space elevator

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs

beyond the pale

tpm

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

"They walked out," Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren't fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. "They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you're not gonna get paid for the rest of the day."

The daughter, who wanted her name withheld fearing retribution from her employer, confirmed the story to us. "It was like at least 40 people," the daughter said. "People thought the script was nasty and they didn't wanna read it."

A second worker at the call center confirmed the episode, saying that "at least 30" workers had walked out after refusing to read the script.

"We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger," this worker said. "I wouldn't do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting."

This worker, too, confirmed sacrificing pay to walk out, saying her supervisor told her: "If you don't wanna phone it you can just go home for the day."

The script coincided with this robo-slime call running in other states, but because robocalling is illegal in Indiana it was being read by call center workers.

Representatives at Americall in Indiana, and at the company's corporate headquarters in Naperville, Illinois, didn't return calls for comment.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (October 24, 2008) - Taking Back The Campaign Nominee

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (October 24, 2008) - Taking Back The Campaign Nominee

Obamacons

c/o daily dish

The Daily Show in Wasilla

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Official Website | Current Events & Pop Culture News, Comedy & Fake News | Comedy Central

Jon Stewart

HuffPo Jason Linkins

Earlier this week, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, performing at Northeastern University in Boston, criticized Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for making divisive remarks, saying, "She said that small towns, that's the part of the country she really likes going to because that's the pro-America part of the country. You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly: fuck you." Since then, a few more hobos hopped aboard the hate-America bandwagon -- Nancy Pfotenhauer insisted that Northern Virginia was not part of a "real Virginia" (despite being the economic driver of the entire state), and Michelle Bachmann (who is basically a nonsense-spewing twit whose electoral success is among the world's most enduring mysteries) went on Hardball to call for a Congress-wide witch hunt for people who didn't measure up to her standard of patriotism.

Early in the show, Stewart lambasted the general divisive sentiment that pits small towns against big cities, alluding to the fact that 9/11's "ground zero" happened to be godless and elite New York City and "Communist Country/Fake Virginia" Arlington County. But at the end of the show, Stewart went back to reference his remarks at Northeastern, to make his point more broadly.

"We're all a little chafed here about this whole 'some parts of the country are real and American' and other parts are not. This weekend I was performing at Northeastern and I just read the statement that Sarah Palin had made about the 'pro-American' parts of the country and I...in response to that, I think I might have said, you know, 'Fuck you!' That's just my way of saying that I think that's a profanity to say, and I was answering with a profanity. But it's not really fair, and it makes it seem like I'm just addressing Governor Palin about this, and I'm not, it's just this whole entire theme that there's more American areas, or some people love the country, some people don't. So what I meant to say is, 'Fuck all y'all.'"

Here's (William and Mary graduate) Stewart's response to Nancy Pfotenhauer:

Jason Jones' correspondent's piece used Wasilla, Alaska as the backdrop to make similar points about the small-town vs. big city argument.

Carville, Begala: Learn History's Lessons

HuffPo

As Barack Obama and the Democrats appear poised for an historic sweep, we have a message for our Republican friends: It is time to point fingers.

We are pro-finger-pointing. We disagree strongly with Gov. Sarah Palin who said recently, "Do you notice that our opponents sure have spent a lot of time looking at the past and pointing fingers? You look to the past because that's where you find blame, but we're...looking to the future, because that's where you find solutions." On the contrary, Governor, blame assignment, while much maligned, is essential to determining what went wrong and how to set it right. [Zalls I'm sayin.] Besides, it's a hell of a spectator sport. Here's our primer for a little game we like to call Big Losers Always Make Excuses (BLAME):

First -- a couple of ground rules. You can't blame the press or minorities. Sure, media-bashing is part of the conservative catechism, and minority voters are likely to support Barack Obama in record numbers. But finger-pointing is only interesting when you point at someone on your team. Republicans need a civil war -- a steel cage death match -- to sort out what they stand for. Scapegoating outsiders won't purge the party of what's rotting it on the inside.

Here's the most important thing about finger-pointing: you have to start early. If you're a Republican who wants to avoid blame for the current meltdown, you cannot afford to wait until after the election is over.

The smartest people in the conservative movement are already pointing like a bird dog on a South Georgia quail hunt. David Brooks and Bill Kristol are leading the way. Mr. Brooks, representing the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, called Ms. Palin, "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Attaboy, Brooksie. Score one for the brainiacs.

Mr. Kristol, on the other hand, blames neither Ms. Palin nor Sen. John McCain, but rather McCain's campaign advisers, writing of the campaign: "Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic." See? That's how you do it. Kristol can't say McCain's problem is that he supported the Iraq war, (which Kristol advocated) or that he chose Sarah Palin (whom Kristol praised). So rather than play defense, Bill went on offense, blaming McCain's Steve Schmidt-led campaign. But we have a feeling this fight will only begin when the Schmidt hits the fan.

But where are the other voices? We need to hear, for example, from Karl Rove. Whom will he blame? We stipulate that Karl is a genius -- albeit a genius whose advice took Pres. Bush from a 91 percent approval rating down to 26. With the House of Bush ablaze, Karl is going to have to do some quick finger-pointing before they change they change his nickname from The Architect to The Arsonist.

How about Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other radio personalities? They never liked McCain much -- but his campaign cratered only when he embraced their wild attacks on Sen. Obama. It was only after Mr. McCain borrowed the Limbaugh-Hannity line on Bill Ayers, only after Gov. Palin accused Mr. Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists," that the bottom fell out for Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin. We're betting the hot air boys will blame the intellectuals. After all, if you want to make an omelet, you've got to break a few eggheads.

The Republican Party is atomizing, and each faction must participate in Project BLAME. The neocons may want to blame the theocons. The economic conservatives will likely blame the big spenders. The conflagration will be so multi-dimensional we'll need a program to sort out the players. They will need to answer fundamental questions: What does it mean to be a Republican? Do Republicans support laissez-faire or nationalized banking? Do Republicans support a balanced budget or half-trillion-dollar deficits? Do Republicans want a "humble foreign policy" like George W. Bush, or preventive war against countries that pose no threat, like, umm, George W. Bush? Are Republicans the party of limited government or a vast Medicare prescription drug benefit? Are they wary of Big Brother or eager to expand warrantless wiretaps? Do they support Christian values or torture? Are they the party that believes that cutting-edge technology can shoot a missile out of the sky or the party that believes humans and dinosaurs walked the earth simultaneously?

These questions should define the 2012 GOP presidential primaries. So start blaming, all you would-be candidates. That means you, Ms. Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist. Hurry up. You only have 1,165 days left until the Iowa Caucuses.

James Carville and Paul Begala were senior strategists for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign. They'd like everyone to know it's not their fault.

***

-ed: how about let's see if this history transpires before speaking about it in the past tense ...

FactCheck: ACORN

FactCheck.org

by Jess Henig, with Ronald Lampard

Summary

The McCain-Palin campaign accuses ACORN, a community activist group that operates nationwide, of perpetrating "massive voter fraud." It says Obama has “long and deep” ties to the group. We find both claims to be exaggerated. But we also find Obama has understated the extent of his work with the group.

• Neither ACORN nor its employees have been found guilty of, or even charged with, casting fraudulent votes. What a McCain-Palin Web ad calls "voter fraud" is actually voter registration fraud. Several ACORN canvassers have been found guilty of faking registration forms and others are being investigated. But the evidence that has surfaced so far shows they faked forms to get paid for work they didn’t do, not to stuff ballot boxes.
  


• Obama’s path has intersected with ACORN on several occasions – more often than he allowed in the final debate.
  

Analysis

We've received scores of e-mails asking us about Obama's connection to the community activist group Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN. A McCain-Palin ad released on the Web accuses Obama of having ties to the organization, which it says engages in "intimidation tactics," "massive voter fraud" and "pressuring banks to issue risky loans."

Destroying Democracy?

The McCain ad accuses ACORN of "massive voter fraud." In the final presidential debate, John McCain added that ACORN "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." Sounds scary, but is it true?

McCain-Palin Web Ad: "ACORN"

McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Announcer: Who is Barack Obama? A man with "a political baptism performed at warp speed." Vast ambition. After college, he moved to Chicago. Became a community organizer. There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN. He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.

No wonder Obama's campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, "Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN." But Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep. He taught classes for ACORN. They even endorsed him for President.

But now ACORN is in trouble.

Reporter: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.

Announcer: Massive voter fraud. And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.

Pressuring banks to issue risky loans. Nationwide voter fraud. Barack Obama. Bad judgment. Blind ambition. Too risky for America.

There's no evidence of any such democracy-destroying fraud. Here's what is true: In recent years, ACORN employees have been investigated multiple times for voter registration fraud. ACORN workers have been convicted of submitting false voter registration forms in Colorado Springs in 2005, Kansas City, Mo., in 2006 and King County, Wash., in 2007. ACORN's Las Vegas office was raided by a state criminal investigator on Oct. 7, 2008. ACORN workers are also the subjects of ongoing investigations in Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. The Indiana investigation started in early October and may involve thousands of fraudulent registration forms.

On Oct. 16 The Associated Press quoted two "senior law enforcement" officials as saying that the FBI is investigating ACORN seeking "any evidence of a coordinated national scam." The following day the Obama campaign's lawyer, Robert Bauer, sent a seven-page letter to the attorney general claiming that federal law enforcement officials were being improperly used to help McCain by suppressing the vote through "unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud." He asked that the investigation be transferred to the special prosecutor investigating the U.S. attorney firing scandal. The McCain campaign issued a statement in which spokesman Ben Porritt called Bauer's letter "outrageous" and "absurd" and a "heavy handed tactic of attempting to criminalize political discourse."

But so far ACORN itself has not been officially charged with any fraud. Aside from the heated charges and counter-charges, no evidence has yet surfaced to show that the ACORN employees who submitted fraudulent registration forms intended to pave the way for illegal voting. Rather, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for doing no work. Dan Satterberg, the Republican prosecuting attorney in King County, Wash., where the largest ACORN case to date was prosecuted, said that the indicted ACORN employees were shirking responsibility, not plotting election fraud.

Satterberg: [A] joint federal and state investigation has determined that this scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting.

Instead, the defendants cheated their employer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN), to get paid for work they did not actually perform. ACORN's lax oversight of their own voter registration drive permitted this to happen. ... It was hardly a sophisticated plan: The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets looking for unregistered voters. ...

[It] appears that the employees of ACORN were not performing the work that they were being paid for, and to some extent, ACORN is a victim of employee theft.

The $8-an-hour employees were charged with providing false information on voter registration forms, and in one case with making a false statement to a public official. Five of the seven who were charged pleaded guilty. ACORN was fined for exercising insufficient oversight, but it was not charged with masterminding any kind of deliberate fraud.

ACORN pays canvassers by the hour, not by the form, but it does ask them to meet certain registration goals. In ACORN's Las Vegas office, one employee who admitted to submitting fraudulent registrations said that she did so because she found ACORN's requirement of 20 registrations per day to be too steep to meet, according to an affidavit by a Nevada state criminal investigator. Local news reports at the time also said that some of the ACORN offices under investigation paid bonuses for each registration, or a higher hourly rate to those who brought in more applications. ACORN's deputy political director, Kevin Whelan, denies that this is ACORN policy.

What ACORN Says

In its defense, ACORN says that only a few of its 13,000 paid canvassers turned in any faked forms. "[T]here are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer," the group said in an Oct. 10 statement on its Web site. "Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift."

ACORN also says it cannot simply discard suspicious forms on its own, but is required by law in most states to submit to local election officials all the forms its canvassers bring in. ACORN's Whelan told us that its own legal counsel strongly advises that the group do the same in states that don't explicitly require it, because "only election officials are legally able to determine the validity of a voter registration application." But ACORN says that it first flags all suspicious registrations. Staffers call the phone numbers written on completed registration forms to make sure they're valid and also take note of incomplete or duplicate forms. The group says that it alerts election officials to forms that look fishy when it sends them in.

However, it's not clear whether or not those procedures were followed in Nevada prior to a highly publicized raid by state officials on Oct. 7. According to an affidavit by Colin Hayes, a criminal investigator for the secretary of state's office, a probe began July 2 after the county registrar reported receiving a number of suspicious registration forms from ACORN. Hayes did not state whether or not those suspicious forms had been flagged by ACORN before being turned in. Later, during a July 18 meeting, ACORN's lawyer told local and state officials that the group had identified a number of suspicious registrations and "would be willing to provide such information" for further investigation. On Aug. 7, at the request of the county registrar, ACORN supplied copies of documents related to 33 ACORN workers who had been fired for "suspicious" voter registration activities.

Investigator Hayes followed up, confirmed that many registrations were faked, and found a former ACORN worker who confessed to faking most of her forms. After obtaining a warrant based on the affidavit, state officials seized records and computers. Secretary of State Ross Miller was quoted as saying the faked forms included names from the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

While ACORN says that such raids are part of "a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression," it is worth noting that in this case, Secretary of State Miller is a Democrat.

Whelan told us that ACORN's national management staff trains local directors and travels extensively to supervise offices, but the 2007 Washington state prosecution makes it clear that quality control is lacking in at least some outposts. Prosecutor Satterberg wrote: "We believe that ACORN’s internal quality control procedures were not just deficient but entirely non-existent when it came to the latter stages of their operation in Tacoma." He fined the group $25,000 for failing to exercise sufficient oversight.

How Common Is Fraud?

Election fraud does exist, but hasn't been shown to be widespread. The New York Times reported in 2007 that a five-year crackdown on such fraud by the Bush administration's Justice Department had produced 70 convictions at the federal level, including 40 campaign workers or government workers convicted of vote-buying, intimidation or ballot forgery, and 23 cases of multiple voting or voting by ineligible voters. But the Times described these as unconnected incidents and said the Justice Department had turned up no evidence of "any organized effort to skew federal elections."

Bush administration officials have pushed hard to find such evidence, too hard in one case, according to an investigation by the Department of Justice's internal watchdogs, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Their report into the firing of nine United States attorneys concluded that the "real reason" for the firing of New Mexico's U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was "complaints about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud and public corruption matters." The complaints included gripes by state Republican Party officials who believed that widespread fraud by Democrats had prevented George Bush from winning the state in the 2000 presidential election. Iglesias launched a task force that worked with the FBI but found that "there was insufficient evidence in any of the cases the Task Force reviewed to support criminal prosecution by the [U.S. Attorney's Office] or state authorities," according to the report of the OIG and OPR. These included cases involving ACORN workers. Republicans charged that Iglesias was showing insufficient rigor in prosecuting the cases.

ACORN and the Housing Crisis

The McCain ad says that ACORN in Chicago engaged in "bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business" and "forced banks to issue risky home loans." In support of these statements, the McCain campaign cites conservative opinion pieces, including a column by Mona Charen posted by the National Review Online, titled "Guilty Party: ACORN, Obama and the Mortgage Mess."

It is true that ACORN has led demonstrations on a number of issues nationwide – predatory lending, immigration reform, neighborhood violence, utilities shut-offs, minimum wage increases. Sometimes the group's tactics are confrontational, veering into civil disobedience. For instance, in the late 1980s, ACORN activists in a number of cities, including Chicago, seized abandoned houses and encouraged "squatting" by homeless people, in an attempt to force local governments to salvage abandoned properties and convert them into low-income housing. The targets of ACORN's protests sometimes describe the activists as intractable or even aggressive. Other ACORN protests are less confrontational; Sen. McCain himself spoke at an ACORN rally on illegal immigration in 2006.

It stretches the facts, however, to say that ACORN "forced" banks to make risky loans, though it has certainly applied pressure on banks to make loans to minority and low-income borrowers. ACORN also has worked directly with banks in a joint effort to increase such lending. In Chicago these efforts date back at least to 1992, after a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showed that minorities in that city were two to three times as likely to be denied mortgage loans as white applicants, and that high-income minorities were more likely to be turned down than low-income whites. Chicago ACORN then started a mortgage assistance program, in cooperation with five local banks, to help minority and low-income borrowers get mortgage loans.

The mortgages that ACORN worked out with the banks did have lower underwriting standards than were customary. They allowed a higher percentage of a family's income to go to debt repayment, and counted rent and utility payments, not just credit card payments, as evidence of ability to pay back a loan. The loans were also more forgiving of past credit problems, as long as the recipient was making a proven effort to address them. But ACORN provided loan deals only to people who went through counseling on budget and credit issues. In 1992, First Nationwide Bank Vice President Neal Halleran told the Chicago Tribune: "Transaction by transaction, [loans from the ACORN program] would appear to be performing no worse than our portfolio overall." According to the Tribune, First Nationwide had contacted ACORN to initiate the lending program.

Obama: Burying ACORNs

The ad says that "Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep" – that he "taught classes" for the group, paid a "front" $800,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts, and was endorsed by ACORN for president. That last one's true – ACORN's political action committee did offer an Obama endorsement. It's also true that Obama has worked with the group in the past. In 1995, Obama helped represent ACORN in a successful lawsuit to require the state of Illinois to offer "motor voter" registration at DMV offices. Obama has said that this is his only association with ACORN, but that's not the case – he has had other, though less direct, interactions with the organization. After law school, Obama directed a Chicago registration drive for Project Vote, which works closely with ACORN. And when Obama was on the board of directors of the Woods Fund, the foundation gave grants of $75,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002 to ACORN's Chicago office. The McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee cite an additional grant of $45,000 in 2000. The Woods Fund has not responded to our calls about their 2000 grants.

The Obama campaign also paid Citizens Services Inc., a group affiliated with ACORN, more than $800,000 for get-out-the-vote (not voter registration) efforts during the primary election. The nature of CSI's services was initially misrepresented on the Obama campaign's disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, which the campaign describes as an oversight. The Obama campaign says it has not been involved with ACORN during the general election.

As for "teaching classes" for the group, the McCain campaign cites a March 2008 Newsday article, which says that ACORN organizer Madeleine Talbot "initially considered Obama a competitor" when both were working to get asbestos insulation removed from a Chicago housing project, but that "she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." Newsday does not say whether Obama accepted the invitation. An article by Chicago alderman Toni Foulkes says that "we [ACORN] have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year" between 1992 and 2004, when the article was written. The Obama campaign says that Obama participated in two, one-hour trainings in a volunteer capacity. Foulkes could not be reached for comment.

Neither ACORN's Chicago office nor CSI has been accused of voter registration irregularities.

Sources

Helling, Dave. "False voter registrations allegedly submitted; Four who have been indicted had worked as registration recruiters for ACORN group." Kansas City Star, 2 Nov. 2006.



Associated Press. "Pierce County to pull 230 names off voter list," 3 Feb. 2008.



Griffin, Drew and Kathleen Johnston. "Thousands of voter registration forms faked, officials say." CNN, 10 Oct. 2008.




Jordan, Lara Jakes. "Officials: FBI investigates ACORN for voter fraud." Associated Press, 16 Oct. 2008.



CNN. "Obama camp calls for special prosecutor in fraud investigation," 18 Oct 2008.



Bliss, Jeff. "Obama Lawyer Asks for Probe Into Vote-Fraud Claims (Update1)." Bloomberg News, 17 Oct 2008.



Bauer, Robert. Letter to U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey, 17 Oct 2008.




McCain-Palin 2008. "Statement On Obama Campaign's Letter To Justice Department On Voter Fraud," 17 Oct 2008.



Falcone, Michael. "Acorn Replies to Questions About Role With Voters." New York Times, 14 Oct. 2008.



ACORN. "Voter Registration Performance Verification Procedures," Accessed 17 Oct. 2008.



Haynes, Colin. "Application and Affidavit for Search Warrant." Office of the Secretary of State, Nevada, Oct. 2008.




U.S. Inspector General. "An Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006." U.S. Department of Justice, Sep. 2008.



Lipton, Eric and Ian Urbina. "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud." New York Times, 12 Apr. 2007.



Munnell, Alicia H., et al. "Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data." American Economic Review, Mar. 1996.



Allen, J. Linn. "Banks, activists tailor loans to communities." Chicago Tribute, 1 Sep. 1992.




Ringham, Bob. "The Loan Rangers." Chicago Sun-Times, 23 Sep. 1993.



Vogrin, Bill. "Voice for the needy keeps low profile." Colorado Springs Gazette, 18 Apr. 2005.



Duncombe, Ted. "Drive Gains to Legally Place Homeless in Abandoned Buildings." Associated Press, 1 Dec. 1987.



Brown, David. "Obama to amend report on $800,000 in spending." Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 22 Aug. 2008.




Tayler, Etta and Keith Herbert. "Chicago Streets Obama's Teacher." Newsday, 2 Mar. 2008.



Foulkes, Toni. "Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama Campaign." Social Policy, Winter 2003/Spring 2004.

For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU (archiving magazine articles 7/2007)

For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU:

"But reCaptcha has an even sneakier — and more delightful — purpose. The words are pulled from the book-scanning project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit project in San Francisco that aims to digitize millions of public-domain books and put them online for free. One of the two words in the test is the control word: The gatekeeper computer knows what it should be, so it's there to make sure the puzzle-solver is indeed human. But the other word is there for a different reason. The Archive's scanners are good, but some of the words are too smudgy for the software to decipher. The game takes the image of each smudgy word and puts it into reCaptcha. Each time someone completes a reCaptcha puzzle, they'll be doing a tiny bit of work — translating that difficult image into text, which von Ahn eventually feeds back into the Archive."

Podcast Lectures 101 (archiving magazine articles 12/2006)

Podcast Lectures 101

Pundit Roundup

DailyKos, by DemFromCT
Wed Oct 15, 2008 at 04:38:37 AM PDT

Pundits are working on their pre-excuses, pre-explanantions and pre-eulogies.

Matthew Dowd : A classic reminder from September:

Rule One: When a campaign starts attacking the media, things aren't going well.

Rule Two: When a campaign says the polls are wrong, things aren't very good.

Rule Three: When a campaign says "the only poll that counts is the one on election day" usually means a campaign is about to lose.

Now we could probably add a new one: when partisans start saying let the candidate be the candidate, it means things are off course.

Fox News:

McCain’s Brother to Campaign:"Let John McCain be John McCain."

Marc Ambinder:

The New CBS News / New York Times poll "falls outside the range" of where the race is now, a senior McCain official said tonight.

Asked to respond to the poll, which gives Barack Obama a a 14 point lead among likely voter, the official said via e-mail that the sub-group shifts it showed were improbably large.

Joe Scarborough (On air, MSNBC): I am so upset that issues are predominating. The rules have been changed and character attacks don't work any more. My God. People want to talk about issues. And Republicans can't win in this environment. It's not fair.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

My 401(k) is down $21,000 since the end of September. And John McCain thinks I should be worried about William Ayers.

Maureen Dowd:MoDo's a must read today.

I started my campaign to win a Nobel prize by trying to make peace between the two conservatives at odds on our Op-Ed page.

Ross Douthat: A few of my fellow conservatives, the hard-liners, are having a hard time accepting the concept that they're losing badly... and that those who say so might be reasonable people. The rest tend to blog at NRO.

Harold Myerson: Conservative economists are going to have to deal with the market failure.

No wonder we've seen a disoriented John McCain wandering the moors howling about Bill Ayers. What's he supposed to do? Admit that the Reagan-Thatcher faith in unregulated capitalism, to which every GOP presidential candidate was pledging allegiance just last winter, has collapsed?

Jay Cost:

These numbers are horrible for McCain. All of them speak to core qualities we expect a President to possess - not to mention the central premises of the McCain candidacy. Strong leader, able to handle a major crisis, somebody you'd go to for the toughest decision in your life because you know he has good judgment. Right now, that man is Barack Obama - not John McCain. This is a clear indication to me that, as of today, the country is comfortable with the idea of Obama as President. If it remains comfortable with that idea come Election Day, he will win.

Capital Journal (WSJ):

None of this bodes particularly well for bipartisanship after the election. In fact, it's starting to appear that the only way for Washington to overcome partisan divides may be if one party -- the Democrats, in this case -- wins by such commanding margins that it can overpower the other party.

And that might not be such a good thing. But given the alternative...

Palin's Troopergate: Not Over Yet | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com

Palin's Troopergate: Not Over Yet | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com

Some weeks ago, the McCain team devised a plan to have Palin file an ethics complaint against herself with the State Personnel Board, arguing that it alone was capable of conducting a fair, nonpartisan inquiry into whether she fired Monegan because he refused to fire Wooten, who had been involved in a messy custody battle with her sister. Some Democrats ridiculed the move, noting that the personnel board answered to Palin.

But the board ended up hiring an aggressive Anchorage trial lawyer, Timothy Petumenos, as an independent counsel. McCain aides were chagrined to discover that Petumenos was a Democrat who had contributed to Palin's 2006 opponent for governor, Tony Knowles. Palin is now scheduled to be questioned next week, and the counsel's report could be released soon after. "We took a gamble when we went to the personnel board," said a McCain aide who asked not to be identified discussing strategy. While the McCain camp still insists Palin "has nothing to hide," it acknowledges a critical finding by Petumenos would be even harder to dismiss.

national trend

pollster.com

top is actual as of 9.15.2008, with forward-looking RGM 'prayerjection' appended

bottom is actual as of 10.10.2008

The world's air traffic simulated over 24 hours

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (October 06, 2008)

train

dKos