Thoughts
I've started giving serious thought to the high likelihood that Barack Obama is about to inherit this mess.
On a separate but obviously related front it's distressing that a lot of very respectable economists think that Henry Paulson is dragging his feet -- the G7 and IMF meetings seemed to produce statements of unity and purpose, but no real action.
Finally, yes, it seems to be unquestionably good news that Paulson has jettisoned his first idea (government purchase of 'toxic' mortgage debt) in favor of British/Swedish model partial government purchase of major banks. But the fact that he rammed through his bailout bill as absolutely essential to saving the economy, only to decide a few days later that we need something dramatically different, does not inspire me with great confidence in his grasp of the nature of the crisis.
Late Update: This passage, which Atrios picked out of the current Times article, gets right at what's so unsettling ...
Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation's banks -- in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.
The Treasury Department's surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.
--Josh Marshall
Darker and Darker
We've been having a fascinating dialog with readers in response to last night's post about those exchanges John McCain had with those rabid supporters in Minnesota. I want to post some of your emails. But before that I want to go back to this question of just what that female McCain supporter said to him before he snatched the microphone away from her.
As I said there were conflicting reports about whether the woman, Gayle Quinnell, said Obama was an "Arab" or an "Arab terrorist." I've now seen reports that suggest that she said the latter but either the mic was cut or she didn't have the mic in range. In any case, the citizen journalism site theUptake.org has video of an interview with the woman just after the rally. It's done with a cell phone camera. But uptake.org is a known quantity site. And CNN's Dana Bash and NBC's Adam Aigner appear in the video. So with those caveats, I think we can be confident of the provenance of the video.
You can see the video I've embedded below. The gist is that Quinnell apparently did say "Arab terrorist." (ed.note: It would be more accurate to say that she insisted he was one in the interview. It's unclear from interview whether she actually used the second word with McCain.) She got the idea from a pamphlet she got not from the McCain campaign but from a fellow volunteer at the local McCain headquarters, where she's a volunteer. She's been sending the pamphlet to people in her area. And she thinks that McCain really knows that Obama's Arab but didn't want to get into it with her on camera. (You can read a transcript at the Uptake.org site.)
Now, this video and Quinnell I think kind of speak for themselves. But what a number of readers have pointed out about the first video (where she's speaking to McCain) is this telling moment after McCain says, "No, Ma'am" the first time. Quinnell says 'no?' But the tone is the key. She's surprised. Apparently genuinely surprised. Almost like, wait, I got something wrong? The reply really captures everything that's going on here.
--Josh Marshall
They've Still Got the Sludge
As every day brings new instances of McCain-Palin crowds denouncing the Democratic nominee as a "terrorist" or "traitor" and in some cases even calling for his blood, Michael Barone bemoans the "Coming Obama Thugocracy." If the American right has lost its electoral edge and standing with the public at large, it has not lost its telltale imperviousness to irony.
In many ways it seems Barone is settling in to be one of the spokesman of the high-brow version of the revanchist paranoid right we're seeing on display in many of those McCain rallies.
--Josh Marshall
Question of the Moment
When did Rove's hatchet men do greater damage to John McCain? In 2000 or 2008?
To me it seems like a very easy question to answer. But what do you think?
--Josh Marshall
Weird. Sad. Surreal
This afternoon on the campaign trail, John McCain began dialing back (or began trying to appear to be dialing back) the rising tide of hatred and verbal violence he and his running mate have been whipping up over recent weeks. After all we've seen over recent months, I think it would naive to conclude that McCain did this for any other reason but that the attacks appeared to be backfiring. Perhaps that's ungenerous. But to think so requires a leap of faith, a judgment not grounded in any evidence from the last year of the man's behavior. The aim of such a bludgeoning assault is to force the subject of Obama's relationship to Ayers back to the center of the campaign dialogue. But that's not what happened. By week's end that campaign narrative was all about the ferocity and recklessness of McCain's attacks.
There's something else to note too. Over the last 48 hours several name brand Republicans have come out and either chided or denounced McCain's borderline incitement. And given how taboo it is to level such criticism of your own nominee at this stage of the election you have to assume these criticisms were only the tip of the iceberg, with a far more intense and angry barrage of criticism voiced privately.
Here are a few clips put together by CNN that are worth watching.
The first passage to watch starts at 25 seconds in. A participant tells McCain he's "scared" of any Obama presidency and McCain responds that he "is a decent person and a person you do not have to be scared [of] as President of the United States."
Those are the words. But look at the facial expressions. McCain looks down as he says it and has the countenance of someone who been forced to tell someone else they're sorry. There's some mix of gritting your teeth and saying something you don't want to say mixed with some sort of shamefacedness. Look at the video. Because while I feel like I intuitively 'get' the gestures I find it hard to quite capture them in words. Perhaps you'll do better and you can share your thoughts with me.
In the next clip McCain is speaking up close with a woman in the audience who says she can't trust Obama and then blurts out that it's because he's "Arab". Some reports have it that she said 'Arab terrorist'. But at least on this tape only 'Arab' is audible.
McCain shakes his head, as though losing his patience and snatches the mic back out of woman's hands. "No, Ma'am. No, Ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." Again, there's a lot there when you actually see the video. And I encourage you to watch.
I get from his expression a sense of a man that is, in addition to all the other things he's angry about, is frustrated or angry at the situation he's gotten himself into. But he has sown the wind and now he's reaping the whirlwind. "Even," says TPM Reader RB, "as he says 'You don't have to be scared of an Obama presidency' to a handful of followers (and, more importantly, of national reporters), he is spending millions to bombard as many people as he can with the ad named "Dangerous". The small hand giveth, and the large hand taketh away."
And yet this conveys too much suggestion of planning and intent. I have more the sense of someone desperately casting about and losing control of the situation itself. Even hypocrites can get in over their heads. Indeed, in a more nuts-and-bolts strategic sense McCain has really gotten himself into a hole because the campaign he's been running has almost entirely been premised on the claim that you should be scared of an Obama presidency. Not that McCain, if he'd run a very different campaign, couldn't have run on issue disagreements with Obama. But right now if you take away fear of Obama becoming president, there's almost no reason not to vote for him since McCain has basically conceded the issue agenda to Obama. If you look at every poll for months, voters are dying for change. Fear of Obama is the only thing keeping him from leaving McCain in the dust. Take that away and McCain's done.
I'm not sure what else to say about this episode. But it is something to behold.
--Josh Marshall
Red Herring
You can already see, in the McCain camp's first statement on the Trooper-Gate report, that the McCain campaign will spin it as actually letting Gov. Palin off the hook for firing Monegan because it finds that she had the power to fire him.
That's ridiculous. Monegan's firing was just the tip of the iceberg.
The report details the extraordinary lengths that Gov. Palin, largely through her husband Todd, went to get her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired because of personal family reasons (namely, his nasty divorce from Palin's sister). It was this effort, which led to pressure being improperly brought to bear on numerous state employees, that constituted an abuse of power by Palin. As it should be. State employees should not be subject to personal vendettas from elected officials.
While the report also finds that the governor in Alaska has the inherent power to fire her department heads for any reason or for no reason, it concludes that Monegan's refusal to fire one of his state troopers at the insistence of the governor and her family was a contributing factor in his own firing.
So rather than the firing of Monegan itself being the abuse of power, the wide-ranging effort to retaliate against her sister's ex-husband, of which Monegan's firing was merely a part, was the real abuse. Monegan's firing is evidence of the broader scheme, not the scheme itself. Cold comfort if you're a McCain-Palin supporter.
--David Kurtz
Background Reality Check
How's McCain's veep-vetting process looking right about now?
--David Kurtz
Trooper-Gate: Palin Abused Power
The Republican-dominated panel overseeing the Trooper-Gate probe just voted unanimously to release the report by its independent investigator.
Here's the report (.pdf).
The report finds that Gov. Sarah Palin "abused her power" in violation of Alaska law. That's the key finding. It also finds that while the refusal to fire Palin's former brother in law was not the sole reason Palin terminated her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, it was a "contributing factor."
--David Kurtz
Trying to Snuff Out the Flame
At a rally late today in Minnesota, John McCain addressed the heated comments, including calls to violence, coming from some supporters at his rallies this week:
"I am enthusiastic and encouraged by the enthusiasm and I think it's really good," McCain said. "We have to fight and i will fight but we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments and I want to be respectful.
Here's the (updated longer version) video of a portion of McCain's remarks:
Late Update: Ana Marie Cox is on the ground at the rally and reports:
Indeed, [McCain] just snatched the microphone out the hands of a woman who began her question with, "I'm scared of Barack Obama... he's an Arab terrorist...""No, no ma'am," he interrupted. "He's a decent family man with whom I happen to have some disagreements."
Later Update: In the expanded version of the video above, I don't hear any reference to terrorist when the woman calls Obama an Arab.
--David Kurtz
McCain Goes After Michelle ...
From TPM Election Central ...
The McCain campaign is now broadening their attack on Obama's past association with William Ayers to include Michelle Obama -- even though McCain has repeatedly said spouses should be off limits during the campaign.The attack? Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers' wife and fellow former Weatherman, went to work in 1984 for the major Chicago-based national law firm of Sidley & Austin, and three years later, Michelle joined the mega-firm as well.
That's the entire attack. We wish we were joking. But we aren't.
Read the rest of the story here.
--Josh Marshall
Secret Service Steps In ...
From the Tampa Tribune ...
The U.S. Secret Service is looking into reports that a crowd member yelled,"Kill him!" while Gov. Sarah Palin was talking about Sen. Barack Obama during her Clearwater rally Monday.The incident reportedly occurred after Palin questioned Obama's patriotism because of his acquaintance with William Ayers, a Chicago university professor who was an anti-Vietnam War radical in the 1970s.
Apparently the only public evidence of the "kill him" shout is a Washington Post news story Tuesday by reporter Dana Milbank, who covered the rally.
Milbank later was quoted in an interview with the Politico Web site as saying he thought the shout may have been a reference to Ayers, not Obama.
A few points are worth noting here. Milbank appears to be the only direct source for this. We've had numerous angry audience members, cries of 'terrorist' and 'treason' and so forth. But this was definitely one of the most inflammatory. Perhaps Milbank misheard. Let's hope so. Regardless, it makes sense to look into it and find out just what happened.
(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader MH for the tip.)
--Josh Marshall
McCain Camp: Obama Is Going Negative
Obama's critique of the people yelling "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" at McCain-Palin rallies is an attack on the good, god-fearing people of America, according to McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers:
"Barack Obama's attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn't understand regular people and the issues they care about. He dismisses hardworking middle class Americans as clinging to guns and religion, while at the same time attacking average Americans at McCain rallies who are angry at Washington, Wall Street and the status quo."Even worse, he attacks anyone who dares to question his readiness to serve as their commander in chief in chief. Raising legitimate questions about record, character and judgment are a vital part of the Democratic process, and Barack Obama's effort to silence and shame those who seek answers should make everyone wonder exactly what he is hiding."
Here's Tucker Bounds, another campaign flack, picking up the same talking points a short time ago on MSNBC:
Note at the very end where Bounds claims that the McCain camp's latest TV ad about Ayers is really an ad about the economy. Really.
--David Kurtz
George Wallace McCain
Earlier this afternoon I wrote about the ACORN story and the right's effort to lie to people and fool them into thinking this has anything to do with voter fraud. This email just came in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack, his army of gangsters and black street hustlers, and possibly Osama bin Laden too.
--Josh Marshall
The Ayers Effect? Nada
Not even the Fox News poll could find Ayers having an effect on support for Obama.
--David Kurtz
Just a Typo, They Say
Some absentee ballots in one upstate New York county list Obama as "Barack Osama."
--David Kurtz
I Put My Money on 43 Days
From TPM Reader BS ...
How long after the election before John McCain shows "contrition" for how he campaigned?
Late Update: TPM Reader ST thinks we'll be waiting a long time ...
McCain will never apologize. This is his last shot, and he knows it. Maintaining his viability after embarrassing losses is what all of the previous apologies were for. Should he lose, he will no longer have any viability to protect, so he will switch to a shrill defense of his actions until the day he mercifully fades from the public eye.
--Josh Marshall
One Six Degrees of Henry Paulson
Propublica has a cool new widget which shows Henry Paulson's connections to virtually everyone else in the financial services industry.
--Josh Marshall
The Gist of the ACORN Story
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.
ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.
I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...
At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.
Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.
The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
It's that simple.
Late Update: McCain's sleaze and disgrace just runs deeper and deeper. This just in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack and his army of gangsters and black street hustlers.
--Josh Marshall
Buckley for Obama
Bill Buckley's son, Christopher Buckley, hops on the Obama bandwagon. With both feet.
--Josh Marshall
How Low Can He Go, Take #9
With John McCain descending further every day toward sleaze and hate speech, 'how low can he go' is a question that has to be revisited almost every day. But it seems time again to review the ugly, hypocritical record in full ...
--Josh Marshall
Playing With Fire
Anti-Obama fury spawned by McCain-Palin spilling over into down-ticket races.
--David Kurtz
Not Very Mavericky
After fighting the Trooper-Gate investigation tooth and nail, including refusing to cooperate and challenging the legal authority of the investigation, Sarah Palin is now complaining that she wasn't interviewed by investigators.
--David Kurtz
More
Frank Schaeffer, writing in the Baltimore Sun ...
John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.
Shame!
John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.
You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.
--Josh Marshall
Cause and Effect
The big news orgs can't quite bring themselves to connect the threats spouted by supporters at McCain-Palin rallies to the candidates' rhetoric.
--David Kurtz
Gettin' Under His Skin?
Watch as John McCain responds to Obama's taunt that McCain isn't raising Bill Ayers and other over-the-top attack lines in Obama presence -- or as Obama put it, "say it to my face":
In case you missed it, here's Joe Biden riffing on this line yesterday, bringing his old-neighborhood swagger into the routine:
--David Kurtz
Which Is It?
For days the McCain-Palin camp has been saying that Palin didn't fire Walt Monegan but that he quit as Alaska's public safety commissioner. But now they claim that the "investigative report" the campaign itself released last night "will prove Walt Monegan's dismissal was a result of his insubordination and budgetary clashes."
So hard to keep the story straight.
--David Kurtz
Crockodile Tears
From the Journal ...
Some McCain campaign officials are becoming concerned about the hostility that attacks against Sen. Obama are whipping up among Republican supporters. During an internal conference call Thursday, campaign officials discussed how the tenor of the crowds has turned on the media and on Sen. Obama.
Borderline criminal incitement will do that. But hey, whatever it takes.
Late Update: Joe Klein is getting concerned too.
(ed.note: This is not a laughing matter. So I want to be clear what I was alluding to when I referred to "borderline criminal incitement." John McCain has a first amendment right to smear and (at least free of criminal penalties) slander Barack Obama by suggesting he's in league with terrorists. But as we've seen many times, even offhandedly threatening comments directed at a Secret Service protected individual, can earn you a visit from the guys with the earpieces. And McCain and Palin are now routinely holding rallies in which they whip supporters into such a delirium by castigating Obama as a dangerous terrorist-lover that members of the audience shout what can very reasonably be interpreted as threats against Obama's safety. Am I saying they're breaking the law? No. But I do think they're nudging up against the envelope and getting near that line beyond which, if McCain were not a presidential candidate, his rallies would be getting some attention from those charged with protecting Obama's safety.)
--Josh Marshall
Election Central Morning Roundup
Yesterday it was a web-only ad tying Obama to Bill Ayers, today McCain takes the Ayers smear on TV with a new ad. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
--David Kurtz
Father Coughlin
McCain lashes out at Frank and Dodd as "willing co-conspirators" in bringing about the banking crisis.
Here's the exchange between McCain and an audience member today in Wisconsin (courtesy of this diarist at Daily Kos, and confirmed against the original video by me) ...
Audience member: Will you assure us that as president you will take immediate action to investigate, prosecute and name the names of the people actually responsible?McCain: I will. And it is already a matter of record that members, Democrat members of Congress fought against reform and it is a matter of record and hearings that they said everything was fine. Senator Obama a year ago said that these kinds of subprime loans are, quote, fine with him. And the fact is that the same people that are now claiming credit for this rescue are the same ones that were willing co-conspirators in causing this problem that it is. And you know their names. And you will know more of their names. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd are two of them.
--Josh Marshall
For the Ages
In advance of tomorrow's release of the Alaska legislature's report on the troopergate investigation, the McCain-Palin campaign has released its own investigative report clearing Palin of any wrongdoing.
--Josh Marshall
Obama's Choice
Edsall ...
As two major developments become increasingly likely - a Democratic presidential victory on November 4 and a sustained economic crisis - Barack Obama faces a difficult choice: does he begin now to prepare the electorate for tough times, or does he continue to maintain a politically contrived optimism on the assumption that he can shift gears after election day.The short-term incentives are all on the side of maintaining a happy face: As things stand, Obama keeps moving ahead in the polls, winning debates and expanding his hold on battleground states. Why junk a winner?
Conversely, Obama and his aides have to calculate how the rhetoric of his campaign will influence his ability to govern. On this score, there is wide disagreement, with political scientists, strategists and political analysts - in responses given to the Huffington Post - all over the map.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: Into Thin Ayers
It's Sean Hannity's big moment: the William Ayers story has finally hit the big time. Hannity and friend Greta Van Susteren got to spend their respective shows with John McCain and Sarah Palin. The topic du jour? William Ayers.
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
--Ben Craw
How Long Till The N-Word?
McCain campaign co-chair Fmr. Okla Gov. Frank Keating calls Obama "a guy of the street."
--Josh Marshall
Dirty Tricks Time
A possible push-poll in the Oregon Senate race by the same outfit that got so much attention for those calls during the GOP primaries that mentioned Mitt Romney's Mormonism.
--David Kurtz
If Petraeus Says It, It Must be True
David Petraeus, whom John McCain frequently cites as if an oracle, says we have to talk to our enemies.
--David Kurtz