Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.

The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. In this piece at The Corner, Mark R. Levin, bristling over normally rational conservatives like Colin Powell and Charles Fried falling under Obama's demagogic spell, pushes ajar the door to his inner psyche, where the horrors are of the communist-cum-Nazi variety. Levin doesn't go in much for the Obama as closet Muslim nightmare. I'm sure it's just a failure of imagination.

You might think the U.S. attorneys scandal would be enough to make the White House steer clear of voter fraud bamboozlement in the very next election. You'd be wrong.

It is time for the McCain campaign to come clean about what role any of its staffers may have had in hyping or pushing the press to hype the charges stemming from Ashley Todd's vicious and reprehensible hoax.

As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, McCain Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman pushed reporters on a highly incendiary version of Todd's hoax -- providing reporters with quotes from the fictitious attacker and telling them the the "B" scratched on Todd's face stood for "Barack." As the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson aptly put it, Feldman's actions showed "not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a ... racial backlash against the Obama campaign."

Our reporting did not find any direct evidence that the McCain campaign's national headquarters played a role pushing the story.

However, the national campaign has now come forward and lied about what happened in Pennsylvania. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers has now told NBC that alleged quotes from the McCain campaign in early reports of the story were actually the product of "sloppy reporting" and that they were actually quotes from the Pittsburgh police.

This is simply not credible.

Initial reports specifically quote the McCain campaign. And at least two sources involved in the contemporaneous reporting have come forward and said on the record that the quotes came directly from the McCain campaign. To believe that two separate local news organizations made the identical mistake with the same quotes and are now both covering it up is simply not credible. But that is what Rogers is now claiming.

The McCain campaign's after-the-fact lie about its role in this hoax makes it essential that it provide a complete and honest account of both the local and national campaign's role. As I said above, we did not find direct evidence of the national McCain campaign pushing this story. But Gov. Palin did call Todd after the purported attack, as did Sen. McCain. And news of these calls was provided to the press.

The involvement of the candidates and specifically the release of such information -- which was clearly intended to bump up interest in the story -- shows some level of involvement by the national campaign.

Perhaps it is simply that the national campaign heard a staffer had been mugged and had the principals call the purported victim. One might further speculate that it was only the Pennsylvania communications director who heard about the calls and took it upon himself to push these out to the media.

Possible, but certainly a generous interpretation. And now that we see the national McCain campaign making false statements about what happened, its credibility on the whole story is simply too damaged to allow such a benefit of the doubt.

Reporters who the McCain camp cannot stonewall need to push for a clear accounting of what happened -- starting by coming clean on Feldman's role. If this were simply some other minor campaign mystery, the sort that is routinely tossed off late in a hard-fought campaign, it might not matter. But the awfulness of what was attempted here makes nothing less than a full accounting necessary.

The McCain camp is denying that it was a campaign spokesperson who told local TV reporters in Pittsburgh that the "B" supposedly scrawled on the face of a young McCain campaign worker was a reference to "Barack" Obama, angrily carved into her face with a knife by a black mugger because she was a McCain supporter.

Of course we now know the victim's entire account was a hoax. I suspect the McCain campaign's denial is, too.

In response to our story, campaign spokesperson Brian Rogers told MSNBC that the campaign didn't provide those details to the local reporters, but that the police did, and the reporters were sloppy in attributing them to the McCain campaign (at the 0:54 mark):

So here's what the McCain camp would have you believe. Two different TV stations. Two different reporters. Neither could distinguish what they were told by the police (whom they presumably deal with on a daily basis) from what a campaign flack told them. So thorough is their sloppiness that even after the fact, upon reflection, both reporters stick by their stories, continuing to misattribute police statements to the campaign.

The McCain campaign denial also requires you to believe that, more than 12 hours after the concocted attack, the police -- who say they were suspicious of the hoaxster's account from the beginning -- started leaking to reporters an incendiary version of events that didn't even make it into the original police report of the incident.

Perhaps most implausibly, the McCain camp account requires you to give the benefit of the doubt to a crew that wants you to believe that Obama himself is a smooth-talking, baby-killing Islamic terrorist who embraces socialism and white women.

Joe Lieberman tries to patch things up with the Dems, insists he's been respectful to Barack Obama -- whom he's previously said doesn't put the country first. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

A few of the early Palin profiles reported out of Alaska noted her propensity to turn on early mentors or those who gave her key legs up after those people were no longer useful.

Now the latest from The Politico ...

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image -- even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

Obviously, Palin is the McCain campaign's responsibility, his fault, etc. But I must confess to some sympathy for the frustration and heartburn it must cause his staffers to hear Palin and her crew complaining about a "botched rollout and [her] tarnished image." That's gratitude for you. Sometimes it's just the product.

TPM Reader SW:

I have been a reader (and meager contributor) since 2002, and hit you several times daily. However, I think more and more of the stories you do (and do and do and do, like the Pittsburgh face carver of limited talent and imagination) are better over-covered by, say, the Huffington Post. (Yes, it's important to tell how the McCain campaign sleazed its way through this one-- that's the important story, and it must be told, and you did that well.) You have a great platform to educate people who need to be educated, and more importantly, want to be educated (unlike say, the Fox/Drudge clientele). Better, you people have the means and talent to educate your intelligent readers.

I spit out my coffee when I read this story yesterday. I had not heard that the banks who are getting the $250,000,000,000.00 (with twice as much still left to come) Treasury just gave out are not being told by Secretary Treasury Paulson to lend it to Joe Sixpack to buy his boss's business, but to buy other banks. What an effing outrage!

Joe Nocera's article details how Treasury has been lying since this crises began, just like an oily subprime lender, selling us something we don't need or want by telling us it's something else. If this article is true, our taxes are financing J.P. Morgan's and Goldman Sachs' 2008 executive bonus fund.

Can you please get word of this excellent article out?

Keep up the good work.

TPM Reader LP replies ...

SW says more education, less anything else.

I say TPM already does a great job of balancing this, with lots and lots of critical info and analysis and measured opinion, with a small bit of relevant but less-deadly-serious articles to help keep me and I'm presuming most readers able to move on to the next deadly-serious article without getting "serious" indigestion. There's only so much density and mass one can digest at a time.

I think it also helps attract new and keep old visitors coming back. A lot of journalists who come to this site, I'm guessing, wouldn't have the investigatory dedication or love of inquiry to often visit a more dry and academic site, or a site with a more staid demeanor.

Personally, I work online and TPM helps me stay awake, become much better informed, stay passionate about politics, and laughing each and every day. This is why I visit briefly usually every one to two hours. It's really quite an informative and serious enough site as is.

Looking forward to 2012, it seems Palin ain't quite the darling of the base some imagine.

If Republicans had to pick for 2012 today, it'd be: Romney 35%, Huckabee 26%, Palin 20%.

McCain volunteer Ashley Todd tells the police she's "upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm."

Ashley makes her perp walk.

A portion of the press conference held this afternoon by Pittsburgh police:

With only 11 days to go until Election Day, we take a look at the state of the race through the prism of some telling new polls ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

The pressure seems to be getting to McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. In response to a Marc Ambinder post suggesting that a faction in McCain's campaign thinks Palin is going off script to appeal to the base, Randy sent Ambinder this email ...

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

An old pal and handler of Chalabi, a big slime purveyor for McCain through the whole cycle, reputations are hard to repair. These must not be good times for Scheunemann.

It's that time of year.

TPM brings on a new class of interns each season. And we're now taking applications for our Winter 2008/2009 cycle. TPM interns are probably as intimately and rapidly involved in the preparation and production of news coverage as interns at any other news organization. And that ranges from work on the news section of the front page to research for our news blogs to video editing to bylined articles. Winter cycle interns will work closely on stories relating to the presidential transition and the start of the new Congress. The application deadline is November 7th. To find out details for how to apply, click here.

Well, for everyone who had eyes to see, this thing stunk to high heaven. But now we have official word that that McCain volunteer who had the straight-out-of- the-trash-novel story about being assaulted by a mugger-cum-Obama-activist has confessed that the whole thing was a hoax. It is the classic story that is so perfect for certain malevolent actors that if it hadn't happened they'd have to make it up. As indeed they did.

To say this is a dark moment does not do justice to the deep awfulness of this stunt. It's the metaphoric pedal-to-the-metal for the sleazy sub-rosa campaign of racial fear-mongering that so far has failed to derail Obama's candidacy.

There are many questions to be asked about who pushed this story yesterday afternoon and last night. A lot of explaining.

Conservative legal scholar and Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried, who just endorsed Obama, isn't just a Republican. He's actually one of McCain's campaign advisors.

Before they cycle down the memory hole, here's Fried on McCain's Honest and Open Election Committee and Justice Advisory Committee.

Key to his decision was McCain's "choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

The NRSC is pulling out of the Colorado Senate race.

Bill Weld endorses Obama.

Getting the sense that no moderate GOPer wants to be the one left holding the McCain bag on November 5th.

On the Street I believe this is referred to as a 'flight to quality' ...

A new poll gives Obama his first lead in Georgia, 48-47.

The highest-paid McCain-Palin campaign staffer is Sarah Palin's makeup artist. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

From the Marin Independent Journal ...

A Republican charged with representing the views of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain told Dominican University students Thursday that war with Iran in the next four years is inevitable.

The prediction came during a campus event in which teams of Dominican students presented the positions of McCain and his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, on six key issues: the economy, foreign policy, environment, health care, education and ethics.

...

After each presentation, brief comments were added by Republican William Grayson, president of a San Francisco hedge fund company and former general counsel for the San Francisco Republican Central Committee, and Tony West, a partner at a San Francisco law firm and co-chairman of the Obama campaign's California finance committee.

"Let me assure you of this," Grayson said after the student presentation on foreign policy. "The next president, whether it is Senator Obama or John McCain, will go to war, and he will go to war with Iran.

Special thanks to TPM Reader OL for the tip.

Sarah Palin on $150k blingfest: "That is not who we are."

All in one place! In one mighty cauldron of fetid McCainite sleaze!

Don't miss our newly updated, interactive "Map of GOP Sleaze", with all the mailers and audio of the latest robocalls.

We noted earlier in the week part of CNN's interview with Sarah Palin in which she was asked about a National Review article that the interviewer clearly took out of context. Today, CNN offered on-air what I guess you would call an explanation:

My dear, departed father, a biologist to the core, loved the phrase 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', which is a perfectly deft but utterly inscrutable way of saying that the stages of growth of a fetus in the womb mimics the evolutionary history of the species itself *. (If that's still not completely clear, see this.) But we also know, if not from science than from Science Fiction or at least Star Trek, that as organisms die they often cycle back through their own individual histories, tracking off their defining moments as they wind down into oblivion.

And yesterday I had an political epiphany. As the McCain campaign staggers toward its conclusion, with electoral columns and pediments standing since 1966 buckling under their weight, the party seems to be cycling back through its history of character assassination, McCarthyism and wedge politics flimflam, only now with an desperate and parodic impotence taking the place of punishing rhetorical violence.

Southern strategy race-baiting, check! Hyper 9/11ist 'the Dems are terrorists' character assassination, check! Rep. Michelle Bachmann's neo-McCarthyite manifesto and call for a new HUAC, check! 'The Democrats want to bring socialism to America', check! Who lost Georgia? Aspirational neo-Cold Warism, check! Mix these in with a general stew of 70s-90s soft-on-crime, Dems are pedophile weirdo-freak-loser wedge politics and we've basically got the full ground covered.

I don't doubt that anti-tax politics retains a potent, if diminished resonance. And perhaps I'm just naive. But does 'socialism', as a cudgel in the context of a national political campaign, not simply sound archaic? It is one more reason I sense the GOP's and perhaps the conservative movement's dying regression into its ideological infancy.

I'd started writing this post two days ago before setting it aside to work on other tasks and projects. But tonight I saw that the situation had become so farcical and grave that TPM Reader BH was moved to genuine concern for future Republican prospects ...

I have been a long time reader, propably since sometime on 2001. Anyway I just wanted to pass a thought along that I have been having lately. I'm *concerned* that this McCain Campaign could cause some long term damage to the GOP in a few ways, but here is the most interesting angle to me.

I don't why its happening right now but it seems like the long used divisive attacks from Republicans that declare some of us real Americans and others not are finally being widely exposed as the pathetic rhetoric it is. It seems like a lot of it might have to do with the position they are now in, ploys like these came off as tough and macho when the GOP was on top but now that they are on the ropes its starting to look pretty desperate instead. Part of me thinks the Republicans should just throw in the towel because as they step up their attacks its starting to look like a parody and they may never be able to effectively use some of these classic attacks in the future if they are too widely mocked during and after this election. In future elections democrats will be able to point to similar campaigns and compare them to the McCain campaign which conventional wisdom will likely soon be viewed as frenzied and pitiful. But I'm even more hopeful the sun is setting on this style of politics, dividing the country up into states that were truly part of the homeland and others that weren't worked alright but as demographics shift their more nuanced arguments about real Virginia vs fake Virginia expose the true silliness of it all.

David raises the question: has the GOP bag of tricks simply lost political traction and resonance or does the audacious slime that is so bracing and outrageous from the politically powerful simply seem pitiful from the hapless and impotent? For me the two trends are too deeply woven together to distinguish. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

* (ed.note: I believe that current biological science holds that 'recapitulation' theory is not true in the narrow sense, though there are broad visual similarities between the early morphology of a human embryo and other more 'primitive' animal life forms. My father told me this at one point. I think he just loved the phrase.)

Career staff in the Office of Special Counsel had been begging the White House for months to fire their boss, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch. Why did the White House finally fire him (sub. req.) only three days after Bloch announced his intention to resign in January?

Every cycle it seems there's one numbskull pol who comes up with an out of the blue unforced error which takes them from safe reelection to top on the endangered species list overnight. This year it's Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), execrable congresswoman from Minnesota. And in today's episode we tell her very, very sorry tale ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Not even becoming violent and disruptive during deliberations can get you thrown off a DC federal jury.

Not worth noting, except that it's Sen. Ted Stevens' jury.

Late Update: TPM Reader JM points out my failings as a humorist: "Attention David Kurtz! You're missing a "jury of his peers" joke there."

For all the news coming out of the self-inflicted Michelle Bachmann 'anti-American' trainwreck, we still haven't gotten any polling data out of the district to tell us who's actually head. But we will tonight when SurveyUSA releases the first public poll of the race since Bachmann's boffo Joe McCarthy impression on Hardball last Friday.

An analysis of TV ad buys in key swings states shows McCain cutting spending, sometimes dramatically, in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Colorado while increasing spending in Virginia and Florida. TPM Election Central has the details.

John McCain plays simple answers to simple questions.

Reporters: Why did the RNC spend $150,000 on clothes and accessories for Sarah Palin and her family?

McCain: "She needed the clothes."

What is it with Austrian Nazis, neo- or otherwise ...

The successor of the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider was dismissed yesterday after he revealed a "special" relationship "far beyond" friendship with his former mentor.

In emotional interviews with the national broadcaster and a tabloid newspaper Stefan Petzner spoke openly about his affair with Haider, who died at the age of 58 in a high-speed car crash after heavy drinking session at a gay club this month. Haider's party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 11 per cent of the vote in national elections last month .

"He was the man of my life. Our relationship went far beyond friendship," Mr Petzner, 27, said after only a week in the job, adding that Haider's wife, Claudia, 52, "did not object" to their relationship.

...

Mr Petzner dropped out of university when he met Haider at a party. At that time he was working as a journalist, writing about cosmetic treatments.

...

Local papers said that, on the night of his accident, Haider and Mr Petzner had a row at a magazine launch party. Haider left in a hurry and drove to a gay club in Klagenfurt, his home town, where he drank vodka with male escorts. The reports said that he was hardly able to walk to his car.

Strikes a personal chord for me, as I suspect it will for many others.

Drudge is no longer as big a fan of John Zogby.

Former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson (R) is endorsing Barack Obama.

Usually when you hear these sorts of stories it's someone who was governor for like one term in the 1970s or something, when party divisions were very different from today. Carlson, though, was Minnesota Governor for most of the 1990s. My recollection is that he basically got run out by the hard right faction of the GOP in the state. But he was a moderate, but a genuine Republican. He cited Bachmann's tirade as one thing that pushed him to endorse.

It's bad enough that the NRCC is having to abandon some incumbents to save others, but the NRSC is running a TV ad for Sen. Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina that presumes McCain is going to lose.

Some things are so basic they don't even bother putting them in the official political playbook -- like the rule that dismissing your district as racist could make it harder for you to get re-elected.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement from a fellow GOP governor:

New Quinnipiac polls give Obama sizable leads in Pennsylvania (+13) and Ohio (+14) and a clear lead in Florida (+5). That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

From the central front in the GOP war on minority voting, from earlier this week ...

A judge weighing whether to close down early voting sites in Lake County's Democratic strongholds questioned local officials about the absentee voting process during visits to the disputed sites.

Lake County Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider toured the Gary, Hammond and East Chicago satellite voting sites Monday and heard hours of testimony and arguments on whether they are legal and fair.

Republicans want to shut down the centers in the largely Democratic county on the grounds that they will increase the likelihood of vote fraud in the Nov. 4 election.

Kavadias-Schneider, who was appointed a special judge in the case by the Indiana Supreme Court, questioned county elections board director Sally LaSota on Monday about the process of early voting and safeguards against vote fraud.

LaSota assured the judge that the elections board staff ensures voters are registered and don't vote more than once.

When Kavadias-Schneider asked, "What of those who have already voted?" R. Lawrence Steele, a GOP lawyer, replied, "Maybe those votes should be discarded."

May just toss those votes. Pretty much says it all.

Yesterday, the judge dismissed GOP complaints and ruled that the satellite voting sites would stay open.

If the McCain campaign is so short on funds, where did they get the cash to buy the time machine they used to go back to 1994 to get Joe the Plumber?

NRCC pulling the plug on Rep. Musgrave (R-CO) too, says Politico.

Survey USA: Wash CD 8: Burner (D) 50%, Reichert (R) 46%.

Here's the TPMtv interview with Burner from this year's NetRoots Nation conference ...

Karl Rove created a permanent Republican majority.

We've confirmed with a Republican source that the House Republican campaign committee, the NRCC, has indeed pulled all its advertising for suddenly imperiled Rep. Michelle Bachmann.

MSNBC just ran what we can only call an extraordinary interview with NBC News' Chuck Todd and Brian Williams. They were discussing the interview NBC just did with John McCain and Sarah Palin. We'll have the video shortly. But what really stood out was the candidness of Todd's discussion of the wheels possibly coming off McCain's campaign, his willingness to discuss the tension between the two candidates and even to speculate that McCain may be starting to blame Palin for his campaign's collapse.

That's obviously speculation on Todd's part. But ... Well, wait to see it yourself.

We actually posted this this morning at TPMtv. But I only found about it now. There were already some questions from the vice presidential debate about whether Sarah Palin understands the constitutional role of the vice president. But now it seems clear that she has no idea of the constitutional role of the office she's running for.

In an interview on Monday afternoon, when asked what the vice president does, Palin said (emphasis added) ...

A vice president has a really great job, because not only are they there to support the president's agenda, they're like the team member, the teammate to that president, but also they're in charge of the United States Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it's a great job and I look forward to having that job.

Now as you can see from the question, and as the McCain campaign has been pushing aggressively, the interviewer had read a question from a third grader. So the argument is that she wasn't giving a serious or exact answer since the question itself was from a child. I flag this point because I want to be fair and give their argument. But I don't think that adds up. A vice presidential candidate doesn't invent extra-constitutional powers in a tv interview to humor a child she hasn't even met. An interview is an interviewer. I think she's just out of it.

Here's the tape.

CNN just played the Social Security portion of John McCain's interview with Wolf Blitzer. And two key points stood out.

First, McCain fabricated an alternative history of the 2005 Social Security battle in order to create a new tax talking points. According to McCain, and he repeated this again and again, "the [Social Security] talks broke down because the Democrats insisted as a precondition that we raise taxes."

That's very weird. First, there were no Social Security talks. And the Democrats didn't make any demands to raise taxes. They didn't even propose raising taxes. As many of you know, I followed that debate extremely closely. And McCain just made this stuff out of whole cloth. Really bizarre.

Second, Blitzer asked if McCain still would have favored President Bush's privatization plan, as he did in 2005, that we see how volatile the stock market it is. McCain repeatedly refused to answer the question and instead repeated the tax precondition fib.

Blitzer actually complicated the matter by misstating what Bush proposed -- claiming he proposed allowing people to put 10% of their Social Security funds in the market rather than just under 20%. But the key point remains -- after standing behind privatization as recently as a few weeks ago, now McCain refuses to say he still supports it.

Latest McCain robocall raises Obama's "bitter" remark in criticizing "elitist Democrats."

Late Update: And there's yet more of this stuff. A veritable blizzard of robocalls recapping the last 35 years of culture wars.

Okay, here's some special bonus robo-clothes shopper snark.

Jeff Larson is not only John McCain's chief robocaller and Sen. Palin's $150k clothes shopper, he's also the guy who's giving that sweetheart rental deal on his apartment in DC.

McCain's chief robocaller is the one who actually bought Palin the clothes. More in a moment.

Rudy Giuliani is popping up on robocalls in Wisconsin and Maine (those two we know about) claiming Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for murderers and rapists.

It was fun for a while, but the honeymoon is over. Sarah Palin has turned out to be a major drag on John McCain's candidacy. We look at the numbers in today's episode of TPMtv ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Along with their daily horse race numbers, Gallup is also tracking how many voters say they've already voted, either by absentee or early voting in their states. As of today, the percentage of registered voters is at 10% who say they've already voted. Bear in mind that not all registered voters vote -- in fact a lot of them don't. So the percentage of the 2008 electorate that has already cast a ballot is certainly higher than 10%.

McCain foreign policy advisor takes a few moments out from bailing water to insist that Al Qaida really isn't rooting for McCain, even though a major al Qaida-linked website says they are.

Really not where you want to be 13 days out.

Late Update: TPM alum Spencer Ackerman has more thoughts on this. --gs

TPM Reader SS: "If Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe had a life of its own, it would get a tax cut from a President Obama."

Did Levi get some Saks Bling too?

All that designer-label apparel the RNC purchased for Sarah Palin (to the tune of $150,000)? No worries. They'll donate it to charity after the election. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Most of us know this, but hearing it from them ...

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier," the message said. "Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush."

Via TPM Alum Spencer Ackerman.

New York Post forced to retract phony story about Michelle Obama dining on lobster and caviar in her room at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Her not even staying at the Waldorf was the first of several problems.

Obama camp to unleash blistering robocall returning fire at McCain for running "sleazy" campaign.

You may have seen Democratic Rep. John Murtha's sweeping statements about his part of western Pennsylvania being "racist" (and his subsequent "redneck" mea culpa). Not exactly laying the ground work for racial harmony. So John McCain arrived in Pennsylvania today all set to capitalize on Murtha's boneheaded remarks. Well, McCain's got the boneheaded part down:

You can see the glimmer of recognition of the flub, like he just chased Road Runner off the edge of the cliff. There's the split-second decision to try to pull off a miracle escape. But his legs stop spinning and gravity takes over and from there it's a long way down. For a guy who spent the last week reminding everyone he's not Bush, that's got to hurt.

Politico reports on the RNC apparently shelling out $150,000 to clothe and accessorize the Palin family.

Nothing says Main Street quite like Saks Fifth Avenue.

Is Palin a bigger drag on McCain than Bush?

The Nevada GOP is demanding that voters with errors on their registration forms cast provisional ballots rather than simply fixing those errors when they go to the polls and casting regular ballots, arguing that any last minute changes violate state law closing new voter registrations three weeks before the election.

Joe Biden, calling McCain to the carpet today over his "scurrilous" robocalls:

New union robocall in Ohio labels McCain a pro-Wall Street "disaster for the middle class."

Sarah Palin put on the spot about a piece from National Review:

Late Update: The National Review's Rich Lowry emails to note that CNN took his mag's piece way out of context. I think he has a point there.

Hard to see the upside in denying having said something on national TV since it's a provable lie. But Rep. Michele "Anti-American" Bachmann (R-MN) is gutting it out, telling local TV in her home state that it's just not true that she said what she said:

We've started compiling the sleazier mailers and robocalls that the McCain camp and GOP-leaning groups have unleashed -- and mapping which states they're appearing in.

We're going to keep updating this map and adding some new reader-friendly features shortly. In the meantime, take a look and let us know what we're missing.

As we'll do from now until Election Day, our daily update on the state of the race ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

So Gov. Palin is giving her first interview to CNN to CNN's investigative reporter Drew Griffin.

Remember this is the guy they sent to Alaska to investigate Trooper-gate and came back snarking, "But please tell me if you think [Trooper Mike Wooten's] tale -- dubbed Troopergate by Gov. Palin's political enemies -- is really the scandal that will bring down the newest star on the political scene."

Late Update: Hmmm. Seems like Griffin's fluffing more than Sarah Palin. TPM Reader RC sends in video of Griffin providing the same service for Stanley Kurtz's 'reporting' on Bill Ayers, the bogus ACORN story and ACORN special reports for Lou Dobbs.

Latter Update: In Griffin's defense, here's a decent critique Griffin did of the GOP's jihad against ACORN. Not perfect, but not deeply hackish either.

From Cindy ...

In an interview with Fox news that aired Monday night, Mrs. McCain said she thought the biggest difference between her husband's first presidential run eight years ago and his campaign this year was the media's attitude toward the Arizona senator's candidacy.

"What has really stunned me is the -- quite honestly, is the kind of viciousness of the media on occasion," Mrs. McCain said. "In 2000 -- there's certainly always been, you know, differences, and the -- you know, the things that occur. But this has taken on a different tenor. And I don't know why and what's caused that, and I'm sorry for it because I think it turns a lot of young people off."

In her speech just an hour or so ago Sarah Palin rolled out the successor to Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder. It may be like Joe is the John the Baptist to Tito's Jesus or some such similar typology. But it just so happens that Mother Jones' David Corn was lucky enough to get into a one way yelling match with Tito at his debut event a couple days ago in Woodbridge, VA.

Here's David's write up of the glorious event.

Boris Johnson, the lavishly Tory Mayor of London ...

However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.

The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people's eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

CQ has downgraded Rep. Michele Bachmann's re-election chances in the wake of her anti-Americanism tirade against Democratic leaders on Hardball. Her opponent is closing in on a million dollars raised online since her disastrous interview and is using the money for a new TV ad.

SurveyUSA: McConnell 48%, Lunsford 48%.

That's not out of line with the other recent polling in Kentucky.

Obama and the DNC had 30 percent more cash on hand than McCain and the RNC heading into the last month of the campaign.

Shorter McCain Campaign: Obama's a black, socialist, Muslim terrorist homo.

U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch -- he of Geeks on Call fame, among other notorieties -- will leave office in January.

McCain, from the CBS Early Show.

McCain: Our Bill Ayers-themed robocalls are "absolutely accurate." That and the day's other news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Hmmm.

From Politico ...

Rep. Christopher Smith, a Republican who has represented central New Jersey since 1980, probably didn't realize he was walking into a political minefield when his family requested a break on his daughter's huge college bill.

Smith's daughter, who until recently lived with him in the family's Herndon, Va., home, obtained in-state tuition privileges at a prestigious Virginia university -- saving the Smiths $20,000 per year off the $29,000 tuition charged to out-of-state students.

But what Smith saved in cash could end up costing him politically - Democrats says the claim to Virginia residency shows that Smith is out of touch with the New Jersey constituents he's supposed to represent.

Palin calls reports of hollered threats at rallies "atrocious and unacceptable."

Top McCain aide/alter ego Salter unleashes new whining fusillade.

RNC New Mexico GOP gets caught red-handed mid-bamboozle hawking a phony vote fraud story.

Yesterday we had Colin Powell endorsing Barack Obama. And today, via George Packer, we learn that uber-hawk Ken Adelman is going to vote for Obama.

Now, the thing here is that Adelman's choice, while not nearly as politically consequential, is a much, much bigger surprise than Powell's. Powell's informal support for Obama has been an open secret for some time. And he was always an outlier in George W. Bush's world of petulant unilateralism.

Not Adelman. Without putting too fine a point on it, the kind of 'shoot first and ask questions later', 'we're going to democratize your ass' foreign policy that McCain comes to by way of personality disorder is one Adelman has been espousing as a matter of considered principle for more than thirty years.

So what's his beef exactly?

You can read his email to Packer for the full details. But the gist seems to be that watching McCain over the last two months, Adelman decided he just lacks the temperament and judgment to be president.

TPM readers report robocalls from Sarah Palin in Nevada and Wisconsin.

Why did Rep. John Lewis have to go and make the honorable John McCain start race-baiting?

The latest McCain camp caricature shows signs that it's not moving voters to McCain any better than last one, Bill Ayers, did.

Obama, speaking a short time ago on McCain's sleazy robocalls: "You really have to work hard to violate Governor Palin's standards on negative campaigning."

Either because of age or recent immersion in politics, a lot of readers have asked, is it really usually this bad? Do they all get this sleazy? As sleazy as McCain?

The simple answer, I think, is, No. They don't. I don't think there's any question that McCain's is the dirtiest and most dishonest campaign, certainly in the last 35 years and possibly going much further back into the early 20th century.

You may say, wait, Willie Horton? The Swift-boat smears? What about those?

But here's the key point, one that is getting too little attention. President Bush's father didn't run the Willie Horton ad. And this President Bush, however much they may have been funded by his supporters and run with Karl Rove's tacit approval, didn't run the Swift Boat ads. These were run by independent groups. Just how 'independent' we think they really are is a decent question. But even the sleaziest campaigns usually draw the line at the kind of sleaze they are wiling to run themselves under their own name.

In this case, though, the kind of toxic sludge usually run by one-off independent groups in very limited ad buys makes up virtually all of McCain's presence on TV.

Even setting aside this distinction, McCain's campaign has charted new territory in deliberate lying and appeals to racism and xenophobia. But this distinction itself is too little recognized.

Late Update: One reader points to Richard Nixon's campaigns as the obvious competitor for McCain in the sleaziest of all time derby. And this is why I flagged the "in the last 35 years" caveat. But let's break this down. The best argument here would be to compare McCain's terrorist-baiting to Nixon's red-baiting. And it's not a bad comparison. But this was much more a matter of the Nixon of the 1950s. That didn't figure in the 1960 campaign. And red-baiting per se, at least of the 1950s variety, wasn't Nixon's pitch in the 1968 or 1972 elections, but rather a more general stab-in-the-back, take the country back for the real Americans from the anti-American hippie freaks. Now, there's a separate question of whether Nixon outdid McCain in the category of illegality and dirty tricks in the 1968 and 1972 campaigns. And at least on the basis of what's publicly known at the moment, there seems little doubt that Nixon wins in that category. Regardless, McCain's in excellent company. And I'd stick to my claim that McCain likely outdoes Nixon on things that happened in presidential campaigns.

Late Update: TPM Reader PB responds ...

The campaign you are in the middle of always seems to be the one where the other guy is running the "dirtiest" in history. Republicans are making the same charge against Obama, and I don't doubt they believe it. I don't want to diminish the extent to which the McCain campaign has mired itself in the muck, but I think you are losing the forest for the trees. It should be noted that for whatever reason, McCain has so far refused to go places that Hillary went in the primary (Wright, explicit comments about "hard-working, white" Americans supporting her, distributing emails with pictures of Obama in Muslim garb, etc.).

Yes, the Willie Horton ad was run by an outside group, but in this case that is a distinction without a difference. Bush repeatedly brought up Horton on the campaign trail, and the "independent" group that ran the ad had extensive ties to Bush's campaign. The only difference here is that McCain is signing his name to the sleaze, while Bush tried to erase his fingerprints.

As for the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, W. just did a better job of covering up his campaign's involvement. Rove's fingerprints were all over the Swift Boat attacks and the Dan Rather "Memogate" story. It's a mistake to try to separate out what is done by independent groups and what is done by the campaigns proper, as these groups rarely operate fully independently of the campaigns. Bush and his campaign surrogates could have condemned the Swift Boaters and called for a halt to the attacks. Instead they sent people like Bob Dole out to say that the issues the group raised were "legitimate."

No one campaigns sleazier than a Bush. The fact that the family maintains plausible deniability to distance itself from the sleaze it peddles on their opponents only makes them more, not less slimy. McCain's sleaziness is unique only insofar as he seems to have an extraordinary ability to believe that he is hewing to some imaginary code of honor while engaging in dirty, illegitimate attacks that he would righteously denounce were they launched against him. I was very much struck by McCain's righteous insistence that the content of the robocalls his campaign was running were "true." In the narrowest possible sense, that is of course correct, but the same could probably be said of the robocalls Bush made against him in SC in 2000. I don't doubt that every fact presented in those calls was true, that did not change the fact that the overall intent of the call was to mislead and misdirect.

Former Secretary of State and retired General Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama on Meet the Press Sunday morning. Let's see how it played on the rest of the Sunday Shows ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Judy Miller signs on as Fox News analyst.

Since Rep. Michele Bachmann's unhinged performance on Hardball Friday, her Democratic opponent has raised some $650,000 in online contributions.

TPM Reader HR puts McCain on the couch ...

I've never really cared whether McCain was an honorable man who lost his way, or was never all that honorable in the first place. It's seemed to me a distinction without a difference-- I'm reminded of the debate in Pogo about whether The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another blind Greek poet of the same name.

That having been said, McCain's defense of robocalling to Chris [Wallace's] is fascinating. It's so evident that McCain is lying through his teeth--and knows it. But instead of feeling guilty, contrite (like a man of honor), or oblivious (like a sociopath), McCain just gets angrier.

I get the sense that the further he drifts from his (perhaps former) ideals, the angrier he gets at those who (in his mind) forced him to stray.

"My fellow prisoners" indeed.

The video in question is in the post immediately below.

Obama and Hillary campaigning together in Florida today. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

It speaks for itself ...

I spent most of this weekend at a family celebration. So it was only this evening that I got a chance to see Colin Powell's statement at the beginning of Meet the Press this morning, which you can see here ...

And what struck me was that Powell's rationale for supporting Obama tracked very closely with some of the harshest critics of Sen. McCain, despite the fact that he used less cutting words to express them.

There were three key points he hit. First, he questioned McCain's unsteady and erratic response to the economic crisis. He didn't use the word 'erratic' but he might as well have. McCain was "unsure", "almost everyday there was a different approach to the problem," he "didn't have a complete grasp of the economic problems." In contrast, Obama had "steadiness" amidst the crisis.

Second, he questioned McCain's "judgment", particularly but it would seem not exclusively in his decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate, someone Powell said was unqualified to serve as president.

Third, he said he was "disappointed" in McCain's sleazy campaign tactics. Yes, 'sleazy' is my word. But Powell's own words were pretty clear -- he was talking about McCain's campaign of distortion and innuendo aimed at painting Obama as a crypto-Muslim and terrorist. It "goes too far", said Powell, in something of an understatement.

It's quite a blow for McCain on each point. But the most galling must be what Powell said about his judgment, his steadiness in moment's of crisis. Powell and McCain are both in their early 70s. Obama is a quarter century younger. And in so many words Powell said that compared to Obama, McCain simply lacks the seasoning, the maturity to be president.

McCain: Obama's small-donor fundraising model in desperate need of reform.

From TPM Reader PP ...

You mentioned that Obama drew 100,000 people to a rally in St. Louis Saturday. After that, he went to Kansas City, where he held another rally which drew an estimated 75,000. I was there. Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius was there, and remarked that we know what kind of person he is since he was raised by two strong Kansas women. Obama spoke positively, of what he plans to do to help Americans, his vision of America, and only mentioned his opponents policies, not his character. He also stopped by his local office, talked to some local volunteers and jumped in on some phone calls they were making.

John McCain responds to Barack Obama's record September haul, says Obama's fundraising model will inevitably lead to scandal and we'll eventually have to pass legislation to fix the situation. That and other political news in today's Election Central Sunday Roundup.

If you're thinking to yourself that there's little more than two weeks before election day and Obama has a solid lead in the polls, don't be so sure.

Yes, it looks good for the Democrats. But you need to play close attention to the McCain campaign's final weeks' strategy under and just above the radar. McCain's final strategy relies on two pillars. The first is aggressively playing to voters' fears of electing a black president. Make no mistake: not just his campaign in a general sense, but McCain himself and his top handful of advisers, are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans.

Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn't matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun "terrorist" in polite company in the same sentence as "Obama," over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a 'respectable' version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.

Stripped down to its components McCain's message to voters is this: "Don't forget. He's definitely black. And he may be a terrorist." That's the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting -- through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether. Smears in the air and voter suppression on the ground.

Many people say, well ... all this stuff just hasn't worked. But the truth is that the really corrupt and vicious part of McCain's effort only comes now because it's only in the last couple weeks that you can pull stuff that the press won't get to call you on before election day -- after which it doesn't matter. Will it take Obama down? So far McCain's gutter campaign has hurt him more than helped. But there's no reason to be sure it will continue that way. And many Obama supporters, sure the election is basically wrapped up, appear ready to slack in the stretch and let McCain smear and cheat his way into office.

Mark Reed's words.

McCain defends his campaign's robocalls on the grounds that the calls don't say what they in fact say.

Late Update: Here's the video:

Colin Powell just endorsed Barack Obama during an appearance on Meet The Press.

Powell's post-MTP presser:

Video of the MTP appearance shortly ...

Late Update: Here's Powell announcing the endorsement on Meet The Press:

Obama raises $150 million in September.

McCain camp to focus on pro-America regions like "real Virginia."