Opinion - HuffingtonPost.com

Who is Todd Palin?

According to Time, McCain campaign staffers in Virginia are teaching volunteers to see Barack Obama as having terrorist 'friends,' and then providing these volunteers with arguments for persuading voters that Sen. Obama, like Osama Bin Laden, shares responsibility for bombings of the Pentagon.

In no way am I suggesting that John McCain is qualified to be president of the United States. By temperament and policy, he is clearly not able to lead us in foreign affairs or domestic policy. He is mired in the cold war policies of the past. His aggressiveness is likely to provoke another useless war...

Imagine an election where one of the participants calls foul. Investigations are launched or at least called for. Prosecutors raise the specter of charges, the U.S. attorney and FBI get involved. No voter fraud is ever actually found. But by the time that conclusion is reached, the myth has been solidified both to soothe the loser's supporters and condemn the winner.

There is "that one" and then there is That One, namely an unadulterated bogeyman of the presidential campaign: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. My friends, we tend to throw partisanship to the winds to all agree that he is an evildoer and that we'd best not directly negotiate with him.

One way to view the current economic crisis is as a pervasive failure to manage risk. In fact, bad risk management actually explains a lot of what's gone wrong in recent years. And that realization is one we'd be well advised to bring with us into the voting booth in a few weeks.

With just three weeks to go until Election Day, the McCain campaign has launched a nationwide talent search to find angry audience members for their increasingly hate-filled rallies, McCain aides confirmed today.

This particular guy caught the attention of several newswire photographers on Saturday. He was in the front row during McCain's Iowa appearance waving a hat which matched his shirt. This shot -- since replaced -- accompanied a NYT article detailing GOP anxiety over McCain's increasingly chaotic campaign.

It's hard out there for a shill. A bipartisan panel in Alaska finds that Sarah Palin abused her power and broke the law, and the best defense the campaign can muster is that she "acted within her proper and lawful authority in firing Walt Monegan." Hey, she did some things that weren't illegal.

Today my office issued the following statement, which includes my comments

I posted the following article on the Guardian's Comments is Free site yesterday. It says things that I think need to be said, about the moral crassness of the commentators who have taken to blaming poor people for the financial collapse we're undergoing. With the permission of the Guardian, I'm republishing it today on the Huffington Post. If you've already read it, please forgive me. If you haven't, I hope it will be of interest.

"Big bottom drives me out of my mind, how can I leave that behind..."

Back in the days of Willie Horton and the Jesse Helms "hands" ad, a healthy garnish of racial fear would almost guarantee an election victory for the offending party. Flash some dark flesh in an ad, allude to white girls put in jeopardy by the colored menace, and you could pretty much start measuring curtains for the executive mansion.

As previously described, John McCain's body language shows he is a hater ("McCain's Body Language: He is a Hater", October 8, 2008). Now, his rhetoric has caught up to his body language. He has been baiting his audiences to view Barack Obama as dangerous, and representative of a "foreign" (read: sinister) element.

In a year full of surprises to the conventional political wisdom, the greatest story yet may be unfolding in West Virginia, where Senator Obama's campaign is rocketing to competitiveness in a nearly all-white state that went comfortably for George W.

Today, the Connecticut Supreme Court took an historic step by joining California and Massachusetts in the fight to provide marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples.

To the children of same-sex parents: You Are Bad.

The crash continues to roll from one market to the next, and huge new bailout talks are underway. We're analyzing this morning's events live at Clusterstock -- please feel free to join us. We'll keep the discussion open until about 11:30 ET. Then we'll post the transcript here.

The comments made by the partners of Sequoia Capital at their recently held "CEO Summit" have been widely covered by leaks to numerous bloggers. These bloggers have disseminated the details and spread the contagion of the sentiments to the public at large, unfortunately running the risk that the words become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Without challenging the comments, which expressed a heightened degree of doom and gloom for the economic prospects of young start-up companies particularly, I do think it calls for a somewhat more restrained response on the outlook and required action before throwing the baby out with the bath water. Certainly, we are going through a period of enormous economic and political uncertainty. The loss of confidence, primarily in our financial system, as a result of the excess of the past five to ten years (if not longer -- we may never know how long some of the flawed practices have been going on) is one of the leading contributors. We are also at the moment looking for leadership on the political front and both because of very low public support for the president and because we are in the midst of a heated election for his successor, we have no real voice of authority to provide some guidance, reassurance, and inspirational confidence that the bus has a driver who knows where he is going.

I was watching formidable reporter Christiane Amanpour on Real Time with Bill Maher this week as she argued that Sarah Palin "connects" and, "whether you agree with her policies or not, it's actually good there is a woman on a major ticket... it's important... it's progress."

In a new low, not just for this campaign, but for the history of American politics, Senator John McCain's campaign today defended threats against Senator Barack Obama.

I've been thinking a lot about trust recently. When it is abundant everything goes more smoothly: from love to commerce, from sports to politics. When it is lacking, everything else can seem broken or meaningless.

With the disastrous market reaction to his last bailout plan, Hank Paulson is now preparing to ratchet up the rescue by pouring capital into frightened financial institutions in return for equity shares.

Senator John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

I've been working on other posts, but then I saw today's paper, and the stock market drop. You want good reading? How about 60% of Americans say depression likely (A CNN poll). Or the much more reassuring Then and Now. I recognize that my place in blogging is something like baby-boomer ex-hippy MBA entrepreneur, which doesn't include this post.  But I can't help it. 

The Republicans tried to make fun of Barack Obama as a community organizer at their national convention in Minnesota, which I guess just goes to show how little Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have to fear from right-wing "humor."

Back in June, many of us laughed and laughed at the idea that John McCain (R) and the RNC was putting the top staff to Rudy Giuliani's (R) disastrous presidential campaign to run the general election ground game.

McCain today released a shockingly inflammatory Obama-is-a-pal-of-terrorist-Bill-Ayers ad. Here's the link via Andrew Sullivan.