Sen. Barack Obama got in a little campaigning on the David Letterman show Wednesday night:

Ultimately what we’ve seen over the last week is a concession on the part of the McCain campaign that this election is going to be about change. You’ll recall, you know, for the last two years, we’ve been talking about needing to change how Washington works, how the country is managed and people were saying, ‘No, it’s about experience, experience, experience,’ and over the last week and a half I think they recognized that, no, the American people want something fundamentally different and for a good reason. Because when you travel, it doesn’t matter whether you’re here in New York City or a tiny hamlet somewhere in the Midwest, what you find is people are just having a tough time right now.

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Apparently lipstick was the story of the day yesterday. I was barely aware of the controversy. I wonder how much it penetrated the American consciousness? I'm guessing not at all, that it was a "Freak Show" story for the Media. So I am going to ignore it.

All your non-Palin comments can go here. You can also add to the underdiscussed Ms. Palin as well if you wish.

This is an Open Thread.

The Republicans are leaving no dirty stone unturned in their attempt to win in November.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

There are no words for how low they will sink.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin. He gets it exactly right. Hope you will send it on. Here's the link.

This is an open thread.

The Washington Post reports on the smear campaign on multiple fronts Sen. John McCain has launched against Sen. Barack Obama. Most are clearly swift-boating.

Take this one. In the Illinois Senate, Obama voted for a bill that allowed school boards to determine appropriate sex education courses. It didn't specify what kind of program or what ages would receive it.

Kindergarten teachers were given the approval to teach about appropriate and inappropriate touching to combat molestation.

The McCain advertisement calls it "Obama's one accomplishment" in education: "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners." "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama, wrong on education, wrong for your family," the ad concludes.

So, John McCain opposes teaching kindergartners how to recognize molestation. John McCain doesn't care about preventing sex assaults of children? If I were a parent of a kindergartner, he wouldn't get my vote based on that alone.

Let's face it. These attacks only matter in the swing states. McCain already has the evangelicals, the radical right and Republicans.

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Sorry, BTD. Dan Schnur assures us that Big Ten states will control the outcome of the election.

[A]s the election draws closer, expect the travel itineraries of Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama to mirror closely that of the Northwestern Wildcats. ...

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Gov. Sarah Palin is dividing the country. The airwaves are filled with those who can see past McCain's cheap ploy to get his campaign moving.

McCain put his desire to be President above the best interests of our country. He deserves to lose.

Aside from all the reasons Palin is a danger to the country because of her lack of qualifications remotely relevant to any high national office, from foreign policy to education to the economy to social security to health care, there's her record, her lack of a record, her ties to the radical right, her position on issues, her distortion of her record and the pending investigation into abuse of her office.

She has become so polarizing a figure that she's now a threat. The radical right is so excited that it might get a chance to direct the pick of our next Supreme Court justices, it cannot contain its glee. The rest of the country is terrified (except for a small number of women who think the race should still be about Hillary and sexism.)

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Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress today we are not winning in Afghanistan.

Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the House Armed Services Committee a day after President Bush announced that the U.S. would increase its presence in Afghanistan by 1,500 troops. Gates, who focused on Iraq, told the committee he thought that the U.S. strategy in Iraq has "entered that end game."

Their testimony was a public airing of a discussion that's going on within the Pentagon about how quickly the military can shift its focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. While violence has dropped precipitously in Iraq, it's climbed in Afghanistan. U.S. troop deaths there are higher than Iraq now, despite a far smaller presence. In addition, insurgent groups increasingly are taking control of villages.

Mullen thinks we can win in Afghanistan with more troops and a different strategy. We are not going to save Afghanistan no matter how many troops we put there. [More...]

Obama criticizes McCain's blatant attempt to swift-boat him over the lipstick comments.

"Spare me the phony outrage. Spare me the phony talk about change," Obama said at the start of an education event in Norfolk, Virginia.

"We have real problems in this country right now. The American people are looking to us for answers, not distractions, not diversions, not manipulations. They want real answers to the real problems we are facing.

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When critics talk about regulatory officials being in bed with those they regulate, the phrase is typically used metaphorically. At the Department of the Interior, however, it should be taken literally.

The Interior Department's Inspector General, who has been investigating the U.S. Minerals Management Service's Royalty-In-Kind program, said government employees who were supposed to be regulating the oil companies were engaging in drug use and having sex with industry contacts. "Several staff admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters," Inspector General Earl Devaney wrote in a Sept. 9 memo to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne released today.

The Royalty-In-Kind program allows oil companies to pay royalties to the government in oil rather than cash. Between 2002 and 2006, "these employees accepted gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business" according to the Inspector General's report. [more ...]

The Texecution of Charles Hood will be delayed, but not because the prosecutor and judge in his case were having an affair. The fact of the affair no longer seems to be disputed.

In the letter to the governor, lawyers for the inmate, Charles Dean Hood, said the former judge, Verla Sue Holland, and the former prosecutor, Thomas S. O’Connell Jr., testified in depositions given late Monday and Tuesday morning that they had a romantic relationship for years.

Whether they were still romantically involved at the time of Hood's trial is unclear, because the judge and prosecutor "had differing recollections about when the affair ended." An independent witness, "a former assistant district attorney, has said the affair continued until 1993." Hood's trial was in September 1990.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could not bring itself to say that a sexual liason between judge and prosecutor renders a criminal trial unfair. But the court found a different reason to stay Hood's execution, which had been scheduled to take place today. [more ...]

Via Todd Beeton:

So I was happy, if unsurprised, to learn from a source that Barack Obama called Hillary Clinton yesterday to thank her for what she's doing on behalf of the campaign. During their conversation, I'm told he thanked her specifically for what she was saying on the campaign trail. The fact is the Obama campaign is working closely with Hillary Clinton on her role in the campaign and will continue to do so until election day.

This is not surprising in the least. Hillary Clinton's message has echoed the Obama campaign's concentration on McCain as Bush' Third Term. Credit where due to the Obama campaign, they realize that fixating on Sarah Palin is a losing political strategy.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only