The really crazed ones won't budge, but the reachable ones are starting to ask themselves the old Reagan chestnut that Obama's recently updated: Are you better off now than you were four WEEKS ago?

Furthermore, nobody is in a mood to tolerate clowning around as a substitute for leadership. We saw that in the debates, when the professional, calm, sharp Obama reassured nervous Americans while the goofballing McCain frightened them. And McCain's two chief tactics have been to a) clown around and b) play the race card.

One can disagree with Obama's decisions and policies, but one can at least see him as a rational being who used a rational process to formulate them. He's someone you can reason with, in other words. McCain comes across as a spoiled brat who went from immaturity to senescence without the usual intervening period of adult responsibility.

But Beagle, she's not afraid to have guests on who might challenge her viewpoint. And she asks tough questions of all her guests, no matter their party.

The Jerusalem Post will be pissed, but no nukes will be lobbed at Teheran this year:

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1031246.html

1) The economy trumps everything else.

2) When the economy stinks, even racists, anti-choicers, and anti-gay folk will give up their pet causes to vote for a black guy who looks and sounds far more competent than his white opponent.

3) Even Republicans hate Bush.

4) McCain votes with Bush most of the time.

5) Sarah Palin, far from saving McCain's butt, turned out to be the final nail in his campaign's coffin as she scares the poo out of even Republicans.

6) The pundits predicting a massive defection of Hillary backers to McCain suffer from recto-cranial inversion.

It'd be interesting to see a similar report of voters' feelings in Fundie and religio-racist right strongholds, mainly to see if they like Palin any better than the folks in Bucks County. But if the rest of the nation is anything like Bucks County, then the Republicans would have to be insane to unite behind Palin for 2012.

And you have how the MSM covered the 2000 election.

The corporate media was for the most part very generous to both Bush and McCain, which is what made it funny when the Bush mudslinging in the primaries occurred: the MSMers were under obvious orders to Always Back Republicans, but the question then was "Which Republican do we back?" Meanwhile, every little thing Al Gore did or didn't do (and even some things that existed only in the minds of RNC spinmeisters and the tame stenographer "journalists" who love them) was Fodder For Scandal.

For more on this (including a recent Dean Reynolds anti-Obama whine that could have been penned by Kit Seelye about Gore back in 2000), go here: http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/573

When the original of Prop 8, the Knight Initiative, passed in 2000, it was by a huge, twenty-four-point margin, 62% to 38%.

Now, even with forty million bucks in ads over five months, the margin of victory shrank to four points: 52% to 48%.

And that was with a rather disorganized GOTV effort on the No on 8 part (only 50% turnout in San Francisco? When LA mustered 82%? Ai-yi-yi!).

Keep up the fight -- it's shifting in the good guy's favor:

http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/1491

Yeah, it won, BUT: It was by a far smaller margin, 52% to 48%, than it did when it was the Knight Initiative in 2000 (when it won 62% to 38%).

Got that? In the space of eight years, despite five months and forty million dollars of Yes on 8 ads, and a terribly disorganized anti-8 mobilization and GOTV effort (San Francisco only had 50% turnout, while LA had 82%), the margin of support for this anti-gay-marriage measure was slashed by 80%.

http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/1491

Now, if the No on 8 folks can keep hammering away with the methodical intensity of the Mormons and RCCs backing the measure, a counter-measure repealing it could pass in far less time than eight years. Constantly informing nonwhite voters that the LDS, which has anti-black bigotry written into its scriptures, is the power behind the Prop 8 drive -- the LDSers deliberately have since 1997 had their partners in antigay actions, the Catholic Church, be the public face of their antigay movement for this reason (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/3/15369/3779?detail=f) -- would be rather effective to aid in this end.

The first time Prop 8 -- as the Knight Initiative -- came up for a vote in 2000, it passed by a crushingly large twenty-four-point margin, 62% to 38%.

Eight years later, the margin of victory shrunk from twenty-four points to a bare four points: 52% to 48%. This despite five months and forty million dollars' worth of cleverly-crafted ads by the Mormons that hijacked the language of the civil rights movement, which is ironic considering that anti-black racism is not just Mormon custom, but Mormon doctrine: http://www.i4m.com/think/history/mormon_racism.htm. (This is one reason why, back in the late 1990s, the LDS chose to have the Roman Catholic Church be the public face for their cause: http://www.calitics.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7396)

The No on 8 folks have set up the groundwork for another initiative, one undoing Prop 8. Exposing the role of the racist LDS in leading the anti-gay-marriage troops will go a long way to making this happen, and in considerably less than eight years' time.

John Lott is such a tool that he makes up female sockpuppets to hide behind when he ventures into chat rooms to defend his bogus statistics. Google "Mary Rosh" and have a giggle.

It says something about the sleaziness of the Republicans that they're using this clown.