Help Missourians for Cleaner Cheaper Energy get our new TV ad in front of Missouri voters:

There is Power in the wind and the sun.
Power to create new energy that's cleaner, cheaper.
It is the Power to create new industries, new businesses right here in Missouri.
But most of all it is the Power to create thousands of new Missouri jobs and put people back to work.

The KET debate is going on as scheduled tonight. Heather Ryan will be there to debate the issues effecting Kentucky and the Nation, however the cowardly lion Exxon Ed Whitfield is a no-show.

(Cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama)

Adam Nagourney writes up a breezy little list of six what-if scenarios that might cause McCain to win the presidency.  None of the points, except perhaps one of them, actually reflects a dynamic currently in play; even if the one might be in play, they are all contingencies that rely on speculation about what might happen.  They sort of fall into the, "if wishes were horses," category.

(cross-posted at Motley Moose and Clintonistas for Obama)

Straight talk.

Apparently it's a dying art.

John McCain was never a maverick. He was a staunch Republican whose positions deviated from those of his party only on occasion. But the one thing he had going for him was honesty and sincerity. He told the country what he believed and why he believed it, firmly and unapologetically. He stood up for his beliefs even if they were unpopular. He defended his principles. But somewhere along the line John McCain gave up. He sacrificed his principles, he surrendered to the sordid tactics of his party, the tactics he once despised and vocally denounced. To fully understand the magnitude of his fall, one must look back -- a glance at the McCain of a month ago, really, is sufficient to understand the duplicity of his statements and positions, but the differences between the McCain of 2000 and the McCain of 2008 are staggering. A brief list compiled by blogger Alex Valentine shows the stark contrast between the two McCains:

The more we know about 2004, the more we know how wrong the conventional wisdom was and has been:  No, Bush didn't win.  No, this wasn't a victory of right-wing so-called "values voters".  And no, marriage initiatives did not make a difference in the vote.

Kerry pollster Mark Mellman has found that [2004] anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives didn't boost voter turnout for either party. Moreover, political scientists at MIT found that Bush's share of the 2004 vote increased in most battleground states, but not the three that had gay marriage bans on the ballot. Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the study's authors, concludes that the gay marriage referenda may have given Kerry a bump. "That suggests there might even be some sort of backlash against this kind of politics," he notes.

Of course, we already knew that civil rights battles should not wait for the mythical time when no elections are on the horizon, and that pro-equality plaintiffs can't be expected to back out of their years-long case because the timing is inconvenient.   We already knew that Karl Rove, not people fighting for their civil rights, "pushed the issue" in 2004.  Now we know that it didn't even work.  This should put an end to any more "those darn impatient gays!" nonsense about 2004.

Browsing the internals of the Washington Post polling data, and wanted to share some of the more interesting highlights.  I think that Obama's performance is a giant lawn dart skewering McCains hope to appeal to undecideds and moderates.

In my diaries, I've been following the Minnesota Senate race between Democratic humorist and friend of the late Paul Wellstone, Al Franken, and incumbant Republican beneficiary of relaxed lobbying rules Norm Coleman, but recently things just got weird.

Joe Lieberman (Himself-CT), former Democrat and McCain supporter, wrote an op-ed for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in which he extolled the virtues of Norm Coleman's position on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

Let's have a look at what he said and try to figure out what he's really saying, shall we?

The latest in my postings on Oregon politics is a discussion of how I intend to vote when I get my ballot on Friday or Saturday. I am posting this now both to foster discussion and because, especially on the ballot measures, I am willing to listen to arguments on whether I am wrong to think about voting the way I intend to.

Cross-Posted from Loaded Orygun: http://www.loadedorygun.net/showDiary.do ?diaryId=1411