It seems like the fascist right wing has managed to discharge of massive quantity of inmates from asylums for the criminally insane and in exchange demanded that they write letters to Salon today.

Be afraid, be very araid....this is how we decide the future of our counrty? Well, if you are Republican I guess so. Move past your fear. Recognize that your party has seriously injured this great nation. Do something positive and pitch in to help the healing.

If it doens't support her contention that he is a MEAN, MEAN MAN, then it doesn't belong here.

My apologies!

[snip childish insult]

-- something stinks

have to do with the way McCranky is running his campaign? Do you really not understand the difference between these roles?

I heard the Howard Sten thing showing how ignorant people in Harlem were too. first of all, the quality of an education in the portion of the city where people are worried about where their next meal is coming from and have no parents helping their kids get an education is like shooting fish in a barrel. Whoile it made it's point, who knows how many interviews they left out? I love Howard, but it is a comedy show and they do not seek to be balkanced. They went out and looked for people to make a funny bit. There are plenty of African Americans who DO know about the issues and plenty of white people who don't, (I'm not voting for Obama because he's an arab", "He's preparing to hire 250,000 paratroopers to enforce his rule"? There is ignorance on all sides to go around.)

Arlen Specter's comments were on par with a performer playing to their audience. While those comments may play well out there, I doubt he'd use them at an a ppearance within NYC or DC. I heard him on The Stern show recently, in fact, and he made no such incendiary comments, instead trying to appeal to as many people as he could to sell his book. these appearances are set up to appeal to the LCD of their base, which is the only way they can fight back since they are losing on the issues, or simply lack novel ideas to sell to their electorate base. I have no problem with inciting energy to your base, but to do so in "a base manner" and to do so with a positive style of encouragment are two very different behaviors. And by using negative energy, (whether specter meant to sound sub-rosa racist or not, any politician knows that things can be misinterpreted and usually avoid those type of statements, unless esparate to hold on to their power), it makes it that much harder to sew up the country back together to work as one after months of such divisive behavior. Lets just hope that the usal flea-life attention span kicks in and it Is possible for the country to come back together as a cohesive unit as we most hope to occur. But your naivete in not seeing or not wanting to see precisely how divisie a rally where shenanigans like this occur, is a prime example why they DON'T simply run on the issues.

After Bradley lost, pollsters who had predicted a win needed to figure out what went wrong. They hypothesize, but obviously could never prove, that some of the people they polled must have lied. But there are a lot of other possibilities as well; the election may have been tipped by absentee voters who weren't included in the polls.

Now, if people are so cringingly fearful of being called "racists" by a poll taker who is only a disembodied voice over the phone whose name you don't know and whom you will never meet, all I can say is that conservative self-pity and paranoia are truly astounding. I've been called worse than "racist" by flamers on many web sites, and didn't take it lying down, or lying at all, I can assure you.

It looks like there's a bunch of right wingers who have taken over the letters section.

Obama is going to win because he is the best qualified candidate.He does NOT hypnotize, he does NOT practice prejudice

and he is an All American man who sees the way our country can heal itself.

If you can't see that, well, vote for the ignorant McCain/Palin ticket, you deserve them.

That seems to be the theme of McCain's desperate last-ditch strategy.

I have family members and friends who are voting for McCain. They tend to be people who would directly be affected by Obama's tax plan and don't want to pay more. I'm not happy that they don't see beyond that singular issue, but at least they have real, legitimate reasons for choosing McCain.

They stand in direct contrast to those who have written letters raising the ridiculous claims of socialism, in spite of the fact that, on top of the bailout McCain proposes a socialist $300 billion plan to redistribute each taxpayers "wealth" to bail out irresponsible or ignorant homeowners. I also have enjoyed reading that racism is dead. My African-American friends (by and large successful professionals) who still get called the N word in Chicago will be glad to hear that. The rhetoric on display in these letters has also devolved into the patently false (that Obama has not produced a birth certificate) to the absolutely ridiculous (Obama is using hypnosis to control our minds).

Bottom line: I disagree with those who choose to vote McCain, but I can respect and support that choice if it is based on a rational thought process. However, I cannot respect or support those who are basing their decision on fear, demonstrably false information, irrationality, and/or alleged mind control (!?!?!).

McCain has realized that his only hope is to appeal to the weakest members of his party: the ignorant, the fearful, and the irrational. That says a lot about what kind of president he would be. It's quite frankly unbearably sad.

ColoDem,

McCain's fellow POWs have spoken out publicly in support of his suffering and valor while in prison. Hard to fathom what you're talking about.

McCain was near bottom of his class at USNA in part because of his "maverick" attitude, though he excelled in subjects that interested him. Many great statesmen share such a story (e.g., Winston Churchill). We should note when comparing younger and older candidates, however, than grade inflation has run amuck in recent decades, beginning especially in the 1980 and 90s. A gentlemen's C in the 40s, 50s and 60s was a well earned grade, even if not outstanding. Whereas many an A in today's grading criteria are empty and without merit.

Obama may have graduated Harvard Law in 1991 magna cum laude, but given that the vast majority (a whopping 91 percent...!!!) of Harvard College graduates in say 2002 "earned" honors, it doesn't say much for the honors bestowed on Mr. Obama. Harvard has been cited as the worst offender among the IVYs (google Boston Globe): Harvard, 91%, Yale 51%, Princeton, 44% of grads graduated with honors. Having taught at an IVY League school I can attest to the rampant abuse of grade inflation.

So McCain's class standing may have little bearing on the comparison of the two.

What's important is that we know McCain's record. Barack Obama's is secret. We know nothing of his undergraduate record at Columbia, or for that matter at Occidental College (his first two years of university life). What was Obama's GPA at Columbia? (Everyone knows that it's much harder to make good grades in college than in law school.) Nor can Mr. Obama explain how it is that he was elected -- indeed, even reached finalist status! -- the President of the Harvard Law Review (one of, if not the leading law journals in America), even though Barack Obama has apparently never published a single article for review (we can't seriously count the silly student exercise, edited by his professor which Politio unearthed a while back) -- publication being the sine qua non for such a position for every and all of his HLR predicessors. This IS Alarming! Alarming, too, is the fact that he was up for tenure at Univ. of Chicago Law School, again without ever having published a word. This just doesn't happen in academia.

Keating 5? Please. McCain wasn't even censured, and it's well known that he a a Republican scapegoat in a cabal of Democrat Senators. He was mildly admonished for using poor judgement. A charge that one could write a book about concerning Mr. Obama (Rezko, Ayers, Khalidi, Rev. Wright, et al.).

What you should be asking is how it is that Obama came to be the second largest recipient of Fannie Mae largess (2nd only to Dodd who'd been on that dole for 9 years) when he, Obama, had only been in the Senate for three short years. Shouldn't the American electorate know more about this? Aren't we entitled? Of course we are. But the press has been silent.

I could go on, but you get the point. Obama is a cipher. He has not been properly vetted by his sympathetic media partners.