campbell brown: so what if obama was a muslim or an arab?

Thank heavens for Campbell Brown and her aptly named segment, “Cutting Through the Bull.” She says forcefully what hasn’t been said enough–even though everyone but the crazy right-wingers and people living under rocks know that Obama is neither Muslim nor Arab, why should it not be ok if he were? “Muslim” and “Arab” are thrown around like slurs these days, impugning the character of millions of peaceful Arabs and Muslims who are American citizens, not to mention those overseas. Shame on the McCain campaign for seeding and perpetuating the whispers of intolerance and division in our country.

 

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today’s polls

Nate Silver parses the latest. You really must go here for his excellent full analysis of the day’s results. Of the much-touted CBS poll showing a 14-point lead for Obama today amongst likely voters, he says, it could be an outlier,

 

But if so, John McCain has more and more outliers that he has to explain away these days. There are now no fewer than seven current national polls that show Obama with a double-digit advantage: Newsweek (+11), ABC/Post (+10), Democracy Corps (+10), Research 2000 (+10), Battleground (+13), Gallup (+10 using their Likely Voter II model) and now this CBS News poll.

These are balanced by other results that show the race a hair tighter. Our model now projects that, were an election held today, Obama would win by 8.1 points. It also expects that the race is more likely than not to tighten some.

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olbermann: mccain, suspend your campaign

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From Daily Kos tonight:

 

Incident at Philadelphia Obama Office

 

Today, the Obama campaign office in South Philadelphia was the target of a mailed threat that also contained a white powder.  It was found by a volunteer opening the mail and resulted in a full scale hazmat and police response.  The office was evacuated and containment and testing instituted to find out what the substance was.

Fortunately, the powder turned out to be sugar and all staff and volunteers are fine.  Since the letter was actually sent through the mail, the matter is now a federal investigation, as it rightly should be.

. . . This is a highly disturbing, though hardly unexpected, escalation in the current nastiness coming from radical fringe of the Republican party, only three days after Barack was in Philly. It looks like the “black helicopter” devotees are coming out of the woodwork and desperation is driving them to more extreme action.

The real question now is: how much more?  Will the next delivery be a package instead, with more than a couple of spoons of sugar in it?  It’s the logical effect of the hatred that’s been whipped up by the McCain/Palin campaign, including right here in Pennsylvania this very day. Hatred breeds this sort of extremism as surely as carrion breeds flies.

The most alarming thing about this is that it points out a problem we tend to overlook in our worry about Obama’s personal safety: it’s not just him at risk from this.  It’s a simple matter of the availability of targets and the psychology of anyone who could be moved to such extremism.

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GOP: the grand old party of intolerance

Not like there was much doubt left on that score… but how appalling that conservatives are so willing to turn on their own and not tolerate any dissent. Bravo for those who are courageous enough to take a stand, even knowing that they risk this level of ostracism:

 

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955.

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.

As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

That news via the NYT Caucus blog. Mr. Buckley’s response to the uproar is here, as is the link to his original endorsement. He also laments how constricted the amosphere has become since his father’s day:

 

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.  

. . . the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

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vote no on prop 8

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Please make a donation to the Human Rights Campaign to help defeat this measure, which would roll back California’s Constitutional protections. Donations today will be matched up to $120,000. (After today, the money will still be desperately needed too! Please help if you can.)

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anchorage daily news calls out sarah palin’s troopergate denial

Excellent. Good to know there’s still some mainstream media out there that will call a spade a spade. Read the whole piece here (h/t Sullivan).

 

Sarah Palin’s reaction to the Legislature’s Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation. She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.” Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.

You asked us to hold you accountable, Gov. Palin. Did you mean it?

. . . Perhaps Gov. Palin has been too busy to actually read the Troopergate report. Perhaps she is relying on briefings from McCain campaign spinmeisters.

That’s the charitable interpretation.

Because if she had actually read it, she couldn’t claim “vindication” with a straight face.

Palin asserted that the report found “there was no abuse of authority at all in trying to get Officer Wooten fired.”

In fact, the report concluded that “impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.”

Palin’s response is the kind of political “big lie” that George Orwell warned against. War is peace. Black is white. Up is down.

. . . Gov. Palin and her husband were obsessed with Wooten the way Capt. Ahab was obsessed with the Great White Whale. No Wooten, no peace. Has Gov. Palin committed an impeachable offense? Hardly. Is what she did indictable? No. But it wasn’t appropriate, especially for someone elected as an ethical reformer. And her Orwellian claims of “vindication” make this blemish on her record look even worse.

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