in on their dial thingies

nazpatel (9:02:32 PM): yeaa.. im excited cuz i read in the blogs that hes going to really press the candidates to answer the questions
nazpatel (9:02:40 PM): lets see how successful he is
nazpatel (9:02:54 PM): nice table set up

drewricketts (9:03:12 PM): he’s going to try to press them but you can’t press a skilled politician
drewricketts (9:03:13 PM): never

nazpatel (9:03:26 PM): kinda awkward… haha
nazpatel (9:03:26 PM): obama wore that tie at the DNC speech…… auspicious
nazpatel (9:03:54 PM): haha.. ok mccain stop wasting time with pleasantries

drewricketts (9:04:30 PM): freddie mae? sez John McCain
drewricketts (9:04:44 PM): he’s going to try to lock down the ‘saving the homeowner argument’

nazpatel (9:05:04 PM): maybe hes being clever and combining the two
nazpatel (9:05:04 PM): the ohio voters dial is barely above neutral
nazpatel (9:05:14 PM): i “KNOW the criticism”

drewricketts (9:05:44 PM): those dials are misleading because the more charismatic guy will ALWAYS get the dial turned

nazpatel (9:06:14 PM): maybe McCain was miss cleo in a past life
nazpatel (9:06:15 PM): yea i guess but thats not misleading cuz voters vote along those lines
nazpatel (9:06:15 PM): whos more likable

drewricketts (9:06:38 PM): protectionist obama!
drewricketts (9:06:50 PM): that will killll the economy

nazpatel (9:06:50 PM): the dials are SKYHIGH! yeaaaaaaa BARACK
nazpatel (9:06:50 PM): women are really lovin obama.

drewricketts (9:07:51 PM): uh oh…j-mac brings the first anecdote
drewricketts (9:07:55 PM): joe the plumber

nazpatel (9:07:55 PM): i think the table is really making them feel awkward
nazpatel (9:07:55 PM): obama is a little…. rehearsed.. and nervous-like
nazpatel (9:07:55 PM): ‘uh uh uh’

drewricketts (9:08:12 PM): obama pauses ten times more as he gets ten times closer to the win
drewricketts (9:08:49 PM): watch a video of Obama 2002 and it’s without the preggo pause
drewricketts (9:09:45 PM): re-aligning tax code is NOT a republican fave…let’s “redistribute wealth”…
drewricketts (9:09:47 PM): to oil barons

nazpatel (9:10:22 PM): i DO enjoy how he narrows his eyes toward mccain whenever he starts speaking lol
nazpatel (9:10:22 PM): like ‘yea? johnnie, lets hear what bs ur about to say’
nazpatel (9:10:22 PM): why is everyone named joe?
nazpatel (9:10:22 PM): man mccains flatlining. lol
nazpatel (9:10:22 PM): WHAT AN ALLEGORY
nazpatel (9:10:23 PM): shuttup john.
nazpatel (9:10:23 PM): can you tell im biased? lol
nazpatel (9:10:27 PM): 95% huh? i wonder who that unfortunate 5% is lol

drewricketts (9:10:49 PM): hahaha

nazpatel (9:10:49 PM): yea well when this topic came up in the last debate mccain INSISTED.. ‘look. i mean. im not gonna tax the wealthy. i dont wanna raise taxes for anyone!’

drewricketts (9:11:13 PM): joe the plumber is becoming a theme here…not sure if I get this

nazpatel (9:11:13 PM): shut the f@#$ up about joe the plumber!
nazpatel (9:11:13 PM): (can we publish that last sentence?)

drewricketts (9:11:23 PM): yes we can! yes we can!
drewricketts (9:11:26 PM): lol

nazpatel (9:11:54 PM): lol clever drew
nazpatel (9:11:26 PM): this whole exchange is truly awkward and redundant
nazpatel (9:11:54 PM): are they supposed to talk to each directly?
nazpatel (9:11:56 PM): i wanna see some mccain rage

drewricketts (9:12:05 PM): he will express it with smugness

nazpatel (9:12:05 PM): hes on roids. I BETCHA!

drewricketts (9:12:29 PM): (mccain takes notes to remember his anecdotes)

nazpatel (9:12:44 PM): obama seems genuine in his fumbling.. like ‘look i didnt rehearse. this is from the HEART’

drewricketts (9:13:22 PM): mccain just made a great point about taxes in the US
drewricketts (9:13:28 PM): he has a strong start so far

nazpatel (9:13:30 PM): mccain is coming off grandfatherly
nazpatel (9:13:30 PM): if ur grandfather was a card-carrying NRA member who hated DEM N#@$%S
nazpatel (9:13:54 PM): what was his good point?
nazpatel (9:14:14 PM): i missed it while thinking of a hilarious description of a racist grandpappy
nazpatel (9:14:24 PM): theyre asking the same questions
nazpatel (9:14:24 PM): ASK SOMETHING NEW
nazpatel (9:14:56 PM): they asked this question in BOTH previous debates.. about what theyre gonna cut out of their respective economic plans

drewricketts (9:15:26 PM): sigh

nazpatel (9:16:07 PM): i like the way he explained cutting defunct programs and strengthening ones we need.. it was really clear for some reason

drewricketts (9:16:37 PM): ooooh “profligate ways.” sez Obama
drewricketts (9:16:41 PM): good one

nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): ohio men & women are tied for super high right now
nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): “i just wanna get back to this home ownership”
nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): oh i like this moderator.
nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): hes strict
nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): mccain has sarah palin in his head
nazpatel (9:17:55 PM): u would get out a scalpel AFTER the hatchet?……
nazpatel (9:18:04 PM): why bother? lol
nazpatel (9:18:24 PM): the moderator is definitely doing a great job interrupting mccains canned talking points

drewricketts (9:18:40 PM): this supposed “spending freeze” of mccain’s will not include war spending
drewricketts (9:18:48 PM): pork barrel is a slavery term by the way

nazpatel (9:18:48 PM): hes making it more of a real debate
nazpatel (9:18:48 PM): “i know how to save billions”
nazpatel (9:18:48 PM): u know everything john.

drewricketts (9:19:04 PM): he knows how to create nuclear energy from his hands!

nazpatel (9:19:14 PM): yea i was wondering about the origin of that term….

drewricketts (9:19:45 PM): pork barrel fat was given as the leftover bonus to slaves in their portions

nazpatel (9:19:45 PM): mccain looks like a reptile

drewricketts (9:19:51 PM): the better the take or the harvest
drewricketts (9:19:58 PM): the more pork fat you’d get

nazpatel (9:20:14 PM): wooww
nazpatel (9:20:14 PM): we should totally say something about that on newsone

drewricketts (9:20:18 PM): hence the link to ‘wastefulness’ it emphasizes being reckless and prosperous

nazpatel (9:20:55 PM): WHOA
nazpatel (9:20:55 PM): that mccain comment

drewricketts (9:20:58 PM): john mccain sez : I’ M NOT BUSH … I’m his older cousin

nazpatel (9:21:04 PM): ‘if u wanted to run against pres bush, u should have run 4 years ago’

drewricketts (9:21:25 PM): I’m NOT BUSH … I’m his long-lost BFF
drewricketts (9:21:54 PM): McCain is coming out swinging…

nazpatel (9:21:59 PM): i think i heard a collective gasp in the audience

drewricketts (9:22:55 PM): Obama is responding well on this not-bipartisan issue
drewricketts (9:24:07 PM): EXACTLY…McCain has been bipartisan at POINTS in his career but he is clearly shifting toward the right
drewricketts (9:24:11 PM): for better or worse

nazpatel (9:25:39 PM): OHHHH hes challenging them

drewricketts (9:25:39 PM): schiefer’s questions are great

nazpatel (9:25:43 PM): SAY IT TO MAH FACE!

drewricketts (9:25:46 PM): lol

nazpatel (9:25:54 PM): yea theyre brilliant. that last one about negative campaigning was great

drewricketts (9:26:16 PM): McCain admits regrets
drewricketts (9:26:23 PM): that’s big

nazpatel (9:26:43 PM): so mccain is saying that his campaign is negative bc obama didnt sit down for town halls????? does that make sense???
nazpatel (9:26:51 PM): OH snap hes bringing up john lewis

drewricketts (9:27:00 PM): this is his Reagan moment
drewricketts (9:27:07 PM): and Obama, as a black man, cannot play tough on this
drewricketts (9:27:11 PM): he has to be humble to a fault
drewricketts (9:30:48 PM): sorry about this wacky connection

nazpatel (9:30:48 PM): ok ads against ur policies is acceptable. ads against character are NOT acceptable
nazpatel (9:31:28 PM): when obama laughs at mccains points its presidential. when mccain laughs, its sinister and condescending

drewricketts (9:31:42 PM): woooooow
drewricketts (9:31:50 PM): he mentioned the terrorist issue!

nazpatel (9:32:00 PM): can u believe there are 30 years between the two of them
nazpatel (9:32:10 PM): YEAAAAAA
nazpatel (9:32:10 PM): OBAMAAAAA

drewricketts (9:32:13 PM): mccain is genuinely angry right now
drewricketts (9:32:18 PM): he rolled his eyes!
drewricketts (9:32:44 PM): the American people don’t. wanna. hear. this bull$#%&.

nazpatel (9:32:44 PM): i missed that [eye roll]!

drewricketts (9:33:19 PM): schiefer baited him ! he baited mccain!

nazpatel (9:33:34 PM): “im proud of the ppl that come to my rallies”
nazpatel (9:33:40 PM): haha yea totally..

drewricketts (9:33:48 PM): culture wars to the max right now
drewricketts (9:33:55 PM): he’s volleying the whites

nazpatel (9:33:55 PM): seriously

drewricketts (9:34:08 PM): whatever
drewricketts (9:34:12 PM): whatever John McCain

nazpatel (9:34:50 PM): foreal.
nazpatel (9:35:20 PM): women are LUH_HUH_HUVVIN obama
nazpatel (9:35:20 PM): yea!

drewricketts (9:35:34 PM): I’m glad Barack Obama is diverting away from this argumentative petty stuff

drewricketts (9:35:57 PM): look at Barack’s smirk…he is also angry

nazpatel (9:36:11 PM): he keeps interrupting obama like a child
nazpatel (9:36:11 PM): yea he is.. i love it
nazpatel (9:36:20 PM): obama made a statement about ACORN today!
nazpatel (9:36:36 PM): i mean yday

drewricketts (9:36:54 PM): he looks very casual but his arguments are so focused

nazpatel (9:38:10 PM): yea thats the brilliance that is obama

drewricketts (9:38:23 PM): he’s thinking about five things at once
drewricketts (9:38:31 PM): and expressing them in perfect sequence
drewricketts (9:38:54 PM): his poise is tremendous

nazpatel (9:39:02 PM): OH SHIT
nazpatel (9:39:06 PM): GOOD F#@$ING ANSWER
nazpatel (9:39:20 PM): man that was a great response

drewricketts (9:40:05 PM): Obama is comporting himself as being above the fray

nazpatel (9:40:23 PM): goddamn, this guys questions are ON POINT

drewricketts (9:40:34 PM): he is precise but he is kind of killing McCain

nazpatel (9:40:40 PM): yea
nazpatel (9:40:50 PM): but mccains needs to get some guff

drewricketts (9:40:50 PM): because this requires solid response AND mental dexterity

nazpatel (9:40:56 PM): in a forum like this
nazpatel (9:42:37 PM): obama is a lawyer.. this debate stuff is a cakewalk for him
nazpatel (9:42:41 PM): HAHAH a role model to women…
nazpatel (9:42:43 PM): please.

drewricketts (9:43:02 PM): he’s going to spew a BUNCH of lies
drewricketts (9:43:14 PM): about MC Hockey Mom

nazpatel (9:43:35 PM): shes an idiot

drewricketts (9:43:48 PM): McCain: It’s time we had that breas–I mean, BReaTH of fresh air

nazpatel (9:43:48 PM): special needs families? autism?
nazpatel (9:43:56 PM): way to randomly pull an issue out of ur bum
nazpatel (9:44:29 PM): i like how obama called Palin a “politician”
nazpatel (9:44:31 PM): very calculated

drewricketts (9:44:46 PM): Obama is going to flip it on him…watch
drewricketts (9:44:48 PM): bam!

nazpatel (9:44:56 PM): HAHAHA NICE OBAMA

drewricketts (9:45:00 PM): spending freeze will cut off special needs bam!
drewricketts (9:45:03 PM): bam bam!
drewricketts (9:45:41 PM): John McCain’s dials will go low on this Iraq
drewricketts (9:45:53 PM): his sense of “right” and “wrong” is strange and Manichean

nazpatel (9:46:20 PM): haha yea theyre pretty low
nazpatel (9:46:20 PM): yea hes not creative enough to see gray
nazpatel (9:46:20 PM): manichean, good word to describe his ideologies

drewricketts (9:46:47 PM): that’s why I don’t dig culture wars
drewricketts (9:46:52 PM): it obscures the issues
drewricketts (9:47:09 PM): it muddles forensics ya dig?

nazpatel (9:47:19 PM): i dig.

drewricketts (9:48:14 PM): mccain keeps repeating ‘clean coal technology’ when he can’t remember what to say

nazpatel (9:48:21 PM): hahah

drewricketts (9:48:53 PM): Obama faces the camera!
drewricketts (9:48:55 PM): oh snap!
drewricketts (9:49:46 PM): “we can’t drill our way out of the problem”
drewricketts (9:49:51 PM): good rhetorical turn

nazpatel (9:51:11 PM): troof

drewricketts (9:51:19 PM): wooooow
drewricketts (9:51:26 PM): “he speaks so well”

nazpatel (9:51:34 PM): “i admire so much sen. obamas eloquence”

drewricketts (9:51:37 PM): forget what he says

nazpatel (9:51:37 PM): what a jerk

drewricketts (9:52:48 PM): this is the basis of the real debate
drewricketts (9:53:02 PM): how we define trade as the global economy dominates our own

nazpatel (9:53:11 PM): what. a. f@#$ing. jerk

drewricketts (9:53:22 PM): McCain rolled his eyes again

nazpatel (9:53:57 PM): damn it, i keep missing it

drewricketts (9:54:22 PM): Obama on automakers: we need to produce
drewricketts (9:54:32 PM): catch up with industry
drewricketts (9:54:35 PM): or lose to the world

nazpatel (9:54:41 PM): so true
nazpatel (9:55:04 PM): the dials are SOOO high!
nazpatel (9:55:07 PM): people are loving this idea
nazpatel (9:55:51 PM): the dials in the negatives right now with mccain

drewricketts (9:56:12 PM): McCain wants to suppress Colombian lower class, uphold the trade agreement even when it’s unfair

nazpatel (9:56:28 PM): jesus how many freaking times does obama have to say IM CUTTING TAXES before mccain stops lying about it

drewricketts (9:56:49 PM): anecdote #2
drewricketts (9:56:52 PM): let’s start a count
nazpatel (9:56:58 PM): i hate anecdotes
nazpatel (9:57:01 PM): ok so we’re at 2
nazpatel (9:57:13 PM): joe the plumber and some random chicks with no healthcare

drewricketts (9:57:33 PM): now Obama is gonna spill out a lot of numbers
drewricketts (9:57:47 PM): that will not be the same after the real budget comes in front of his face

nazpatel (9:58:31 PM): yea true

drewricketts (9:58:45 PM): healthcare issue is going to hit middle America
drewricketts (9:58:54 PM): this is time for the rehearsed speech from both guys

nazpatel (9:59:06 PM): but even if its not a realistic plan.. the fact that its so hopeful and so centered on getting everyone healthcare.. proves hes the guy for the job
nazpatel (9:59:21 PM): physical fitness programs?

drewricketts (9:59:22 PM): mccain btw is talking about things we need to have
drewricketts (9:59:28 PM): even as he says spending freeze
drewricketts (9:59:38 PM): joe the plumber AGAIN!
drewricketts (9:59:42 PM): again with JOE!

nazpatel (9:59:46 PM): hahaha… #3
nazpatel (10:00:29 PM): man women hate mccain

drewricketts (10:00:29 PM): Joe Six Pack = Joe the Plumber

nazpatel (10:00:41 PM): even though his VP is a woman
nazpatel (10:00:51 PM): mccain is indignant

drewricketts (10:01:20 PM): his anger is seething at every point
drewricketts (10:01:25 PM): watch his temples pulse

nazpatel (10:01:29 PM): YES
nazpatel (10:01:39 PM): he wants to ‘reach across the aisle’ and deck obama

drewricketts (10:01:59 PM): this is all such absurd theater, off the record

nazpatel (10:02:19 PM): i think hes so emotional bc hes about to go down in history as the man who lost a presidential race to a black man
nazpatel (10:02:19 PM): yea it really is

drewricketts (10:02:54 PM): alyson (10:02:34 PM): hahahahahah yes now he’s talking to joe!
i bet you there is one motherf@#$%r out there named joe who is a plumber
and he is so excited right now

nazpatel (10:03:36 PM): haha

drewricketts (10:03:41 PM): Joe is a running meme to rep for the common man ethos

nazpatel (10:04:03 PM): obama drinks water.
nazpatel (10:04:09 PM): hes annoyed.. rightfully so

drewricketts (10:04:31 PM): he has to hydrate to rip into this flimsy polemic

nazpatel (10:04:57 PM): LOL
nazpatel (10:05:00 PM): LOLOLOL

drewricketts (10:05:29 PM): “he wants government to do the job” Really? You want a leader to lead and that’s bad?
drewricketts (10:05:34 PM): Really John McCain?

nazpatel (10:05:44 PM): mccain is rambling

drewricketts (10:06:56 PM): Roe v. Wade!

nazpatel (10:07:03 PM): MAN THIS MODERATOR ROCKS

drewricketts (10:07:05 PM): damn…he’s going for the gusto

nazpatel (10:07:14 PM): are u kidding me?
nazpatel (10:07:27 PM): EVERY supreme court justice appointment is political
nazpatel (10:07:29 PM): f@#$.
nazpatel (10:07:32 PM): mccain is stupid

drewricketts (10:07:50 PM): I think this ideological battle over judges and even over tax policy
drewricketts (10:07:58 PM): is boring most voters

nazpatel (10:08:05 PM): yea i was just about to say that

drewricketts (10:08:05 PM): even though I think it’s pithy

nazpatel (10:08:11 PM): avg voters dont give a crap about it

drewricketts (10:08:18 PM): no one knows off-hand what a Federalist is

nazpatel (10:08:21 PM): i think its very important.. but yea voters arent voting on this stuff

drewricketts (10:08:30 PM): not no one but you get me
drewricketts (10:08:56 PM): A bunch of Joe Six packs just took a beer break

nazpatel (10:09:03 PM): LOLLLLL

drewricketts (10:09:18 PM): they’re hopping in pick up trucks to get a pack of Marlboros
drewricketts (10:09:28 PM): and a 24 case of Coors
drewricketts (10:09:36 PM): Miller genuine draft if it’s payday
drewricketts (10:09:58 PM): Obama just won with women. Hands down

nazpatel (10:09:59 PM): i think its great that obama is talking directly about roe v wade
nazpatel (10:10:05 PM): rather than dancing around it like a pansy
nazpatel (10:10:19 PM): *cough cough* mccain *cough*
nazpatel (10:10:34 PM): totally
nazpatel (10:10:40 PM): anecdote #4!

drewricketts (10:10:42 PM): Lily Ledbetter

drewricketts (10:10:46 PM): GReAT reference

drewricketts (10:11:21 PM): Lily Ledbetter just entered history
drewricketts (10:11:32 PM): there’s probably a WaPo or NYT article on her somewhere

nazpatel (10:11:42 PM): we have to change the culture of america? wtf

drewricketts (10:12:28 PM): http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/the-democrats-secret-weapon-lilly-ledbetter/

nazpatel (10:12:28 PM): haha really a bad procedure.. terrible
nazpatel (10:12:34 PM): god hes dumb

drewricketts (10:12:55 PM): john mccain just claimed ‘mainstream america’
drewricketts (10:13:05 PM): eyeroll 3
drewricketts (10:14:09 PM): JMAC – “this is my position on vaginas”

nazpatel (10:14:13 PM): lol
drewricketts (10:14:17 PM): O’BAM! – “this is MY position on vaginas”
drewricketts (10:14:21 PM): (neither of us has one)

nazpatel (10:14:47 PM): yea well at least obamas view says ‘ppl with vaginas are in the best position to make a decision about vaginas’
nazpatel (10:15:08 PM): OH MAN.. this is a great segue into abstinence only education and sex-education
nazpatel (10:15:18 PM): BAM bristol palin!

drewricketts (10:15:21 PM): the ELOQUENCE of Sen. Obama!
drewricketts (10:15:47 PM): We adopt children…and we raise the special needz!

nazpatel (10:16:03 PM): lol

drewricketts (10:16:10 PM): education
nazpatel (10:17:15 PM): i feel like obama feels like hes been fighting a campaign against a moron
nazpatel (10:17:29 PM): hes just way too competent

drewricketts (10:17:34 PM): an army of new teachers
drewricketts (10:17:37 PM): new industry
drewricketts (10:17:46 PM): investment in intelligence and skill

nazpatel (10:17:46 PM): NICE
nazpatel (10:17:52 PM): so genius
nazpatel (10:18:02 PM): ohio voters are off the charts on this

drewricketts (10:18:10 PM): that debt he speaks of? hedge funds own the debt on federal student loans
drewricketts (10:18:28 PM): and make profits when it fluctuates
drewricketts (10:19:02 PM): mccain is gonna talk about choice
drewricketts (10:19:03 PM): all day

nazpatel (10:19:05 PM): blah
drewricketts (10:19:08 PM): blah
drewricketts (10:19:09 PM): lol

nazpatel (10:19:13 PM): haha u were dead on

drewricketts (10:19:14 PM): knock on wood

nazpatel (10:19:17 PM): choice and competition
nazpatel (10:19:34 PM): we find bad teachers another line of work?

drewricketts (10:19:38 PM): Obama advocates increasing choice

nazpatel (10:19:40 PM): prostitution? oil rigs?

drewricketts (10:19:46 PM): LOL
drewricketts (10:19:48 PM): hahahha

nazpatel (10:19:59 PM): yea why does mccain talk about choice in everything except abortion
nazpatel (10:20:04 PM): HELLO INCONSISTENCY

drewricketts (10:20:05 PM): Teach for America shout out!

nazpatel (10:20:11 PM): holla!
nazpatel (10:21:31 PM): haha funny no child left behind joke

drewricketts (10:21:51 PM): Obama doubled the number of charter schools
drewricketts (10:22:00 PM): F*** teacher union corruption
drewricketts (10:22:06 PM): invest in GOOD schools

nazpatel (10:22:20 PM): EXACTLY
nazpatel (10:22:25 PM): like the LAB schools in chciago
nazpatel (10:22:34 PM): where his daughters go and i worked in during college
nazpatel (10:23:04 PM): NICE. americas youth not an interest group.. theyre our future
nazpatel (10:23:26 PM): oh god school vouchers….
nazpatel (10:23:29 PM): not this.

drewricketts (10:23:39 PM): they just cling…McCain is clinging

nazpatel (10:24:06 PM): yea he got owned

drewricketts (10:24:32 PM): mccain is having a comeback
drewricketts (10:24:37 PM): on the accountability point

nazpatel (10:24:51 PM): yea he is
nazpatel (10:24:54 PM): i was about to say that

drewricketts (10:25:03 PM): he is saying…it’s not just money..

nazpatel (10:25:09 PM): yea true
nazpatel (10:25:10 PM): its a good point

drewricketts (10:26:46 PM): McCain is going so sarcastically
drewricketts (10:26:54 PM): website shout out
drewricketts (10:26:58 PM): mydebates.org
drewricketts (10:27:02 PM): ad money cha ching!

nazpatel (10:27:27 PM): hahaha
nazpatel (10:27:41 PM): hes stealing obamas platform

drewricketts (10:27:42 PM): America needs a new direction sez J-Mac…

nazpatel (10:27:45 PM): biter

drewricketts (10:27:49 PM): ..and an OLD hand to lead it

nazpatel (10:27:54 PM): hahaha

drewricketts (10:28:10 PM): what’s the over-under on another Joe reference?

nazpatel (10:28:16 PM): who knows

drewricketts (10:28:18 PM): 2 to 1?
drewricketts (10:28:22 PM): 2.5 to 1

nazpatel (10:28:28 PM): 2 to 1 i think

drewricketts (10:29:34 PM): closing statements are sober on both sides
drewricketts (10:29:39 PM): change the central part

nazpatel (10:29:40 PM): yea they are
nazpatel (10:29:41 PM): depressing really

drewricketts (10:29:54 PM): a lot of ‘fundamental’ this and that
drewricketts (10:30:17 PM): it’s like: Look, dummy, I’ll give it to ya simple

nazpatel (10:30:26 PM): haha

drewricketts (10:30:35 PM): you need basic resources to survive…I will give you those

nazpatel (10:31:07 PM): obama f@#$%g ROCKED mccain

drewricketts (10:31:26 PM): McCain acknowledged he did a good job though

nazpatel (10:31:31 PM): mccains suit is too tight

Alabama Fri, Oct. 24

California Mon, Oct. 20

Connecticut Tues, Oct. 21

Iowa Fri, Oct. 24

Kansas Mon, Oct. 20

Maine Tue, Oct. 21

Massachusetts Wed, Oct. 15***

Minnesota Tue, Oct. 14***

Nevada Tue, Oct. 14***

New Jersey Tues, Oct. 14***

Oregon Tue, Oct. 14***

Utah In person Tue, Oct. 28

Vermont Wed, Oct. 29

West Virginia Wed, Oct. 15***

Wisconsin Wed, Oct. 15 (or Mon, Nov. 3 at office)***

ELECTION DAY IS NOVEMBER 4th! ONLY 21 DAYS LEFT!!

LINKS:

www.VoteForChange.com, for information on registering to vote.

www.barackobama.com

www.johnmccain.com

***Red highlight indicates a registration deadline occurring THIS WEEK! If you live in one of these states, make sure you GET REGISTERED!

“He has to make the case that he’s different than Bush and better than Obama on the economy,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of more than a dozen prominent Republicans who in interviews during the past week expressed concern over the course of McCain’s bid. “If he doesn’t win that case, it’s all over, and it’s going to be a very bad year for Republicans.”

Several Republicans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering McCain, said the campaign should have sought to plant doubts about Obama’s associations with 1960s-era radical William Ayers and others months ago, rather than waiting until the campaign’s final weeks. Doing so now, they said, makes the 72-year-old McCain come off as angry, grouchy and desperate, playing into Democrats’ hands.

Rather, these Republicans said, McCain needs to strike a balance in his tone – appearing presidential while also questioning Obama’s readiness to serve and judgment to lead. And, several said McCain should close the campaign on an honorable note.

“He doesn’t need an attack strategy, he needs a comeback strategy,” said Alex Castellanos, a longtime national GOP media consultant who worked for McCain primary rival Mitt Romney.
The unsolicited advice comes as McCain campaign officials are becoming increasingly discouraged. From junior aides to top advisers, the frustration is palpable. Some argue the media isn’t giving McCain a fair shake and are weary of the increasingly problematic environment working against the GOP. Tensions have grown over how hard to go after Obama amid concerns about irreparably damaging McCain’s straight-shooter reputation.

And the candidate himself, the target of a negative whisper campaign in the 2000 GOP primary, appears conflicted on the campaign trail. He’s cheery and smiling during question-and-answer sessions with crowds but becomes visibly annoyed – even surly – when he reads aloud scripted attacks on Obama and Democrats.
Despite the polls showing Obama with a lead nationally and challenging for states long in the Republican column, none of the Republicans interviewed said the race was lost. They said McCain can prevail if he presents himself as the optimistic visionary the public wants at deeply worrisome economic times.h and better than Obama on the economy,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of more than a dozen prominent Republicans who in interviews during the past week expressed concern over the course of McCain’s bid. “If he doesn’t win that case, it’s all over, and it’s going to be a very bad year for Republicans.”

The story was first reported in the TimesUnion.com.

Edward McDonough and Larry Bugbee, the Democratic and Republican County Board of Election chairs, said that “the error was not deliberate” in a joint statement issued Friday.

“In preparation of absentee ballots for the November 4th General Election, a typographical error was made in the name of one of the candidates. The error was included on only 300 out of more than 4000 absentee ballots that will be mailed out this month. The Board of Elections acted quickly to correct the typographical error and regrets the error.”

Bugbee told the TimesUnion.com that despite having three different staff members look over the ballot, “somehow the typo got by us.”

The misspelling comes, coincidentally, at the same time that the McCain-Palin campaign has increased personal attacks on Obama, emphasizing his ties to radical liberals and his time spent “palling around with terrorists.”

The hostility against Obama from the GOP opponents and their surrogates has been intense, with supporters shouting ‘Kill him!’ at McCain-Palin rallies.

Jen Psaki, Obama spokeswoman has said, “We’re glad officials are working to correct this error and we assume it won’t happen again.”

‘We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’

Martin Luther King and many others, both black and white, gave their time, energy and often their lives to guarantee that African Americans have the right to vote, as well as the desire to vote. They fought, struggled suffered and often died with the hope of a future America, where Africans Americans were fully integrated into the political process.

As militant as Malcolm X was, he also knew there were 2 ways to bring about social change, the ballot and the bullet. Today, 69% of all eligible African Americans are registered to vote. That means 31% aren’t, a total of 7.5 million African-Americans. In 2000 the difference between Al Gores and George Bush’s vote total in Florida, the deciding state was less than 400 voters. Imagine if 400 extra African American voters were registered and voted? We might’ve avoided the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown!

Voting is not only important on the presidential level. If Barack Obama wasn’t voted in as a state senator by the people from Chicago, we might not have heard of him today. Voting on the local level is very important to make sure that social programs, schools and other programs are funded in your neighborhood. Several factors that affect the African American community can be changed through voting. Many African Americans are victims of racial profiling. Voting ensure that this issue will be brought to lawmakers and that can make a difference. This year many African Americans had their homes foreclosed. By voting for a candidate who opposes predatory lending we can avoid situations like that. Gun violence is a big issue in black communities. If we can vote on the issues and candidates that help keep the guns out of our neighborhoods, we can reduce the number of young black males killed every year. African American are also several times more likely to be arrested and convicted. Unjust drug laws disproportionately affect African Americans, leaving thousands of black males in jail and thousands of children with no fathers. Through voting we can ensure that African Americans are not unjustly or disproportionately incarcerated.

Today, we are at the crossroads of history. There are two paths that will take our country in two dramatically divergent directions. We, the American people, have a choice to decide which way the county will go. Our decision will affect ourselves, our country, our futures, the futures of our children, the world and the future of the world. WE cannot afford to just sit on the sidelines and see what happens, we must be involved. Can we afford to tell our children and grandchildren to say we had a chance to make a difference but didn’t register to vote? Can we tell them we had a chance at making change but didn’t want to take time out of our days and go to the polls?

Not only must we register to vote but we must make sure our friends family and co-workers are registered.

If you have to nag, argue, plead or beg to get someone to vote it’s well worth your time.

If you have a grandmother, grandfather or aunt who needs a ride to the polls take him/her.

If you know a friend who doesn’t believe voting matters, explain to them why it does.

Make sure your parents and family are registered. If your children are over 18 make sure they are registered and they vote. Your vote matters as much as Bill Gates, Jay-Z, or Oprah’s.

Important Links:

www.VoteForChange.com

www.barackobama.com

From: Diddy, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige & Kevin Liles

WE ARE IN A STATE OF EMERGENCY! YOU MUST REGISTER TO VOTE TODAY! WE ARE ONLY 27 DAYS AWAY FROM THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN OUR LIFETIME!

We are at war, banks are closing, people are losing their jobs and houses every day. It is our responsibility to protect our futures. Time is running out. You must register to vote! Barack Obama cannot win this election on his own; he needs our help. This election is about us. This election is about our children’s future. If you have not registered to vote, you are disrespecting everyone that sacrificed their lives for you to have the right. You are also disrespecting your future. The time is NOW for us to use the voices with which God has blessed us. We need you to do all you can. Here is what you need to do:

-Register to vote! For a full listing of registration deadlines in your state, click here.

-Get as many people as you can to register with you.

-Go to the poll and VOTE on NOVEMBER 4th!

Barack Obama said it best, “Eight is Enough.” No longer will we stand by and follow leadership with no regard for us and no accountability to us. We can be the deciding factor in this election, but you must register to vote to make your voice heard. Who are we? We are young America. This is our moment of truth. Are YOU registered for change? Make sure that on November 4th, we are able to say that we did everything in our power to make sure that Barack Obama becomes the next President of the United States. We owe this to our children, our parents, our grandparents and ourselves. We need you to become a part of TEAM OBAMA.

This is the most important election of our time. REGISTER TO VOTE TODAY and VOTE TO MAKE HISTORY ON NOVEMBER 4th!!

Visit www.VoteForChange.com to register to vote today! It is our duty to make our voices heard. STOP what you’re doing right now and let’s REGISTER TO VOTE. Time is running out!

God Bless,

Sean “Diddy” Combs

Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter

Mary J. Blige

Kevin Liles

In this way, conservatives have attempted to argue that their opposition to affirmative action is not racially motivated, but rather flows from noble principle.

There are general problems with this argument. For one, conservatives’ hand-wringing about merit seems not to apply to the estimated half of all job openings in the United States that aren’t posted and instead go to connected insiders.

Nor do such concerns apply to legacy admissions at universities, which account for a significantly higher percentage of entries than does affirmative action, especially at elite schools. (Though most media have been too polite to make much of it, John McCain himself would never have been accepted into the naval academy on his own merits and his well-documented abysmal performance while there would have sunk the career aspirations of a less well-connected midshipman.)

Both types of preferential treatment-legacy admits and non-competitive hires-disproportionately benefit the already better off. But if there were any doubts that the right-wing’s harping on affirmative action as the cause of declining American standards was disingenuous, Sarah Palin’s selection as the GOP’s choice for Vice President and the right-wing’s defense of her as a viable candidate should put those questions to rest.

To call Palin mediocre might be overly generous. Regardless, only a movement as contemptuous of American political institutions as the modern right, could argue with a straight face that she merits serious consideration as a possible President of the United States.

Her obvious, willful ignorance of basic knowledge and her evident pride in that ignorance were on full display when she crowed during the VP debate, “I’ve only been at this for, what, like five weeks.” This comment demonstrated her monumental self-delusion (does she actually think she’s been a quick-study?) and her conviction that being no more well-informed than a typical American adult is actually a badge of honor.

All of which is par for a movement that doesn’t actually care about merit. Instead, the modern right concerns itself with defending the ramparts of white privilege against the onslaught of “uppity” minorities and their liberal enablers. Hence, when blatantly inept aspirants prove themselves to be willing stooges for the perpetuation of that privilege, they become heroic precisely because of their lack of merit and qualification.

In a recent Newsweek article, Jon Meacham reminds us that we’ve been down this road before: “In 1970 a Nebraska senator, Roman L. Hruska, was defending Richard Nixon’s nomination of U.S. circuit Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. An underwhelming figure, Carswell was facing criticism that he was too ‘mediocre’ for elevation. Hruska tried an interesting counterargument: ‘Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.’”

As Meacham notes, we can certainly come from humble circumstances and achieve great things. But the right-wing seems to aspire to mediocrity; they celebrate ignorance, lack of curiosity and an insistence that you need not ever be self-critical because you have no need to try to improve yourself. In these traits, the movement sees resoluteness. Others might reasonably see in it a recipe for arrogant incompetence.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson penned a favorite phrase of conservatives, the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This phrase is supposed to (a) convey compassion for those coddled poor souls whose low standards have only made them worse off in the long run, and (b) to project deep, serious thought about the need to uphold timeless verities and lofty standards worthy of a great nation.

But that’s all a sick joke in the face of the endemic crony-ism of the Bush years, the right wing’s embarrassingly thin arguments for defending baldly cynical nominees to the Supreme Court, like Carswell and Clarence Thomas (you don’t have to be white to play this game) and now Sarah Palin.

The bigotry on display here is, however, anything but “soft”-the undeserving are perfectly qualified as long as they show proper contempt for the actually under-privileged. And those “low expectations” are to be praised and fiercely defended so long as they’re in the service of bigotry and contempt.

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and the chairman of the NRA’s political action committee planned stops Thursday in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada to talk about the move.

LaPierre said the two agree on many issues important to the group.

“He’s cast more than 60 votes in the Senate in support of the Second Amendment,” LaPierre said.

The NRA‘s Political Victory Fund has spent more than $2.3 million opposing Democratic nominee Barack Obama. The chairman of the political action committee, Chris W. Cox, says its spending in the presidential race will grow to “eight figures” by Election Day. Besides ads, encouraging battleground-state gun owners to vote will be a key focus, he said.

The PAC was running an ad Thursday in USA Today accusing Obama of waffling on gun-rights issues and challenging his statements that he supports the right to bear arms. Obama has said he respects the Second Amendment but doesn’t think it precludes “some commonsense gun laws so that we don’t have kids being shot on the streets of cities like Chicago.”

The NRA PAC’s future spending will target Obama on gun issues and start publicizing the records of McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, LaPierre said. McCain’s selection of Palin was a plus, LaPierre said.

“She’s a hunter, she’s a Second Amendment supporter and she’s a tremendous asset to the ticket,” he said.

Palin, an NRA member, received an A-plus rating from the group when she ran for governor in 2006. That compares to an NRA grade in the average range for McCain in his last Senate race. McCain isn’t an NRA member.

Palin has been an NRA booster, particularly for its education and safety programs, during her career in government. As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she used $750 from her city campaign fund to upgrade her NRA membership.

The NRA doesn’t always endorse presidential candidates. It has backed President Bush but declined to endorse Bob Dole in the 1996 race or President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Obama has been endorsed by the American Hunters and Shooters Association, which calls itself a “mainstream group of hunters” that supports safe and responsible gun ownership.

The International Monetary Fund, in a World Economic Outlook released Wednesday, slashed growth projections for the global economy and predicted the United States – the epicenter of the financial meltdown – will continue to lose traction.

“The world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s,” the IMF said in its report.

The IMF now projects that the global economy, which grew by a hardy 5 percent last year, will lose considerable speed, slowing to 3.9 percent this year. It is forecast to weaken even more – to just 3 percent – next year, marking the worst showing since 2002. In the past, the IMF has called global growth of 3 percent or less the equivalent to a global recession.

The IMF’s projection was made before the Federal Reserve and six other major central banks from around the world slashed interest rates Wednesday in an attempt to prevent a financial crisis from becoming a global economic meltdown.

The Fed reduced its key rate from 2 percent to 1.5 percent. In Europe, which also has been hard hit by the financial crisis, the Bank of England cut its rate by half a point to 4.5 percent, while the European Central Bank sliced its rate to 3.75 percent.

Also taking part were the central banks of China, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland. The Bank of Japan said it strongly supported the actions.

The financial crisis, which erupted in the United States in August 2007 and has quickly spread around the globe, entered a tumultuous new phase last month, badly shaking confidence in global financial institutions and markets, the IMF said. It has triggered a cascading series of bankruptcies, forced mergers and radical government interventions – such as the United States’ unprecedented $700 billion financial bailout – to stem the fallout.

The new projections come before a gathering of the world’s top economic powers on Friday and the weekend meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. The jarring financial crisis is likely to figure prominently in those discussions.

In the United States, the economy, which grew by 2 percent last year, is projected to slow to 1.6 percent this year. Growth would screech to a virtual halt in 2009, barely budging at just 0.1 percent. That would mark the worst showing since 1991, when the country was pulling out of a recession.

“With a recession now looking increasingly likely, the key questions are, how deep will the downturn be, when will a recovery get under way and how strong will it be?” the IMF asked. Much will hinge on how effective the United States’ steps to stabilize financial markets and get credit flowing more freely again turn out to be. Another important factor is whether these and other actions turn around U.S. consumers, whose retrenchment is hurting the economy.

The IMF – and many private economists – believe the U.S. economy will probably contract in the final three months of this year and the first three months of next year, meeting a classic definition of a recession. The economy’s last recession was in 2001.

The government’s bailout package is aimed at thawing lending by buying bad mortgage-related debt from troubled financial institutions. The idea is that the banks’ books would then be cleaner, putting them in a better position to lend and get the economy moving.

The IMF said this effort should help to stabilize markets but even so “the process of balance-sheet repair will be long and arduous.” Credit availability is likely to remain constrained throughout 2009, the IMF said.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned in a speech Tuesday that the economy’s outlook for this year has darkened and the pain could last for some time. His remarks were seen as heralding the rate cut Tuesday.

Looking at other countries, Germany’s growth will slow to 1.8 percent this year, down from 2.5 percent last year. France’s growth will weaken to just 0.8 percent, compared with 2.2 percent in 2007. Britain’s economy will see growth taper to 1 percent, down from 3 percent last year. Canada’s growth will tail off to 0.7 percent this year, from 2.7 percent last year.

In Japan, growth will cool to just 0.7 percent, from 2.1 percent last year.

Global powerhouses China and India will see growth clock in this year at a robust 9.7 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. Even if those projections prove correct, they would still mark downgrades from their blistering performances last year. Russia’s economy should grow by a brisk 7 percent this year, down from 8.1 percent last year.

Inflation around the world remains high, driven up by surging energy and food prices through much of this year.

It will be tricky for Bernanke and his counterparts in other countries to navigate weak growth and inflation pressures, the IMF said.

“The immediate policy challenge is to stabilize financial conditions, while nursing economies through a period of slow activity and keeping inflation under control,” it said.

The debate’s town hall format is McCain’s favorite style of campaigning. He asked Obama to appear with him in a series of town hall debates this past summer, but Obama wouldn’t take him up on the challenge.

That leaves Tuesday night’s debate four weeks before Election Day as the only joint town hall that the two are scheduled to hold. The event at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., is being moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw and will include questions on both foreign and domestic policy raised by the audience and voters participating through the Internet.

But the candidates are likely to go after each other on character issues, which McCain’s team has forcefully re-injected into the campaign since the weekend.

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has raised Obama’s ties to 1960s-era radical William Ayers and to the Democrat’s former pastor, the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In New Mexico on Monday, McCain himself asked, “Who is the real Sen. Obama?”

Obama retorted in North Carolina that McCain was engaging “in the usual political shenanigans and smear tactics” to distract from economic issues, even as his campaign rolled out a video recounting McCain’s involvement in the 1980s Keating Five savings and loan scandal in which the Senate Ethics Committee criticized his “poor judgment.”

The newest TV ad from the Obama campaign plays up widespread reports that McCain’s focus on the Democrat’s past associations is an effort to turn the discussion away from the economy. “As Americans lose their jobs, homes and savings, it’s time for a president who’ll change the economy, not change the subject,” says the ad released Tuesday.

The town hall is McCain’s signature — one way he built his “Straight Talk” reputation by interacting with voters in the 2000 campaign and then pulled himself out of single digits to win this year’s Republican primary. Since he won the nomination, however, the audiences for these events have needed to get tickets and have not been the come-one-come-all events of the primaries.

Obama has used the town hall format sporadically throughout his campaign, but not recently.

Instead the Democratic nominee has carefully protected his lead with a highly scripted campaign style ever since an off-the-cuff line blew up into a false controversy four weeks ago. Ever since, he’s been exclusively sticking to rallies and speeches with a TelePrompTer almost always feeding him prepared text to read.

Obama’s last town hall was on Sept. 12 — three days after he went on a riff about how McCain is talking about change when he’s really just like President Bush and concluded, “You can put lipstick on a pig.”

Obama hadn’t even mentioned McCain running mate Sarah Palin before using the line, but the McCain campaign argued it was a clear reference to her signature line during her nomination acceptance speech the week before, when she said the only difference between hockey moms like her and a pit bull is lipstick.

No matter Obama’s intent, the debate dominated a full day of campaign coverage and distracted from Obama’s plans to focus the campaign on criticism of McCain.

Obama went ahead with two more town halls scheduled for the following three days — one the next day in Virginia, where he lashed out at McCain and the media for blowing up his comment, and another two days later in New Hampshire, where a voter drew the spotlight when he rose and demanded to know when Obama would bring more of a fighting spirit against his critics.

Obama isn’t the only one trying to minimize the chance for an unscripted moment at this critical stage of the campaign. McCain still holds his signature town hall meetings but has limited his interaction with the media.

McCain’s campaign plane is still emblazoned “Straight Talk Express,” but the couch installed at the front doesn’t carry reporters for freewheeling conversations like in the early days on his primary campaign bus trips. The town hall debate could be McCain’s chance to again to come across to voters as feisty, warm, engaging and quick-witted. Those qualities are harder to show in scripted events.

But a town hall debate is not the same as a town hall campaign event — McCain will be sharing the stage with Obama, and his every word will be parsed.

“I think – I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico.com in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “It’s condominiums where – I’ll have them get to you.”

This reveals two important things about the Republican presidential candidate, both of which I think it’s fair to say we already knew: 1) He’s rich and likes to show it. 2) He’s old.

According to his staff, it’s at least four and earlier estimates say at least seven. Either way, the upper limit of how many houses he might, supposedly own are about a dozen. If it were a number like 4,986,765,992, perhaps we might forgive the uncertainty. However, if we consider our second revelation, that McCain is as old as God, it allows some leverage on this point.

Set McCain’s obscene amount of property holdings to Obama’s alleged elitism. If Obama were asked the same question, he would likely respond, “I’ve got a place in Hyde Park and I grew up in a small house in Honolulu with my grandma.” That, too, with confidence.

Meanwhile, McCain claims to represent middle America as he stands in a supermarket in 520 dollar Ferragamo loafers. Nothing says foreign policy experience with such apt grandeur as Italian leather.

Add to this Cindy McCain’s extravagant haircuts and her supposed comment about relying on small planes to get around her home state of Arizona.

Not to beat up on poor Johnnyboy, but the Republican candidate has made it a central theme of his campaign to point out Obama’s elite private education and his uppity attitude towards middle America, a constituency that Obama represents much more accurately than McCain.

I’ll take elite over ostentatious. Sorry, McCain.

Watch Obama rip into McCain about ‘being rich’. . .

What the hell is your problem?! Do you realize that the presidential campaign has now been going on for almost two years?
Wait, let me guess: you’ve been standing in the cereal aisle at your local supermarket since several weeks before the Iowa Caucus, trying to decide what to eat for breakfast, evaluating the health and nutrition claims printed on the boxes of Fruit Loops and All-Bran. (They both make some interesting points, I know.)

Sorry. Forgive me. You may have detected a bit of sarcasm in my tone, Mr. and Mrs. Swing Voter, as perceptive as you are. It’s just that I sometimes wonder what’s going on in those heads of yours. Everybody I know has pretty much made up their minds about who to support at this point, what with the endless reams of information about the parties, the candidates, the parties thrown by the candidates. (All of it is available, incidentally, in newspapers and magazines and on the radio and the television and the Internet, nonstop and around the clock).

And yet, not only have you not made up your mind, but the entire election is going to hinge on people like you—by definition, some of the most ignorant citizens of this nation! Ha! Ha! How hilarious is that? Only in America, right?

Who would’ve thought that just by virtue of living in a particularly contested state and being totally disengaged in the political process (or, maybe, just being a really, really careful shopper), you’d be in a position to decide the outcome of the election, and therefore, the path this country takes at one of the most crucial junctures in our entire history? Certainly not you!

You may not even be aware of what state you live in! Check your cable bill. Those two letters that come after your town—they’re short for the name of your state! You can also check the license plates of your cars, when you decide on your cereal and leave the supermarket!

You know, Mr. and Mrs. Swing Voter, in many ways I envy you. I really do. For almost two years now, I’ve been following this campaign religiously. At this point, I’m utterly sick to my stomach: the lies, the pageantry, the misdirection, the rhetoric, the endless manipulation and, of course, the irony—because none of it is directed at me! Funny, huh?!

I understand the substance of what both John McCain and Barack Obama actually propose to do on issues like the war in Iraq, the economy, health care, and education, and so I’ve made up my mind.  All this information, all these commercials and speeches and interviews, they’re all directed at you. And you’re not even listening! Ha! Ha! Ha! You’ve GOTTA love it! In fact, you’re not even reading this right now!!!

So, thanks for such discerning taste. Breakfast and America just wouldn’t be the same without you.
Adam Mansbach is the author of the novels Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews.

In fact, a growing chorus of op-ed writers, straight news analysts, widely read bloggers like the conservative Andrew Sullivan, and even Karl Rove (albeit tepidly), have fired shots at the Arizona Senator for crossing the line from hardball political tactics to plain, basic dishonesty.

This is something of a departure from long-standing norms of balance, especially for mainstream media. Those norms have routinely compelled political journalists to forsake context and informed judgment for the easier, less courageous position that “all sides take liberties with the truth” and therefore, it’s the media’s job to find examples to illustrate that reality—however unalike those examples might be.

But, old habits die hard, and the reflexive tendency to remind readers that Obama’s hands are also dirty have led many commentators to perpetuate as “distortion” what is, in fact, a serious weakness for McCain and one of his most disturbing positions: Iraq.

In today’s Washington Post, writer and long-time McCain sympathizer Ruth Marcus became the most recent writer to suggest that McCain’s serial lying compromised his fitness for the presidency. But in the course of her otherwise incisive piece, she couldn’t resist noting that Obama has been guilty of cheap shots, most notably, the presumably false claim that McCain wants to stay in Iraq for a hundred years. This weekend, a lengthy New York Times piece cataloguing McCain’s lies also noted this Obama “distortion.”

But how much of a distortion is it?

At a New Hampshire town hall meeting last January, a crowd member asked McCain about Bush’s statement that we might stay in Iraq for fifty years. McCain replied:

“Maybe a hundred. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me. And I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

The McCain campaign has been crying foul for months about attacks on his position, arguing that he meant that we might have the kind of military presence we have in Japan or South Korea. And, since the spring, the media have largely accepted that the criticisms are unfair. But that, in itself, is unfair.

Back in April, Dave Tiffany, who happens to be the guy who asked McCain the question in New Hampshire, wrote: “While splitting hairs over the meaning of campaign rhetoric, all ignore the fact that McCain advocates an open-ended presence in Iraq and the consequences that would follow from such a commitment. McCain’s words left little room for interpretation. By saying that he was fine with staying in Iraq for a hundred years, he made clear his commitment to ‘staying the course’ and to remaining in Iraq for years after the country is pacified, assuming that’s ever possible. Everyone who was there that night got it: we weren’t getting out anytime soon.”

In fact, the outcry about this distortion serves a significant and insidious purpose: to obscure the fact that John McCain has repeatedly rejected a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq before the “job is done.” The unmistakable premise of this position is that we must stay in Iraq indefinitely, even if that means being there for a hundred years.

The premise of the claim that McCain’s words are being taken out context is that if Americans were still taking significant casualties, we would leave. But that has not been McCain’s position. His position has been that we will not leave merely because our presence in Iraq is exacting a high price, in casualties and dollars. In fact, McCain has no answer to the question of how a high a price is too high: however many more thousands of deaths and however many more hundred of billions of dollars in costs we might incur, we must stay until Iraq is secure, can defend itself and doesn’t pose a threat to the region.

How long might that be? John McCain doesn’t know, and neither does anybody else.

As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker this Spring: “what the context shows, I think, is that yanking that sound bite out of context isn’t really all that unfair. McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed.”

For years now, the GOP mantra has been either we stay indefinitely or we “cut and run.” And McCain has been 100% on board. Even if he doesn’t want us to be there, can he honestly say how long we will be if he were President? Wouldn’t it contradict his own position to concede defeat and bring the troops home prior to that time, if that’s how long it took?

Accepting the “hundred years” comment as an example of a distortion allows John McCain to continue sticking to an incoherent, destructive, untenable and deeply unpopular position. More importantly, it allows him to get away with it.

Watch McCain’s infamous comment about a “hundred years war” in Iraq:

Do you hear the middle class people making under $5 million a year complaining? Don’t worry though, John McCain is planning on drafting every male over 15 so they can all be POW’s and come back and marry beer heiresses, so we’ll all be okay.

Watch John McCain insist that the fundamentals of our economy are strong here:

See the pictures here:

Barack Obama mocks the way John McCain took his ‘Change We Need’ slogan and criticizes him for putting lobbyists in charge of his campaign. Obama also continued his attack on Mccain for his ties to Bush.

Watch Obama criticize McCain here:

The truth was, I hadn’t voted for Bush because I’d felt disenfranchised by the Democratic Party. I’ve always been a registered Independent. I hadn’t even voted for Bush because I thought that he’d make a better or even a good President. I thought, in fact, that he’d do just the opposite.

Ultimately, I believe in Israel’s right to exist. I believe that the land being called “Israel” is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people and that they have a right to not only claim that land, but to possess it. No amount of time that passes or treachery committed against the Jewish people diminishes that right. And it is because of this belief of mine that I would consider it very hypocritical to recognize this right for Jews but to ignore it for the natives of this land: The Native Americans.

By ’04, I’d already accepted the unavoidable downfall of America. “You can’t establish a country based on theft of land and enslavement of innocents and expect it to survive and flourish forever,” I liked to argue. Not if you believed in God, karma, divine justice, “what-goes-around-comes-around”, “what-goes-up-must-come-down” or the inevitability of change. This was to be my mindset for the next four years.

Then in 2008, something funny happened. A family illness forced me to split my time between New York and Virginia and it was during all this shuttling back and forth that I was struck again and anew by the awesome physical beauty of this land. The bridge before the exit for Havre de Grace in Maryland or northern Virginia’s amazing blend of the suburban and the rural – shit, even the Jersey Turnpike, when looked at with a clear mind and no agenda, can bring peace to whatever troubled you just moments before.

Then this year’s Olympics came and I found myself rooting way harder than I ever had for America across the board. I cheered for the men’s and women’s basketball teams, the men’s and women’s volleyball teams, May and Walsh, Dalhausser and Rogers; for Shawn Johnson for platform and synchronized diving and for each of the 7 medals that Michael Phelps won outright and even for the one that the Olympic committee decided to award him anyway.

And of course, no discussion of the year 2008 would be complete without at least a mention of the meteoric rise of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. This man seemed so surefire and his election as president of the United States so logical, that for a moment, I almost forgot that this is America we’re talking about. This is a country where they sell beer by showing us pretty girls. Now, the Republicans are selling us a presidential ticket by using the same strategy.
Senator Obama now faces two-pronged opposition of almost cartoon villain proportions. One is a man that has gone on record as saying that staying in Iraq for another 100 years would be “fine with me.” The other is a woman that opposes Roe vs. Wade. The man, an aging idiot, once outrageously opposed legislation towards making the birthday of a true American patriot, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a national holiday. The woman became mayor of a debt-free town of less than 10,000 people and left it 22 millions dollars in debt. The man preaches the sanctity of marriage from the pulpit of personal infidelity. The woman professes her readiness to be vice president while having no clue as to the simple meaning of the “Bush Doctrine”.

So where does all this leave me? Well, right now, I’m very much like the man that has long wished his wife dead, and now stands before her as she lies on her deathbed, finally realizing how much and how long he’s loved her. MY GOD, do I love America! It is truly the greatest country on earth and I write that realizing that with every passing second it becomes less so. I write that realizing that despite the Republican ticket’s shocking inadequacies, this country just might elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. And I write that knowing that if we do elect McCain/Palin, it’s an even money bet that John McCain succumbs to the stress of office even before his first term ends.

Make no mistake about it folks, a Sarah Palin presidency will be the death knell for America as we know it. And I know, I know, I should be ecstatic.

And yet….

“Lipstick on a pig”? Whoa! Of all the bad things that you can call a woman, a pig is by far the worst. Like Blacks who get especially tight over being called the “N word” but let disses like “monkey” slide, it always amazed me when women got all huffy and puffy over the “B-Word”. It’s nothing more than a female dog (a lot of women call men dogs) and there are actually some very beautiful, graceful, sleek and noble “B-words” out there. A “pig” however, symbolizes three very definitive things and none of them are flattering.

First, there’s the general inability to control oneself. “Rutting” is what one thinks of a pig as doing and “rutting” is either defined as burrowing into the ground or following along in the same routine continuously, regardless of the results. Sound familiar?

Second, there’s the pig’s connotation with sloppiness. John McCain’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin may be tough but her personal affairs appear to be a mess. It’s now openly understood that the government plane that she claimed to sell on eBay for profit was actually sold in a private deal to an Alaskan businessman for a 400K loss. It’s come to light that she fired gubernatorial campaign aide and former legislative director John Bitney because he had an affair with Debbie Richter. Debbie and her husband Scott were close friends of the Palins. And of course, there’s the little issue of a candidate who opposes sex education having an unmarried and very pregnant daughter of her own.

Thirdly, as far as our pig references go, there are the physical connotations. Bloated, pink and ugly, pigs are the… well – pigs of the animal kingdom. In every good sitcom there’s a point where one female lead calls another female a pig and it garners laughs without fail. Can you imagine the effects that the use of this word can have on a woman both vain and insecure enough to enter a beauty pageant?

This is that fifth round we talked about in our last column. The round when Ali hit Foreman with the punch that changed everything.

Now, there is and will be of course, the rush by Obama defenders to claim that when Barack Obama said “You can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig,” that he was talking about McCain/Palin’s attempt to drape their own Republican campaign which would really be nothing more than a continuation of Bush/Cheney under the beautiful banner of the word “change”. You may also wanna rush to Barack’s defense and angrily state that the Republicans don’t own a patent on the word “lipstick” nor should they assume that any usages of the word are attacks on one of their candidates.

And there will, of course, be the requisite charges by Republicans that Barack Obama knew exactly what he was doing by using the word “lipstick”– especially after Sarah Palin herself had said that the only difference between a hockey mom (which she is) and a pit bull IS lipstick, and that Obama is now “fighting dirty” and “hitting below the belt.”

Understand this: the Republicans are right this time. Barack Obama is doing exactly what any self-respecting American would want his or her president to do in a time of crisis or war: going for the win. And it’s not gonna be pretty. And it’s not gonna be clean. The losing locker room might try to console themselves with the notion that they played a good game, but the truth is that they’d rather be drinking the champagne.

Don’t sleep though. Expect the Republicans to come back firing wildly and defensively, trying to prove to others and themselves that they can give just as well as they can take. But the only thing their added desperation is going to do is leave them open to more blows. This one’s over folks. And for all those that questioned Barack Obama’s toughness or his ability to do whatever was necessary to win, this MAC Hot Tahiti’s for them. Try it on. Then push your nose back a little.

Somehow, we’re expected to believe, Obama is both an elitist ‘celebrity’ (as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican Convention) and a nefarious, drug-dealing ‘street operative,’ as Jerome Corsi’s odious book The Obama Nation argues. Both a cagey, indecisive careerist and a secret Muslim extremist. Both an inexperienced neophyte and an establishment insider.

But most troubling—and revealing, and farcical —is the newest Republican strategy, trotted out by both Giuliani and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin: making fun of Obama for working as a community organizer. Palin, the self-described “pitbull in lipstick” (not to be confused with the rapper Eve, a “pitbull in a skirt”), lunged at Obama in her acceptance speech by saying her job as a small-town mayor was “a lot like being a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Cue the rollicking laughter of the whitest convention hall in America. (2% of the GOP’s delegates are black this year, as opposed to 24% of the Democrats’.)

But why is the GOP so scornful of community organizers? Is this simply a line that sounds good if you don’t know what it means, because “community” sounds a little like “Communist,” and organizing sounds vaguely… radical? Is this a reprise of the 1988 election, when George H.W. Bush accused Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis of being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” a charge that struck fear into the hearts of millions who had no idea what those four letters stood for—but who associated the term ‘card-carrying’ with the Communist purges of the 1950s?

In part, it is. But it’s also an attack on the kind of idealism that makes a young man who could do anything in the world decide to try to improve the lives of poor people, at a salary of 10,000 dollars a year. It mocks the notion that politics can work from the ground up, and it erases the fact the real, tangible change comes from community activism: that laws have been changed, neighborhoods revitalized and rights defended by community organizers and the people they’ve organized.

It belittles some of the most important people working on the ground in cities and towns all across the country—most of whom harbor no political ambitions whatsoever, and merely want to see things improve for their families and neighbors. It also demeans some of the greatest heroes in the American pantheon. What was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if not a community organizer?

Yesterday, the McCain campaign backpedaled, with spokesman Tucker Bounds acknowledging that “community organizers serve a valued function in civic affairs.” But next-day equivocations count far less than prime-time laugh lines. The McCain campaign has shown America where it stands, and it’s certainly not with the people.

Watch a NewsOne exclusive on GOP negativity:

Watch Jay Smooth’s video blog about GOP beef:

My two little girls march around the house chanting “Obama, Obama.” They picked it up from the will.i.am song.

My pothead friend says, “I’m for Obama because he said that inhaling was the point.”

Compared to McCain, where’s the choice?

My heart is set on the Greens, but where’s the chance?

Whether watching the Republican National Convention this week or not, it is easy to find problems in Senator Barack Obama’s positions. That’s because there are plenty of problems in Obama change agenda for folks to the Left of both Republicans and Democrats.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that history doesn’t move at Justice’s pace.

We know what Justice is like. How tangible it feels to dream of the better land!—a place where we live as people who care for each other, are concerned for each other, want the best for each other, but are equally wary of the possibility that the best for some takes away from others. Those are the core values that many of us live by or want to live by (if we were allowed by the various institutions that otherwise hem us in).

I got into a discussion the other day with a friend, who worried that a Barack Obama victory would sideline the struggle for human equality. “Power will now say that if there’s a Black man in the White House, what’s there to complain about?,” he argued. The discussion frustrated me.

So, is my friend saying that it is better for the worldwide freedom struggle if Obama loses? This is like telling the national liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s not to take power because neo-colonialism would suffocate their movements. It’s like telling the US Congress in 1964-65 not to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts because they don’t address economic inequality.

No. Pass the acts, and then intensify the struggle. Take power and then push for more. Politics is not a pure science. It is a test of will, and a test of whether the forces of Justice will be able to capture the imagination of the people.

Right now, the people repose their faith in the two parties, or else are totally frustrated with the entire political process. A fraction votes for the various other parties (Green, Libertarian, Reform). Our job as those who are partisans in the struggle for justice is to go into the narrow political arena of electoral politics and do four things:

1.     Help elect those who will provide relief to the people (health care, education, social welfare, and perhaps a jobs plan).

2.     Help widen the sphere of political action beyond the elections, and toward building movements for more expansive change.

3.     Help shatter the illusion that the two parties can deliver the kind of real changes needed by the population.

4.     Help build the kind of sustainable and powerful organizations that would be able to take up the challenge of holding the people’s faith once they have left the two parties behind.

The task is complex, but those who seek greater change than Obama can deliver have to be up to it.

We can’t sit on the sidelines, sniping at Senator Obama—or worrying that he is not doing what he should be doing. Instead those of us to the left of Obama should realize he offers a more progressive administration, by degrees, than John McCain promises.

An Obama presidency may not be as progressive as Justice demands. But his message of hope over fear, and the slightly more progressive Democratic Party Platform, will allow us an opening to do our work. So let’s get to it.

Vijay Prasad is the author of the Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and professor of International Studies at Trinity College.

But unlike Debra J. Dickerson‘s mildly amusing “The End of Blackness”, I underlined not a single passage from West’s book. What that suggests to me is that there was no new or groundbreaking thought. I also knew I was in trouble from the door with West’s Book when he wrote in the preface about his Ethiopian wife, Elleni. I’m thinking, “uh oh”. I know an Ethiopian ain’t a white person; it’s actually an African, but for Black American women whose “never been married” percentage is 42.3 for all above the age of 16, Ellini’s origin might have been interpreted as a slap in the face. But, whatever again: Debra Dickerson was married to a white man when she wrote her book.

But now when I’m watching Cornel West in a clip that somebody sent me from an interview where he was featured with Dr. Julianne Malveaux on the Tavis Smiley show. I’m wishing that I was still the campus barber that I was during my Carver Hall days so that I could reach through the screen with my clippers and shave some sense into Dr. West because it’s become clear to me that wild afro of his is carrying his brain cells further and further away from his head.

President of Bennett College, Dr. Julianne Malveaux strikes me as nothing more than a Terry McMillian villain. Female, Black, accomplished and angry. She’s angry at Black men and if she can find someone else that’s angry at Black men, even another Black man, then she’s happy(er). Dr. Malveaux called Hillary Clinton’s applause-worthy DNC speech “incandescent”, but accused Barack Obama of a “whitewash of our history” during his own DNC speech. Lady, a Black man standing and accepting the nomination for president from the Democratic party is making history, not whitewashing it.

Meanwhile, Dr. West, who has bojangled in nothing less than the “Matrix” movie franchise, and who at some point actually high-fived Dr. Malveaux, had earlier posed the question to Barack Obama: “How deep is your love for the people?” Well Dr. West, I’d propose that Mr. Obama’s love for the people is so deep that he married Michelle Robinson of the South Side of Chicago and not Elleni from Ethiopia. Real talk.

Doctors West and Malveaux were both critical of the fact that Mr. Obama didn’t mention The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King by name during his DNC acceptance speech “reducing him” as Dr. Malveaux put it, to a “preacher from Georgia.” No, Dr. Malveaux, Mr. Obama was simplifying Dr. King as a “preacher from Georgia”. So much has been made of Dr. King’s legend that the man’s reality has become somewhat obscured. The same can be argued, I guess, about Christ. You must have missed the point at the end of the speech where Mr. Obama’s daughters and the grandchildren of vice presidential candidate Biden played together onstage. Dr. King’s dream coming true through the candidacy of his embodiment.

And I know you can’t knock the hustle. I’ve had the Reasonable Doubt CD since 1996. I also know that if LB Lacey, who suggested that Blacks “stop acting like crabs in a barrel and work together,” could see me now, he would shake his head in disgust. But I’d ask of Mr. Lacey and Hov this one exception. Black people of any voice or following have got to realize that all they need to do in order to have a microphone shoved into their faces is be critical of Barack Obama. And while I don’t agree with every single thing that the candidate does and stands for, I’ll keep my criticisms to myself and family members, fellow drug users, ex-cons, barbershop do-nothings and the similarly employed. If the press were to put a mic in my face for a quote on Barack Obama, I’d say simply, “He’s great!” then start dancing around and posing like Usain Bolt. But for all the other Blacks who see Mr. Obama’s candidacy as nothing more than an opportunity to advance their own misguided agendas, I feel the need to grab your claw with mine as you make your way towards the rim of the barrel and ask, “will you crabs knock it off?”