THE GREAT SCHLEP - GO TO FLORIDA AND GET YOUR GRANDPARENTS TO VOTE OBAMA

Sarah Silverman is the spokesperson behind a great program called "The Great Schlep", a cool idea that asks you and me to go to Florida and get your grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.  Here's Sarah talking about The Great Schlep:


The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.


For more information, check out the website The Great Schlep !

Does PG&E Want To Screw San Francisco? Opposes Clean Energy

Does PG&E wanto to screw San Francisco? If you consider that the utility doesn't back using clean energy sources and has not met State of California guidelines for renewable energy, it sure seems so. You can change that with the passage of Proposition H - "Yes on H." It's the first initiative of its kind; tell your friends around America about it and have them call friends in San Francisco and tell them to vote "Yes On H".

Palin Displaying Racism and Disrespect For Senator Obama

Governor Palin needs to really examine her heart these days leading to the election -- if she can find it.  This is what she said today according to Politico:

“Barack Obama hasn’t told the American people the total truth about that, about his association with Ayers,” Palin said on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show. “Doggonit, he fails to tell the American people with candor and with truthfulness what his associations are and we have to know.”

Palin blamed the media for not providing what she characterized as the same level of scrutiny to Obama that it has applied to her and running mate John McCain.

“I don't see the other ticket being asked to be truthful and give details,” Palin said.

“Some in the mainstream media are saying that, well, we’re taking the gloves off unfairly. No. You know there are only, what, 26 days to go. We gotta start getting answers to these questions that are paramount here so that voters have a choice in front of them that is based on truthfulness and candor. They deserve it.”

The Alaska governor told Ingraham’s listeners that if those questions were being answered, voters would find Obama “out of the mainstream,” adding that the Illinois senator would diminish “the prestige of the United States presidency.”

McCain's Mortgage Plan May Be His Political Suicide Note

Yesterday, both here and on my blog, I disclosed that McCain's plan - abruptly announced during the second presidential debate - to buy up individual mortgages and renegotiate the principal balance of those mortgages to reflect current home values, was previously called for by Obama and was already part of the bailout legislation signed into law by George Bush. Well, I have a slight correction of sorts: as McCain revealed details of the plan yesterday, It became clear that McCain was trying to accomplish something different, and, in the spirit of McCain policy proposals, far worse, than current law.

Politico reports that Jason Furman, Obama's economic policy advisor, released the following statement regarding McCain's plan:

Last night, in his latest attempt to get [his conflicting proposals for fixing the economy] right, [McCain] threw out a proposal that appeared to give the Treasury authority it already has to restructure troubled mortgages. But now that he’s finally released the details of his plan, it turns out it’s even more costly and out of touch than we ever imagined. John McCain wants the government to massively overpay for mortgages in a plan that would guarantee taxpayers lose money, and put them at risk of losing even more if home values don’t recover. The biggest beneficiaries of this plan will be the same financial institutions that got us into this mess, some of whom even committed fraud.... John McCain’s plan to overpay for bad mortgages by handing taxpayer dollars over to big financial institutions is erratic policymaking at its worst, and it’s not the change we need to strengthen our economy, create new jobs and keep Americans in their homes.

McCain is showing himself quite the magician in this campaign. In one broad stroke, McCain has tranformed himself from being the mortal enemy of government regulation to advocating government regulation on a scale so massive that liberal democrats are saying he's gone too far! There is one resonating constant in this new plan, though: wealthy corporations will be the primary beneficiaries. By purchasing mortgages at their face value - which is clearly above market value - McCain is giving a windfall to banks, especially considering that those mortgages might otherwise have been defaulted on.

My appraisal yesterday of McCain's plan was otherwise dead on. I predicted a flood of republican resentment for the plan, and that's precisely what happened. According to Politico, Conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin had this to say:

I can’t underscore enough what a rotten idea John McCain’s ACORN-like government mortgage buy-up is.... Will he propose a similar plan for those who bought mutual funds at or near the market top?

Andy McCarthy, a conservative writer for National Review, said

The thought that he's going to win this thing on policy is foolish. I mean, now, Fan, Fred and $800 billion later, his great idea is to spend a few hundred bill more to buy the bad mortgages? Really gets the juices flowing, doesn't it?

In fact, The New York Times reports that Michelle Malkin and conservative blogger Melissa Clouthier both cosigned a tag word from my post, referring to McCain's plan as "socialist." It looks like this Hail Mary didn't work either. It's fourth and long. The time has come for McCain to punt the ball to Obama.

Rob J
Cross-posted at Opinion Streams.

McCain Still Comes Off As REAL ANGRY; Some OF His Supporters Are Nuts

I just subjected myself to watch Senator John McCain and his running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at a town hall meeting in Wisconsin that was on MSNBC and CNN -- I skip Fox News when I can.

I've got to say that McCain and Palin are drawing the radical fringe movement and I can't help but wonder how many of them are White Supremacists.  Do they represent America? Well, considering that the audiences at these rallies are almost all white, the answer's no.

McCain and Palin are running for a part of America, not all of it.  That's the problem.

Fellow Keating Five Member: McCain Deserves More Scrutiny

Former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini told PolitickerAZ.com Monday that he thinks Sen. John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal of the late '80s and early '90s is fair game as an issue in the presidential contest between the senator from Arizona and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

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Washington Independent: Petraeus Talk Seems to Bolster Obama

During a talk Wednesday about Iraq at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington policy organization, Petraeus repeatedly made statements that bolstered the foreign-policy proposals of Sen. Barack Obama, McCain’s Democratic rival, or cut against McCain’s own lines.

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