Everybody knows that "redistributive change" is the new post sunken stock market republican share cropper social welfare system.

I don't understand the problem with what he said. You need to listen carefully because he's talking as if his audience is an educated group of thinking adults. It's not a great sound byte. It's a thoughtful answer to a tough question. I don't see the problem. Maybe I'm too stupid to get it?

The text so completely and totally and yet plausibly (and deliberately of course) misunderstood him. He is thoughtful and intelligent and perceptive, and full of context and understanding; these things have been so notably absent from our political discourse for so long, that when we hear them, they are so strange and unfamiliar that misconstruing them is almost going to be inevitable. And it will be helped along by the kinds of jerks that put this thing together.

It is going to be a rough four years, for sure.

Barak has been a good candidate for a long time. I think he is a much better candidate now in part because of Hillary Clinton. Any weaknesses he had have been tested and no longer stay in the news cycle.

This new Drudge/McCain/Fox crap i am confident will go nowhere.

Of course they've read it, and they understand that Obama didn't say what they say he said. But they're banking on the fact that very few people still listening to John McCain have read it or will read it. Don't forget, these people elected (TWICE!) a president who prided himself on, and bragged about, not doing nuance! Obama's thoughtful and nuanced comments will never be heard by McCain's audience. And those of us who bothered to read the actually text stopped listening to McCain eons ago.

But I'm with you...I can't wait for Tuesday.

So far, this story seems stuck in Drudge-land, and for good reason. It's a long, confusing quote which is hard to parse, so it doesn't lend itself to the right's twisting of words to meet their needs. I think he was saying that the courts could give legal recourse in the civil rights battle, but not economic recourse, but the courts weren't designed to do that, so other means would have to be used to bring a level playing field economically. Or maybe not. I don't know, but I don't think this is going to excite the undecideds.

National Review and Hannity are pushing a story about a party Obama attended honoring Rashid Khalidi, so that will be the smear de jour tomorrow.

I was watching CNBC today and they were talking about this manufactured issue.

The "balanced" panel was Maria Bartiromo the host, Larry Kudlow and Arthur Laffer on one side (the how Obama will destroy the economy side and wants to "redistribute the wealth") and Jared Bernstein to represent the other side.

At least Jared was decent and strong at saying that Obama never said resdistribute wealth. That wasn't being talked about in his speech...it was added later.

He's had "redistribution" standing solid in bold print on the face of his site for three days.

One of my good friends reads Drudge religiously.

He hates Obama and did what he felt was right. He's in a swing state and wrote in "Ron Paul".

I can't say I'm unhappy with that decison. Heh.

I mailed in my absentee ballot for Obama last week.

I don't have an opinion on this issue. It's above my pay grade.

Call it a "relief package", or a "restructuring" instead...can you use those big-business words with a straight face?

If you think the McCain ad is bad, check out the breathless coverage of this affair at the Neocon Review on-line.

McCain should be embarrassed by the fact there are seven days to go and he has nothing better to talk about. As a McCain supporter, I would much prefer even a full throated attack centered on Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko to this highly attenuated and confusing argument. If you don't like the Obama tax plan, just say so. Explain why. There's plenty there to criticize. Taking radio snippets out of context and then speaking of *socialism* is stupid. After all, we won the Cold War. They no longer have streets named after WWI-era communists in East Berlin.

Long live the new loaf!

before you get carried away...Joan Walsh doesn't give out Editor's Choice stars!

But Annie W. gives good Drudge.

It is a bummer to me that Joan doesn't give out editors choice thingies. I have worked so hard to be cogent with so little affirmation ... sigh.

I sent in my absentee ballot, too. I also walked a pretty red district with Teamsters yesterday in red tinted Orange County, CA yesterday.

It was funny, people were cautious with me until I said I was canvassing for Dems, then a number of them were relieved and really nice.

There is alot of fear out there on both sides.

it's about time!

When do I get to put my feet in some wet cement on the walk of infamy?

Apology accepted. (Ain't no zealot like a convert, I guess.)

and one would think that would be an experience to be savored, again and again and...oh, back from refreshing and to the point: where is Klytus' star? I can't find it. Were there to be an actual ceremony, him stepping into a mushy sidewalk, I'd bring cement or water, whichever weighs less. And/or a big batch of hummus.

Dear Joan Walsh: Please give Klytus a red star. It's a badge of honor for service well rendered, rarely extended. He's a kind and yet curmudgeonly sort with poetic hues to his views. Sincerely...GEH

If you go to the trouble of actually reading what Obama said, he wasn't preaching about redistribution of wealth or reparations. He was preaching about rejecting our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

He proposes "positive rights," entitlements specified by the government. In other words, granted to you or withheld from you at the whim of the monarch. He slanders "negative rights," those fundamental protections of an individual's liberty which we are blessed with almost uniquely in the world today.

Under Obama's philosophy, which is essentially similar to the UN Declaration of Rights and some European constitutions, you live or die at the whim of the monarch (or the elected government, no matter really). You actually have no rights whatsoever; no true right--that so-called negative right--to exist unmolested as a human being.

Our nation's founders recognized in the Declaration of Independence that we are born with inalienable rights, not granted to us by any state or ruler. They rejected thousands of years of oppressive tradition with their radical concept.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING.

Obama is a neo-monarch, poised to scrap the Constitution for a "New Deal" where the government promises what it wants, and takes what it wants, and rules us by whim, with no rights inconvenient to a state, no "negative rights" like the right to freely speak, or to freely associate, or to bear arms, or to keep one's own property, or enjoy due process under law.

McCain is so ignorant and out of touch he is missing the obvious threat in Obama's 2001 interview. It's just gone right over the old fool's head. Obama isn't a nitwit tax-and-waster, he's a very intelligent leftist scholar. Bill Ayers isn't (just) a mad bomber, he's likewise a very intelligent leftist scholar who has mentored Obama.

Obama's threat isn't a petty dare to tweak Wall Street and loot our wallets to pay for "liberal" pet projects, but a threat to overturn the grandest and most successful political experiment of all human history, the United States Constitution. He'll replace our Bill of Rights with a declaration of entitlements, subject to change without notice.