If the McCain camp is really trying to make a play for Hillary supporters, it'll be fun to see them try to explain away these comments by Palin at Newsweek's Women & Leadership event from March of this year:

Once onstage, together with Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Palin talked about what women expect from women leaders; how she took charge in Alaska during a political scandal that threatened to unseat the state's entire Republican power structure, and her feelings about Sen. Hillary Clinton. (She said she felt kind of bad she couldn't support a woman, but she didn't like Clinton's "whining.")

http://www.theuptake.org/

- then how does she expect her readers to find out about it?

As anybody who's been watching TV or reading online publications besides Salon knows, Obama HAS been fighting back: http://firedoglake.com/2008/09/19/obama-to-mccain-fire-cox-fire-the-whole-administration/

But I guess if you're so in love with the idea that calm, steady leadership is somehow weakness, then nothing Obama does will ever change your take on him.

Paulson's balking at the "no golden parachutes" bit:

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=817F7B43-18FE-70B2-A83E35AE4C5B6A47

Call your congresscritters. NOW.

The recent poll showing McCain even with Obama here was a joke and everyone knew it aside from McCain's people, who wasted a few million on TV ads here. However, the latest Rasmussen (which shows Obama with an eight-point lead) has just brought them back to reality, and while it will make Minnesota's local TV channels easier to watch, it means they'll have more to spend in places like Virginia and Ohio.

The Ras poll: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/minnesota/election_2008_minnesota_presidential_election

A local blogger's satirical take on how prominent local righty bloggers will try to spin it:

http://centrisity.blogspot.com/2008/09/mn-still-presidential-toss-up.html

Naomi Klein weighs in to explain how this is a classic example of the Shock Doctrine scam in action:

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/24/naomi_klein_now_is_the_time

You know, Amy, I don’t think we can stress this enough. Henry Paulson is one of the key people, the top people, responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve, you know, and this is—if we think about the 9/11 analogy and, you know, the state of shock that Americans were in after 9/11 and the emergence of Rudy Giuliani as the savior—and, you know, people have so much regret about that. And in the book, I write about this as the state of regression that we go into when we’re frightened. And I think Henry Paulson has really been cast in this role as an economic Rudy Giuliani, saving the day, impartial, bipartisan, a strong leader.

I found this article in BusinessWeek that ran when Paulson was appointed to the Treasury, and I just want to read you one sentence, because I think it’s all we need to know about Henry Paulson. This is from BusinessWeek, when he got the appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2006. The headline of the article is “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington.” It says, “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in [their] pursuit of profits. By some key measures, the securities industry is more leveraged now than it was at the height of the 1990s boom.”

Then it goes on to say that when Paulson took over Goldman Sachs in 1999, they had $20 billion in debts. When he—in these high-risk gambles. When he left, they had $100 billion, which means he took their risk level from $20 billion to $100 billion. So it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Henry Paulson, far from speaking for Main Street, is actually bailing out his colleagues for some of the very debts that he himself accumulated. This is an extraordinary conflict of interest.