Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: The Last Word - Almost - Obama 364 - McCain 174

NRO: 38 Percent of Virginia’s New Voters Reside in Counties Where Kerry Won Less Than 40 Percent in 2004 - …in counties where Kerry won less than 40 percent of the vote - Bush country - an eye-opening 109,243 new voters have registered. This could be good news for McCain or mean that no where in Virginia is safe…

I don’t think praying to a golden calf is going to get God to help the economy…

Evan Dorkin: Sitcom Pitch = Your Chance To Win A Book - Here’s my wacky sitcom pitch, listen up entertainment industry: McCain and Palin are elected, okay. So, we have four years of comedy right there. It writes itself. It just might write itself, heaven help us.

NYT: Consumers Feel The Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards - The NYT’s getting on the credit card crisis bandwagon.

Blog Maverick: Announcing bailoutsleuth.com - Transparency is key to the success of the Bailout and related loans and investments the government makes with our tax dollars. Without complete transparency, we will get from our government what we always get when it comes to finances, confusion. To do my part, I’ve worked with the folks at Sharesleuth.com to create Bailoutsleuth.com

Tim O’Reilly: Why I Support Barack Obama - We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I’m sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it.

Flashback - The Onion: Roy The Forklift Driver - Nation Eagerly Awaits Ohio Man’s Profound Insight Into Current Events

This was the story rambling through the city of Virginia Beach yesterday. As reverential gasps at the pending approach of “THE ONE” willowed through the Verizon Wireless Ampitheater, so were buzzing cell phones.

The podium isn’t good enough for O-B-A-M-A!

Neither was the second one. Or the third.

Six podiums later, one met with the ONE’S approval - borrowed from Norfolk.

Poor guy…can’t handle leading the free world unless he likes the podium.

From the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

This is an amazing race. The incumbent president has approval ratings somewhere between Robert Mugabe and the ebola virus. The economy is supposedly on the brink of global Armageddon. McCain has only $80 million to spend, while Obama’s burning through $600 mil as fast as he can, and he doesn’t really need to spend a dime given the wall-to-wall media adoration. And tonight Chris Matthews’ doctors announced that his leg tingle has metastasized leaving his entire body like a vibrating cellphone whose ringtone is locked on “I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy.”

And yet an old cranky broke loser is within two or three points of the King of the World. Strange.

Indeed.

Today’s column by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen takes on the question of “experience”:

There are “credentials,” and then there is “cred.” It is sometimes necessary to shorten or otherwise alter a word, to recover its original meaning. Here we are discussing not a job resumé, but what can be seen through it.

Of the four candidates on the two U.S. presidential tickets, it strikes me that both John McCain and Sarah Palin have some credible personal background to equip them in dealing with the interface between politics and life. By comparison, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden has ever done anything much, except master party political machinery.

More…

Barack Obama is against requiring any photo ID to avoid fraud when voting, but attend the Messiah’s $2 million crowning bash?

Did you know there is now a huge reward for a videotape of Obama? From The Hill,

A hedge fund manager is offering a reward of $150,000 in exchange for a tape that shows Barack Obama at a 2003 dinner for a Palestinian scholar.

Aston Grimaldi II said he would pay out the money to whomever can provide a tape of the 2003 event for Rashid Khalidi, which the Los Angeles Times has written about but has refused to release. Grimaldi’s offer letter is available at Dirty Harry’s Place, a conservative blog.

That’s right, the L.A. Times is sitting on a video of Obama. Talk about the media being biased… if it were a correpondingly bad video of McCain there would be a new cable channel devoted to nothing but that video, being played over and over…

Now consider this: the NAACP is suing because presumably Virginia registrars don’t know how to do their jobs:

The NAACP and others filed a complaint Monday in U.S. District Court in Richmond, arguing that “the allocation of polling-place resources” by the state and its jurisdictions “is plainly irrational, nonuniform, and likely discriminatory.” A court date has not been set for the suit.

So let’s review. We have a press that is actively censoring NEWS that is unflattering to their favored candidate. We have groups doing their darndest to cast doubt on the mechanics of the voting itself… does anyone else feel like these are twin axes chopping near the roots of the tree of liberty? Seriously, where are you if there are too many of these kinds of doubts about an honest press and an honest election?

To clarify, I still think enough Americans have the common sense to be aware of these things going on. But these are still bad trends.

Your neighbors are voting. You’re not. That could be a problem.

A video for North Carolina voters, by Dave Willis (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies) and Scott Jacobson (The Daily Show, SNL’s “TV Funhouse”).

So, Obama is buying a 30 minute infomercial. McCain/ Palin are touring the country. The media are highlighting their favorite issues (Palin wardrobe; Obama’s race).

Don’t you wish you could just cut through the spin and get a good idea of what the candidates have said & done on the issues?

Now you can (for just 29.95 - I’m kidding; lighten up, already).

Grassfire.org has a very well done side by side comparison of the candidate’s “Quotes & Votes” on the issues.

Check it out!

Time Magazine had an interesting article this week about why Virginia is a battleground state this November.  The article focuses primarily on the shifting demographics of suburban DC counties like Prince William that are experiencing dramatic increases in economic and ethnic diversity. However, it may not be these new residents that are putting this region in play as much as it is the longer tenured folks they have replaced at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Consider this article in light of Michael Barone’s recent observations about Pennsylvania.  Barone’s hypothesis about the collapse in housing prices hurting McCain in the Philly suburbs could well be applied to the swath of “McMansions” mentioned in Time’s article about Virginia. As folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum caught the wave of economic growth and became upwardly mobile, they were replaced in their old homes by the new demographics.  As Barone points out, those older, smaller homes had less value to begin with and thus were less affected by the mortgage and real estate collapse.

Thus, if Barack Obama has success in PWC and Virginia at large, it may be due more to economic factors than ethnic ones. Just something to think about as you watch the returns come in on Tuesday night.

The Washington Post included a question in their latest federal polling asking Virginians if they prefered a Democrat or Republican governor in 2009:

Of registered voters, 48 percent prefer a Democratic governor vs. 31 percent who want a Republican.

According to the survey, a generic Democratic gubernatorial nominee starts the year with the same coalition of support that led to the election as governor of Mark R. Warner (D) in 2001 and Timothy M. Kaine (D) in 2005.

The survey, which shows voters in Northern Virginia favoring Democrats by 57 percent to 25 percent, sets the stage for another hard-fought political contest in the Old Dominion next year.

There are a lot of reasons to not worry about this poll.  Starters, it’d be interesting to see the split of D/R ID in the poll.  Second is that turnout for statewide compared to federal is nowhere near even.  In a routinely horrible year for Republicans on a federal level you will certainly see a more favorable outlook toward a Democratic governor than Republican, but when it comes to the actual race that trend will mellow out.

Interesting that the WaPo snuck this question in there, though.

LA Times is refusing to release the video tape of Barack Obama attending a function honoring University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi.  Sarah Palin is going after the connection hard.  But I wanted to know more about this Prof. Khalidi.

So I checked out his profile on RateMyProfessor.com:

The downward spiral of Obama’s wealth redistribution continued yesterday as Joe Biden raised Barack Obama’s tax increase by 25% If that’s what they’ll say before Election Day, imagine where they’ll be by January 20th!

“What we’re saying,” he told a Pennsylvania TV interviewer, “is that [our] tax break doesn’t need to go to people making . . . $1.4 million. It should go to [people] making under $150,000 a year.”

Oops. That’s a 25 percent downward redefinition of “middle class.” (NYP)

Remember Bill Clinton’s scam of a middle class tax cut that never happened? Remember Mark Warner vowing to never raise taxes? Remember Obama cutting taxes for everyone except the “super rich?”

Why do we fall for it every time?

Hot on the heels of the Cook Report showing VA-05 is now a Lean Republican comes news that Perriello is outsourcing his phone banking to New York:

Virginia is one of the top priorities this election. This Thursday there will be a phone banking effort in Cobble Hill to get out the vote for Congressional candidate Tom Perriello and for Barack Obama.

If Periello is doing so well in VA-05 why is he looking elsewhere to find people to seal the deal for him?  Or are all his local volunteers out pounding the street for him and the more helping the merrier?

Grassfire.org: Obama and McCain side by side on 20 issues

Gallup Traditional poll: Obama 49 - McCain 47

D.C. Examiner: Jim Gilmore For Senate

How low can they go… Biden lowers tax cut claim to $150,000.  Though this sounds more like either a misstatement or merely an example than a threshold.

CSN: Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy - The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.

Cook Report shifts VA-02 to Toss Up, VA-05 to Lean Republican

Washington Watch - WashingtonWatch.com delivers the numbers behind proposed legislation and regulation. It is important to understand where these numbers come from and what they mean.

Sorry they’re brief so far.  More links to come later this morning.