Daily Update: McCain Appeals to Joe, Obama Appeals to America

Last night we found ourselves at Hofstra University on Long Island... not literally, but with the two candidates. My friends, what a debate that was...if one was looking for something rather medicinal to lull the eyeballs into a closed position. McCain came out a bit feisty, though the rampant phoniness rather overwhelmed his few cogent points; this was particularly apparent when he tried to suggest that Obama was running a dirty campaign, and that various attacks had been hurtful to John himself. Obama sounded like the adult, advising John in so many words to suck it up and be a politician (and further, focus on important issues). Given that everyone knows McCain was the chief baker of mud pies, and chief flinger of nonsense, McCain's attempt to spin the truth was astonishingly bold (in all the wrong ways).

While McCain asked Obama to disavow the words of another congressman (which Obama had already done in writing), McCain never found it necessary to apologize for the rather jabbing tongue of the Pythoness (his own vice presidential nominee), who has either implied or stated that Obama was any number of unsavory things. There is no equivalence between implying that your opponent is old and erratic and implying that your opponent is a terrorist, and especially if the sole truth is that Cain is in fact old, and quite often erratic as he lurches from one thing to another.

And who is this Joe the plumber that McCain kept talking to? We could do for a little less Joe, and a little more of America.

"Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and I'll keep your taxes low and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees. And I will not stand for a tax increase on small business income."

(Huffington Post)

Why do I think this whole Joe as stand in for America will somehow blow up in Cain's face? And why do I think Joe will never be getting his business anytime soon if he was betting on getting bank financing?

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And in other parts of the world:

Stocks continued their plunge, which will have the actual effect of convincing the average casual viewer that the government bailout was a waste. This is unfortunate given the complexity of what has occurred. The only thing we know for sure is that if the financial system manages to stabilize, the real economy will continue to slink to the bottom, and on the whole people will become more cynical. It would be nice to see a nice bi-partisan effort to explain in detail the scope of what is involved, whether we are talking the money markets, credit default swaps, securitization, or the many mortgage firms now gone bust.

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The Republican National Committee intends to pull out of Wisconsin and Maine, focusing its efforts on the states it can actually win.

The party's independent ad operation is doubling its budget to about $10 million and focusing on crucial states such as Colorado, Missouri, Indiana and Virginia where Democrat Barack Obama has established a foothold, according to a Republican strategist familiar with presidential ad placements.

Florida and North Carolina have also been in the RNC ad mix. Pennsylvania is the only Democratic leaning swing state apparently left in the party's ad campaign.

Obama continues to outspend, though we remind that he is spending voluntary money as compared to McCain's use of taxpayer funds:

Flush with money, Obama is outspending the joint efforts of the Republican Party and the McCain campaign by more than 2-1.