Reports Politico:

Reporters traveling with John McCain are slightly miffed that the senator hasn't had any face time with them in, well, a month and three days (But who's counting?)

So, when Straight Talk Air departed Tampa today, a dozen reporters chanted, "Bring Mac back! Bring Mac back!" (Some reporters expressed concern that chanting at takeoff could be against FAA regulations. Others joked that they could be taken away by the secret service agents on board.)

The chanting lasted under a minute as staffers in the business cabin smiled and then promptly closed the curtain between business and coach. No word on whether McCain heard the chanting. But, alas, he never made it back.

Linking to this blog post about politics and the paranoid mind proves that I am a _______ secretly working to elect _______ to the office of _______ so I can go to _______ with _______. Now what does it say about you?

As the presidential candidates debate how "fundamentally sound" our economy is, Scott Lilly points to a bigger problem that is getting buried under the mess on Wall Street:

It is clear to any detached observer that the travails on Wall Street are not simply a superficial kink in the circulation of the nation's money supply. There are deep-seated problems here that will impede growth, and accelerate business failures and job losses if not objectively identified and forcefully addressed. While we have recklessly disregarded the need for prudent supervision of our banking and financial systems, the real problem is even deeper.

For eight years we have papered over the fact that American consumers do not have the purchasing power to sustain economic expansion. As a report I authored a little more than a month ago details, the wage and salary increases that have occurred since 2000 have not been sufficient to even maintain the level of income that most families enjoyed at the beginning of this decade. Employment has not kept pace with population growth. And even though worker productivity has increased by nearly 20 percent over this period, weekly wages are barely higher than they were on the day the current president took office.

Under normal circumstances, we would have seen the effects of slow wage and job growth much sooner in the economic cycle. But the Bush administration and their enablers at the Federal Reserve Board found a way to inoculate the economy temporarily from the fact that the paychecks which Americans were taking home were insufficient to buy the goods and services the economy was capable of producing. The prescription was easy credit—car loans, credit cards, and most importantly, mortgages.

(See update at the end of this post: Ben Smith finds the group behind the calls.)

There are at least two reports, one today and one yesterday, of push polling, that despicable, below-the-radar campaign tactic that is more about spreading misinformation than collecting data. This effort seems to be aimed at Jewish voters. One person who got the call was the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn, who lives in Michigan, and he took notes:

But soon enough I understood why they were asking about Carter. After going over some more issues and confirming the fact that I was likely to vote for Obama, the caller made a series of rather pointed inquiries. Would it affect my vote, he said, if I knew that

Obama has had a decade long relationship with pro-Palestinian leaders in Chicago

the leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, expressed support for Obama and his hope for Obama's victory

the church Barack Obama has attended is known for its anti-Israel and anti-American remarks

Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security advisor is one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors

Barack Obama was the member of a board (sic) that funded a pro-Palestinian chartiable organization

Barack Obama called for holding a summit of Muslim nations exlcuding Israel if elected president

At Politico, Ben Smith reports this has been happening elsewhere, including Pennsylvania, Florida and New Jersey:

(more...)

See, I think Tucker's real problem -- as my friend Megan says -- is that he LIKES getting spanked by hot women...

I was punditing away on Morning Joe this am, making various electoral college predictions with Chuck Todd and the rest of the gang. As Chuck moved various swing states around on an electronic map, I couldn't resist sketching out a cruelly ironic Life Imitates Art Scenario, which I like to call “The Shakespeare.” I plan a full column on this closer to election – because I think, sadly, that it may actually happen -- but here's a first look. The election comes right down to the wire. The state by state results look a lot like 2004, but Obama picks up NM, CO and IA leaving the electoral college count at a razor close 269 Obama to 265 McCain. New Hampshire's four electoral votes hold the final balance. Here's the Shakespeare part. (Think tragedy). The same quirky New Englanders who put John McCain on the map in 2000 and saved his campaign in 2008 decide to ultimately punish McCain, to destroy that which they created. New Hampshire votes as it did in 2004 -- Democratic – and the Presidency is Obama's. Don't laugh; the latest polls show Obama leading in N.H.

The DNC is spamming this out this morning:

Holtz-Eakin: McCain helped create BlackBerry

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

They're going with an Al Gore joke but the boast* is even weirder than that: Research in Motion (the makers of the BlackBerry) is a Canadian company. Which does, as a handsome Dem operative pointed out, make them part of "America's hat," mandatory headgear in times of crisis. So it all comes full circle.

* Mandatory disclosure: He did not actually claim to have invented the internet.

UPDATE: All snark aside, McCain's role vis-a-vis the BlackBerry isn't made up out of whole cloth. While I'm not up totally on wireless/tech politics, he has been advocate for opening up the wireless spectrum auction, and for dedicating half of the newly opened spectrum to public safety. I'll be checking Threat Level for followups on this. (If anyone else has recommendations for further reading, please leave in the comments!)

There's a lot to interest Palin skeptics in this piece at Salon, but this passage in particular caught my eye:

No one has accused Todd Palin of interfering in state business for his own personal benefit -- instead, the situation has remained somewhat inscrutable, if not odd. According to local politicos and observers, he lurks around the capitol if he doesn't have anything better to do, which, since he works seasonal jobs in oil and fishing, is fairly often.

As I said earlier this morning:

[S]witch the genders — our standard mode of cultural critique this year, practically so mandatory that I'm thinking [my husband] and I will just go as each other for Halloween — and what do you think? "Sarah Palin, with 5 kids at home, has no right lurking around her husband's place of work like she has any idea what's going on."

I'm sure commenters have some thoughts.

Here's a very good column from Richard Cohen.

Update: Sarah Palin loses a potential friend. A very good column from David Brooks.

And furthermore: The New York Times editorial board no longer eschews the L-word. (or the M-word, for mentiras, en espanol).

So the question for today: Are there actual limits to impropriety in politics, imposed by the marketplace of democracy? Is McCain about to pay a price for his irrational exuberance? I'll try to answer it in my print column this week.

Goodbye, pigs, and take your lipstick with you. Wall Street's roaring bear market is bringing the political debate back to the very serious things that confront the country. On the front page of the New York Times today, Jackie Calmes (late of the Wall Street Journal) does a good job of laying out the records of the two candidates on dealing with the financial markets. It seems to me that the challenge going forward is a bit trickier for McCain. His image is as a reformer, but his record is as a deregulator. And deregulation, of course, is one of the reasons we have a crisis on our hands.

As Jackie notes:

While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.

He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain's largest contributor, collectively.