Stephen Fox's Blog

Obama Wins? Yes, 'Doonesbury' Calls the Election!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:40:13 EDT

from Washington Post today

Networks have long taken flak for calling elections early, but what are newspaper editors to do when a cartoonist "calls" an election several days in advance? That's the controversial question raised by next Wednesday's "Doonesbury," which Pulitzer-winning creator Garry Trudeau has already submitted and which has been sent to editors.

In the strip, Trudeau declares that Barack Obama has won the presidential election. (His syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate, says a replacement strip will be made available to newspapers who request it.)

Garry Trudeau calls the election for Obama in next Wednesday's "Doonesbury." (Universal Press Syndicate)Enlarge Comic

So what prompted the cartoonist to "call" the outcome of the election? Trudeau tells Comic Riffs today: "If I didn't call the election, I'd have no premise for the week and be forced to write about something else. I didn't want to write about something else. This is history."

Did Trudeau then create the strip with complete and utter confidence that Obama will win? "Nope, more like rational risk assessment," Trudeau explains. "Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com is now giving McCain a 3.7% chance of winning -- pretty comfortable odds. ... Here's the way I look at it: If Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it'll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face."

But will the yolk also be on editors who run the strip? Says Trudeau: "We've supplied our clients with a week of reruns, just in case."

Trudeau adds: "My editor mentioned initial 'panic and anger' from some papers, but she said cooler heads are prevailing today."

Kathie Kerr, the syndicate's vice president for communications, tells Comic Riffs: "So far, there have been about a dozen calls and/or e-mails [from editors], but they are still coming in. ... They are all requesting the substitute strips; some of them haven't made a decision about running them, but they do want access to them."

Kerr adds: "Still, that's not a huge percentage considering the size of Garry 's client list," which is roughly 1,400 newspapers.

NOTE: The Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com plan to publish Trudeau's "prediction" strip.

see also:
http://www.truveo.com/Newspaper-Declares-Obama-Winner/id/2129501627

RJ Shulman: GOP sees chance of stealing election slipping away

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:47:30 EDT

http://www.legitgov.org/ Citizens For Legitimate Government

GOP SEES CHANCE OF STEALING ELECTION SLIPPING AWAY

"We are running out of smear ideas and ideas for voter suppression," said Karl Rove. "What we are the most afraid of, is that the next president of the United States will actually be a man who, I shudder to think of this, a man who actually won the election."

Satire by R J Shulman
WASHINGTON – (PTSD News) – As polls indicate that Senator Barack Obama is slowly pulling away from rival John McCain, Republican leaders are concerned they will not be able to steal the election. "We project that we can overcome up to seven points of an actual Obama lead with the strategy we have in place," said Winthrop Downing of the Republican National Committee.

Downing told the Post Times Sun Dispatch that this strategy, named Operation American Freedom, which was used successfully in 2000 in Florida and in 2004 in Ohio, uses shock and awe to disorient the opponent. "While black box tampering, challenging student, black and recently foreclosed voters, generic voter intimidation and voter roll purges have proven successful in the past," Downing said, "we may not be able to prevail if Obama gets more than 54 percent of the vote."

"We were hoping the relentless personal attacks on Obama, you know, that he is an angry black Muslin intent on teaching sex to your kindergartner, would soften up his numbers enough for us to be in reach of pulling the victory from him, but he as been bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali on steroids," said Barbara White, a GOP strategist.

"We did make some progress when we tricked the media into covering the ACORN story thinking it was about real voter fraud," White said. "Of course, no one with those wild names will show up to actually vote, but media focus on ACORN allows us to challenge more legitimate voters. More importantly, while the media is swarming all over the little acorn, the mighty tree of GOP vote stealing will go unnoticed, even though it will cost more than 3 million Democrat votes."

Polls in several key swing states are now showing an increased lead for Obama. "We just needed that old fool McCain to keep it close enough," said a GOP staffer who wished to remain anonymous, "but he seems to be losing it. Just yesterday he got so mixed up at a rally he told a crowd in western Pennsylvania that he agreed with Obama that they were a bunch of angry rednecks. And Palin? A moose would be more qualified to be veep."

24 October 2008

Visit R J Shulman on MySpace GOP SEES CHANCE OF STEALING ELECTION SLIPPING AWAY

24 October 2008

Visit R J Shulman on MySpace

Albuquerque Journal North reproduces yesterday's Sun News Cover, full size; "OBAMA WINS!"

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:43:12 EDT

The Albuquerque Journal North devoted almost half a page to reproduce life-sizeon Saturday's edition our NEW MEXICO SUN NEWS cover with the Headline, "Obama Wins!"

Caption: Going out on a limb, the left-leaning New Mexico Sun News---a free twice-monthly paper published in Santa Fe---proclaimed "Obama Wins!" on the cover of its Firday edition. The headline is "kind of a journalistic stunt," and the paper's way of endorsing Barack Obama for Presidents, Contributing Editor Stephen Fox said. With the Chicago Daily Tribune's infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman" 1948 headline in mind, is the Sun News worried about jinxing obama? "No, said Editor Jerry Greenker. "I'm not a very superstitious guy."

"OBAMA WINS!" First American Newspaper with this Headline, 11 days before Election Day: Our Endorsement for the New Mexico Sun News

ALSO AT: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stephenfox/gGgfHy

This was the front cover of Friday's edition of the New Mexico Sun News, circulation 11,000, Northern and Central New Mexico.

This was the idea of the Managing Editor, Jerry Greenker, kind of as a declaration of our own support, our own way of endorsing OBAMA, kind of as an affirmation, kind of a doctoral thesis in Political Journalism, kind of a journalistic stunt, and kind of the reason that people are driven to write science fiction, to see which of their predictions actually come true!

Since I had been scrutinizing through some of the best reading in my life, the newspaper endorsements for Obama from all over the United States, I had a plan to publish as much as would be allowed in a 32 page twice monthly local and alternative newspaper. This fit in well with Jerry's Idea, so we went for it, and are happy to share this with mybarackobama.com
readers.

Respectfully,

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
stephen@santafefineart.com
505 983-2002

"OBAMA WINS!" First American Newspaper with this Headline, 11 days before Election Day: New Mexico Sun News

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:26:52 EDT

This is being printed and rolling off the presses, as I write this, on the front cover of Friday's edition of the New Mexico Sun News, circulation 10,000, Northern and Central New Mexico.

This was the idea of the Managing Editor, Jerry Greenker, kind of as a declaration of our own support, our own way of endorsing OBAMA, kind of as an affirmation, kind of a doctoral thesis in Political Journalistm, kind of a journalistic stunt, and kind of the reason that people are driven to write science fiction, to see which of their predictions actually come true!

Since I had been scrutinizing through some of the best reading in my life, the newspaper endorsements for Obama from all over the United States, I had a plan to publish as much as would be allowed in a 32 page twice monthly local and alternative newspaper. This fit in well with Jerry's Idea, so we are going for it, and are happy to share this with mybarackobama.com readers, the most open and most creative true political forum in the United States.

Jerry put it this way in his page 2 story:

"The New Mexico Sun News proudly and confidently declares Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States....this declaration comes from Santa Fe, NM, via a local, biweekly newspaper 11 days before Election Day. It is based on extensive research, an analysis of all of the editorial pages in America, "gut feelings," and the need for the American people to have closure and certainty about something in their lives. Also, our next issue comes out 3 days after the Nov. 4 election. So if we wanted to be first, we had to be bold."

______________________
endorsement issue theme story, New Mexico Sun News:

"Editorial Page Avalanche for Obama Will Lead to Electoral College Landslide"
by Stephen Fox

[I believe this will be the first in the nation, over trepidations from some that this would be like Truman holding the Chicago Tribune printed the night before that 'DEWEY WINS!' when he hadn't won....Well, that's the way it is when you are ahead of the curve, and we wanted to get it out of the way for our readers by letting them know where we stood, well in advance of election day.

For months, I have been coordinating, coaching, and doing free editing to help Obama supporters in every state write letters to the Editor and longer Opinion Editorials; to see this latest and on-going deluge of endorsements reaffirms my faith both in independent and discerning American Editorial Pages and the strength of my tactics, but above all, the intelligence, compassion, and coolness of our best candidate, Obama, who has convinced hundreds of millions of American he is the right choice now! - Recent newspaper endorsements of Obama, selected for the quality of their writing and the depths of their insights. Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News]

starting with the Washington Post: Barack Obama for President

"THE NOMINATING process this year produced two unusually talented and qualified presidential candidates. There are few public figures we have respected more over the years than Sen. John McCain. Yet it is without ambivalence that we endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president. The choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain's disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president.

It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Mr. Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race. Yes, we have reservations and concerns, almost inevitably, given Mr. Obama's relatively brief experience in national politics. But we also have enormous hopes......"
----Washington Post Editorial

The text of the endorsements have all appeared in my 6 prior posted articles at OpEdNews, and here is a list of them for easier access:

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

*********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville, Tuscaloosa, Orlando

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

*********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station, New Haven, San Antonio, Columbus, Las Vegas, Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR
INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, AND ON TO VICTORY!

Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe,NM (505)983-2002

Jerry Greenker, Managing Editor New Mexico Sun News (505) 603-8968

HELP WIN VIRGINIA'S EDITORIAL PAGE BATTLE WITH YOUR LETTER/OPINION/EDITORIAL AND THIS AMAZING "LIVE" LIST OF ALL VIRGINIA NEWSPAPERS

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:41:47 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for VIRGINIA's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com;

VIRGINIA'S NEWSPAPERS, Taken from this "LIVE URL":
http://www.usnpl.com/vanews.php

[plus, below, the 6 PART OpEdNews Compendium of Major EDITORIAL PAGE
Endorsements Thus Far]

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Alexandria Alexandria Gazette Packet (A) (C)
Alexandria The Alexandria Times (A) (C)
Amelia Court House Bulletin Monitor (A) (C)
Arlington Henderson Hall News (A) (C)
Arlington The Arlington Connection (A) (C)
Ashburn Loudoun Easterner (A) (C)
Bedford Bedford Bulletin (A) (C)
Big Stone Gap The Post (A) (C)
Bland Bland County Messenger (A) (C)
Bristol Bristol Herald Courier (A) (C)
Burke The Burke/Fairfax Station Connection (A) (C)
Centreville Centre View (A) (C)
Charlottesville The Daily Progress (A) (C)
Chincoteague Island Chincoteague Beacon (A) (C)
Clintwood The Dickenson Star (A) (C)
Courtland Tidewater News (A) (C)
Covington Virginian Review (A) (C)
Crozet Crozet Gazette (A) (C)
Culpeper Culpeper News (A) (C)
Culpeper Culpeper Star Exponent (A) (C)
Danville Danville Register & Bee (A) (C)
Elkton The Valley Banner (A) (C)
Fairfax The Fairfax Connection (A) (C)
Falls Church Falls Church News-Press (A) (C)
Farmville Farmville Herald (A) (C)
Floyd Floyd Press (A) (C)
Franklin The Tidewater News (A) (C)
Fredericksburg The Free Lance-Star (A) (C)
Galax The Gazette (A) (C)
Gate City Virginia Star (A) (C)
Goochland Goochland Courier (A) (C)
Great Falls The Great Falls Connection (A) (C)
Hampton Daily Press (A) (C)
Hampton Pilot Online (A) (C)
Hanover Herald-Progress (A) (C)
Harrisonburg Daily News Record Online (A) (C)
Herndon Observer Online (A) (C)
Herndon The Herndon Connection (A) (C)
Hopewell Hopewell News (A) (C)
Hot Springs The Recorder (A) (C)
Keysville The Southside Messenger (A) (C)
Kilmarnock Rappahannock Record (A) (C)
King George The Journal (A) (C)
Leesburg Leesburg Today (A) (C)
Leesburg Loudoun Times Mirror (A) (C)
Leesburg The Loudoun Connection (A) (C)
Lexington News-Gazette (A) (C)
Lexington Rockbridge Weekly (A) (C)
Louisa Central Virginian News (A) (C)
Luray Page News & Courier (A) (C)
Lynchburg The News & Advance (A) (C)
Madison Madison County Eagle (A) (C)
Manassas Manassas Journal Messenger (A) (C)
Marion Smyth County News & Messenger (A) (C)
Martinsville Martinsville Bulletin (A) (C)
Martinsville Martinsville Daily (A) (C)
McLean The McLean Connection (A) (C)
McLean USA Today (A) (C)
Midlothian Chesterfield Observer (A) (C)
Mount Vernon Mount Vernon Gazette (A) (C)
Norfolk Inside Business (A) (C)
Norfolk Virginian Pilot (A) (C)
Norton Coalfield Progress (A) (C)
Orange Orange County Review (A) (C)
Petersburg Progress Index (A) (C)
Potomac Potomac Almanac (A) (C)
Pulaski The Southwest Times (A) (C)
Reston The Reston Connection (A) (C)
Reston Times Community Newspapers (A) (C)
Richlands Richlands News Press (A) (C)
Richmond Richmond Times-Dispatch (A) (C)
Richmond Richmond.com (A) (C)
Richmond Style Weekly (A) (C)
Roanoke Blue Ridge Business Journal (A) (C)
Roanoke Roanoke Time & World News (A) (C)
Rocky Mount The Franklin News-Post (A) (C)
Smithfield The Times (A) (C)
South Boston Gazette-Virginian (A) (C)
South Hill The South Hill Enterprise (A) (C)
Springfield The Springfield Connection (A) (C)
Stanardsville Greene County Record (A) (C)
Staunton The Daily News Leader (A) (C)
Strasburg Northern Virginia Daily Online (A) (C)
Stuart The Enterprise (A) (C)
Suffolk News Herald (A) (C)
Tasley Eastern Shore News (A) (C)
Tazewell Clinch Valley News (A) (C)
Toano Toano-Norge Times (A) (C)
Urbanna Southside Sentinel (A) (C)
Vienna The Vienna/Oakton Connection (A) (C)
Warrenton The Fauquier Democrat (A) (C)
Washington Rappahannock News (A) (C)
Waynesboro The News-Virginian (A) (C)
Williamsburg The Virginia Gazette (A) (C)
Winchester Winchester Star (A) (C)
Woodbridge Potomac News (A) (C)
Woodstock Shenandoah Valley Herald (A) (C)
Wytheville The Wytheville Enterprise (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Ferrum College's The IronBlade
George Mason Univ Broadside
George Mason Univ Mason Gazette
James Madison Univ The Breeze
Liberty Univ Liberty Champion
Old Dominion Univ Mace & Crown
Old Dominion Univ The Courier
Radford Univ The Tartan
Univ of Richmond The Collegian
Univ of VA The Declaration
Univ of VA Charlottesville Advocate
Univ of VA Charlottesville Cavalier Daily
Virginia Tech Collegiate Times
William and Mary The Dog Street Journal
William and Mary The Flat Hat

********

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 6 part compendium, posted in full at OpEdNews.com---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville,Tuscaloosa, Orlando
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station,New Haven,San Antonio,Columbus,Las
Vegas,Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

********

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR
INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

HELP WIN NORTH CAROLINA'S EDITORIAL PAGE BATTLE WITH YOUR LETTER/OPINION/EDITORIAL AND THIS AMAZING "LIVE" LIST OF ALL OF NORTH CAROLINA'S NEWSPAPERS

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:27:00 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for NORTH CAROLINA's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com;

OHIO'S NEWSPAPERS, Taken from this "LIVE URL":
http://www.usnpl.com/NCnews.php

[plus, below, the 6 PART OpEdNews Compendium of Major EDITORIAL PAGE
Endorsements Thus Far]

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Ahoskie Roanoke-Chowan News Herald (A) (C)
Albemarle The Stanly News & Press (A) (C)
Andrews The Andrews Journal (A) (C)
Asheboro The Courier Tribune (A) (C)
Asheville Asheville Citizen-Times (A) (C)
Asheville Mountain Xpress (A) (C)
Asheville W. Carolina Business Journal (A) (C)
Black Mountain Black Mountain News (A) (C)
Boone High Country Press (A) (C)
Boone The Mountain Times (A) (C)
Boone Watauga Democrat (A) (C)
Bryson City Smoky Mountain Times (A) (C)
Burlington Times-News (A) (C)
Carolina Beach Island Gazette (A) (C)
Cary The Cary News (A) (C)
Cashiers Crossroads Chronicle (A) (C)
Chapel Hill Chapel Hill News (A) (C)
Charlotte Business Journal of Charlotte (A) (C)
Charlotte Charlotte Observer (A) (C)
Charlotte Charlotte Post (A) (C)
Charlotte Charlotte Weekly (A) (C)
Charlotte Creative Loafing (A) (C)
Charlotte La Noticia (A) (C)
Charlotte Mecklenburg Times (A) (C)
Charlotte Mi Gente Magazine (A) (C)
Charlotte Que Pasa (A) (C)
Charlotte Rhino Times (A) (C)
Clayton The Clayton News-Star (A) (C)
Clemmons The Clemmons Courier (A) (C)
Clinton The Sampson Independent (A) (C)
Columbus Polk County News-Journal (A) (C)
Concord Independent Tribune (A) (C)
Creedmoor Butner-Creedmoor News (A) (C)
Denton The Denton Orator (A) (C)
Denver News@Norman (A) (C)
Dunn The Daily Record (A) (C)
Durham The Herald-Sun (A) (C)
Durham The Independent (A) (C)
Eden Daily News (A) (C)
Elizabeth City The Daily Advance (A) (C)
Elizabethtown The Bladen Journal (A) (C)
Elkin The Tribune (A) (C)
Fayetteville Acento Latino (A) (C)
Fayetteville Fayetteville Observer (A) (C)
Forest City Daily Courier (A) (C)
Franklin Macon County News (A) (C)
Franklin The Franklin Press (A) (C)
Fremont Wayne Wilson News Leader (A) (C)
Fuquay Varina Fuquay-Varina Independent (A) (C)
Garner Citizen News & Times (A) (C)
Garner The Garner News (A) (C)
Gastonia The Gaston Gazette (A) (C)
Goldsboro The News-Argus (A) (C)
Greensboro Carolina Peacemaker (A) (C)
Greensboro The Business Journal (A) (C)
Greensboro The News and Record (A) (C)
Greensboro Yes! Weekly (A) (C)
Greenville The Daily Reflector (A) (C)
Hampstead Topsail Voice (A) (C)
Havelock Havelock News (A) (C)
Hayesville Smoky Mountain Sentinel (A) (C)
Henderson The Daily Dispatch (A) (C)
Hendersonville Times News (A) (C)
Hickory Hickory Daily Record (A) (C)
High Point High Point Enterprise (A) (C)
Highlands The Highlander (A) (C)
Hillsborough The News of Orange County (A) (C)
Huntersville Huntersville Herald (A) (C)
Jacksonville Jacksonville Daily News (A) (C)
Jamestown The Jamestown News (A) (C)
Kannapolis Independent Tribune (A) (C)
Kenly The Kenly News (A) (C)
Kernersville Kernersville News (A) (C)
King The Stokes News (A) (C)
Kinston The Free Press (A) (C)
Laurinburg Laurinburg Exchange (A) (C)
Leland The Tribune (A) (C)
Lenoir Lenoir News Topic (A) (C)
Lexington The Dispatch (A) (C)
Lincolnton Lincoln Times-News (A) (C)
Lincolnton Lincolnton Tribune (A) (C)
Locust The Weekly Post (A) (C)
Louisburg The Franklin Times (A) (C)
Lumberton The Robesonian (A) (C)
Madison The Madison Messenger (A) (C)
Marion McDowell News (A) (C)
Mebane Mebane Enterprise (A) (C)
Mocksville The Enterprise-Record (A) (C)
Monroe The Enquirer-Journal (A) (C)
Mooresville Lake Norman Times (A) (C)
Mooresville Mooresville Tribune (A) (C)
Morehead City Carteret Co News-Times (A) (C)
Morganton The News Herald (A) (C)
Mount Airy Mount Airy News (A) (C)
Mount Olive Mount Olive Tribune (A) (C)
Murphy The Cherokee Scout (A) (C)
Murphy The Cherokee Sentinel (A) (C)
Nags Head Outer Banks Sentinel (A) (C)
New Bern Sun Journal (A) (C)
Newland Avery Journal (A) (C)
Newton Observer News Enterprise (A) (C)
North Wilkesboro The Record (A) (C)
North Wilkesboro Wilkes Journal-Patriot (A) (C)
Oriental The Pamlico News (A) (C)
Pittsboro Chatham Journal (A) (C)
Princeton Princeton News Leader (A) (C)
Raeford The News-Journal (A) (C)
Raleigh News and Observer (A) (C)
Raleigh Que Pasa (A) (C)
Raleigh The Raleigh Chronicle (A) (C)
Raleigh The Raleigh Telegram (A) (C)
Raleigh Triangle Business Journal (A) (C)
Reidsville The Reidsville Review (A) (C)
Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald (A) (C)
Robbinsville The Graham Star (A) (C)
Rockingham Richmond County Daily Journal (A) (C)
Rocky Mount Rocky Mount Telegram (A) (C)
Roxboro Courier Times (A) (C)
Salisbury Salisbury Post (A) (C)
Sanford The Sanford Herald (A) (C)
Shallotte The Brunswick Beacon (A) (C)
Shelby The Shelby Star (A) (C)
Siler City The Chatham News (A) (C)
Smithfield The Smithfield Herald (A) (C)
Southern Pines The Pilot (A) (C)
Sparta The Alleghany News (A) (C)
Spruce Pine News-Journal (A) (C)
Statesville Statesville Record & Landmark (A) (C)
Swansboro Tideland News (A) (C)
Sylva Herald and Ruralite (A) (C)
Tarboro The Daily Southerner (A) (C)
Taylorsville Taylorsville Times (A) (C)
Thomasville Thomasville Times (A) (C)
Troy The Montgomery Herald (A) (C)
Tryon The Tryon Daily Bulletin (A) (C)
Wadesboro The Anson Record (A) (C)
Wadesboro The Express Newspaper (A) (C)
Wake Forest The Wake Weekly (A) (C)
Warrenton The Warren Record (A) (C)
Washington Daily News (A) (C)
Waynesville Smoky Mountain News (A) (C)
Waynesville The Mountaineer (A) (C)
West Jefferson Jefferson Post (A) (C)
Whiteville The News Reporter (A) (C)
Wilmington Star-News Online (A) (C)
Wilson Wilson Daily Times (A) (C)
Winston Salem Que Pasa (A) (C)
Winston Salem The Chronicle (A) (C)
Winston Salem Winston-Salem Journal (A) (C)
Wrightsville Beach The Lumina News (A) (C)
Yadkinville The Yadkin Ripple (A) (C)
Yanceyville The Caswell Messenger (A) (C)
Zebulon Eastern Wake News (A) (C)

College Newspapers
A & T State The A & T Register
Appalachian State The Appalachian
Chowan College Chowan Connections
Davidson College The Davidsonian
Duke Univ The Chronicle
E. Carolina Univ Greenville East Carolinian
Elon College The Pendulum
Guilford College The Guilfordian
Lenoir-Rhyne Lenoir-Rhynean
Mars Hill College The Hilltop
Montreat College The Whetstone
NC Central University Campus Echo
NC State Raleigh Technician Online
Univ NC Asheville The Blue Banner
Univ NC Chapel Hill The Daily Tar Heel
Univ NC Charlotte The Niner Online
Univ NC Greensboro The Carolinian
Univ NC Pembroke The Pine Needle
Univ NC Wilmington The Seahawk
Univ NC Winston-Salem The Kudzu Gazette
Wake Forest Old Gold and Black
Western Carolina Univ Western Carolinian

********

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 6 part compendium, posted in full at OpEdNews.com---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville,Tuscaloosa, Orlando
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station,New Haven,San Antonio,Columbus,Las
Vegas,Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

********

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR
INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

HELP WIN INDIANA'S EDITORIAL PAGE BATTLE WITH YOUR LETTER/OPINION/EDITORIAL AND THIS AMAZING "LIVE" LIST OF ALL INDIANA'S NEWSPAPERS

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:28:39 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for INDIANA's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com;

OHIO'S NEWSPAPERS, Taken from this "LIVE URL": http://www.usnpl.com/INnews.php

[plus, below, the 6 PART OpEdNews Compendium of Major EDITORIAL PAGE Endorsements Thus Far]

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Alexandria The Alexandria Times-Tribune (A) (C)
Anderson Anderson Herald Bulletin (A) (C)
Auburn The Evening Star (A) (C)
Batesville The Herald Tribune (A) (C)
Bedford Bedford Times-Mail (A) (C)
Bloomington The Herald-Times (A) (C)
Bluffton Bluffton News Banner (A) (C)
Brazil The Brazil Times (A) (C)
Brookville Brookville American-Democrat (A) (C)
Brownstown Jackson County Banner (A) (C)
Chesterton Chesterton Tribune (A) (C)
Cloverdale Hoosier Topics (A) (C)
Columbia City The Post & Mail (A) (C)
Columbus The Republic (A) (C)
Connersville News Examiner (A) (C)
Corydon The Corydon Democrat (A) (C)
Crawfordsville Journal Review (A) (C)
Crawfordsville The Paper of Montgomery County (A) (C)
Decatur Decatur Daily Democrat (A) (C)
Elkhart The Elkhart Truth (A) (C)
Elwood The Call-Leader (A) (C)
Evansville Evansville Courier (A) (C)
Evansville News 4U (A) (C)
Flora Carroll County Comet (A) (C)
Fort Wayne Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (A) (C)
Fort Wayne Fort Wayne Reader (A) (C)
Fort Wayne Ink Newspaper (A) (C)
Fort Wayne The News-Sentinel (A) (C)
Frankfort The Times (A) (C)
Franklin Daily Journal of Johnson County (A) (C)
French Lick Springs Valley Herald (A) (C)
Goshen Goshen News (A) (C)
Greencastle Banner-Graphic (A) (C)
Greenfield Daily Reporter (A) (C)
Greensburg Greensburg Daily News (A) (C)
Hartford City Hartford City News-Times (A) (C)
Huntington Herald Press (A) (C)
Indianapolis Indianapolis Business Journal (A) (C)
Indianapolis Indianapolis Star (A) (C)
Indianapolis Indy Outlook (A) (C)
Indianapolis Nuvo Newsweekly (A) (C)
Indianapolis The Indianapolis Recorder (A) (C)
Indianapolis The Southside Times (A) (C)
Jeffersonville Evening News and Tribune (A) (C)
Kendallville Kendallville News-Sun (A) (C)
Kokomo Kokomo Perspective (A) (C)
Kokomo Kokomo Tribune (A) (C)
La Porte Herald-Argus (A) (C)
Lafayette Journal & Courier (A) (C)
Lebanon The Reporter (A) (C)
Linton The Daily World (A) (C)
Logansport Pharos-Tribune (A) (C)
Madison Madison Courier Online (A) (C)
Marion Chronicle-Tribune (A) (C)
Martinsville The Reporter Times (A) (C)
Merrillville Gary Post Tribune (A) (C)
Michigan City The News-Dispatch (A) (C)
Monticello Herald Journal (A) (C)
Mooresville Mooresville Times (A) (C)
Muncie NewsLink Indiana (A) (C)
Muncie The Star Press (A) (C)
Munster The Times (A) (C)
Nashville Brown County Democrat (A) (C)
New Castle The Courier Times (A) (C)
New Harmony Posey County News (A) (C)
New Paris The Farmer's Exchange (A) (C)
Newburgh Newburgh Chandler Register (A) (C)
Noblesville Noblesville Daily Times (A) (C)
Noblesville The Noblesville Ledger (A) (C)
Noblesville Topics Newspapers (A) (C)
North Vernon Plain Dealer & Sun (A) (C)
Paoli Paoli News-Republican (A) (C)
Peru Peru Tribune (A) (C)
Plainfield The Flyer Group Newspapers (A) (C)
Plymouth The Pilot News (A) (C)
Portland Commercial Review (A) (C)
Princeton Princeton Daily Clarion (A) (C)
Rensselaer Rensselaer Republican Newspaper (A) (C)
Richmond Palladium-Item (A) (C)
Rochester Rochester Sentinel (A) (C)
Rushville Rushville Republican (A) (C)
Seymour Seymour Tribune (A) (C)
Shelbyville Shelbyville News (A) (C)
South Bend South Bend Tribune (A) (C)
Spencer Spencer Evening World (A) (C)
Terre Haute Journal of Business (A) (C)
Terre Haute Tribune-Star (A) (C)
Tipton Tipton County Tribune (A) (C)
Versailles Osgood Journal (A) (C)
Versailles Versailles Republican (A) (C)
Vincennes Vincennes Sun-Commercial (A) (C)
Wabash Wabash Plain Dealer (A) (C)
Warsaw Times-Union (A) (C)
Zionsville Times Sentinel (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Anderson Univ News and Events
Ball State Univ News
Butler Univ DawgNet
DePauw Univ theDePauw.com
Goshen College Record
Indiana State Univ Indiana Statesman
Indiana Univ Bloomington Digital Student
Notre Dame Observer
Purdue Univ Exponent
Purdue Univ Calumet Chronicle
Purdue Univ Indianapolis Sagamore
Wabash College Bachelor

********

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 6 part compendium, posted in full at OpEdNews.com---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville,Tuscaloosa, Orlando
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station,New Haven,San Antonio,Columbus,Las Vegas,Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

********

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

HELP WIN OHIO'S EDITORIAL PAGE BATTLE WITH YOUR LETTER/OPINION/EDITORIAL AND THIS AMAZING "LIVE" LIST OF ALL OHIO NEWSPAPERS

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:12:57 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for OHIO's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com;
OHIO'S NEWSPAPERS, Taken from this "LIVE URL":

http://www.usnpl.com/OHnews.php

[plus, below: a 6 PART OpEdNews Compendium of Major EDITORIAL PAGE Endorsements Thus Far]

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Ada Ada Herald (A) (C)
Akron Akron Beacon Journal (A) (C)
Akron Akron Legal News (A) (C)
Akron West Side Leader/Green Leader (A) (C)
Alliance The Review (A) (C)
Archbold Archbold Buckeye (A) (C)
Ashland The Ashland Times Gazette (A) (C)
Ashtabula Ashtabula Star Beacon (A) (C)
Athens The Athens Messenger (A) (C)
Athens The Athens News (A) (C)
Aurora Aurora Advocate (A) (C)
Barberton The Barberton Herald (A) (C)
Beavercreek News Current Extra (A) (C)
Bellefontaine Bellefontaine Examiner (A) (C)
Bellevue Bellevue Gazette (A) (C)
Bloomville Crawford County Post (A) (C)
Bowling Green The Sentinel Tribune (A) (C)
Bryan The Bryan Times (A) (C)
Buckeye Lake Buckeye Lake Beacon (A) (C)
Bucyrus Bucyrus News Online (A) (C)
Bucyrus Telegraph Forum (A) (C)
Cadiz Harrison News Herald (A) (C)
Cambridge The Daily Jeffersonian (A) (C)
Canton The Canton Repository (A) (C)
Carey The Progressor Times (A) (C)
Carrollton Free Press Standard (A) (C)
Celina The Daily Standard (A) (C)
Centerville Centerville-Bellbrook Times (A) (C)
Chagrin Falls Chagrin Valley Times (A) (C)
Chillicothe Chillicothe Gazette (A) (C)
Cincinnati Cincinnati Business Courier (A) (C)
Cincinnati Cincinnati Call and Post (A) (C)
Cincinnati Cincinnati City Beat (A) (C)
Cincinnati Cincinnati Enquirer (A) (C)
Circleville The Circleville Herald (A) (C)
Cleveland All Around Cleveland (A) (C)
Cleveland Cleveland Free Times (A) (C)
Cleveland Cleveland Scene (A) (C)
Cleveland Crain's Cleveland Business (A) (C)
Cleveland Sun Newspapers (A) (C)
Cleveland The Daily Legal News (A) (C)
Cleveland The Plain Dealer (A) (C)
Columbus Business First (A) (C)
Columbus Columbus Alive (A) (C)
Columbus Columbus Dispatch (A) (C)
Columbus Suburban News Publications (A) (C)
Columbus The Columbus Post (A) (C)
Columbus The Other Paper (A) (C)
Columbus The Source (A) (C)
Columbus ThisWeek Newspapers (A) (C)
Coshocton Coshocton Tribune (A) (C)
Dayton Dayton Business Journal (A) (C)
Dayton Dayton Daily News (A) (C)
Dayton Wright-Patterson Skywrighter (A) (C)
Defiance The Crescent-News (A) (C)
Delaware The Delaware Gazette (A) (C)
Delphos The Daily Herald (A) (C)
East Liverpool The Review (A) (C)
Eaton Register-Herald (A) (C)
Elyria The Chronicle-Telegram (A) (C)
Englewood Englewood Independent (A) (C)
Enon Enon Messenger (A) (C)
Fairborn Fairborn Daily Herald (A) (C)
Fairfield Fairfield Echo (A) (C)
Findlay The Courier (A) (C)
Fostoria Fostoria Focus (A) (C)
Fostoria Review Times (A) (C)
Fremont Fremont News-Messenger (A) (C)
Gallipolis Gallipolis Daily Tribune (A) (C)
Georgetown News Democrat (A) (C)
Granville The Granville Sentinel (A) (C)
Greenville The Daily Advocate (A) (C)
Hamilton Journal-News (A) (C)
Hicksville News-Tribune Online! (A) (C)
Hillsboro Times-Gazette (A) (C)
Hubbard The Review Newspapers (A) (C)
Huber Heights Huber Heights Courier (A) (C)
Ironton Ironton Tribune (A) (C)
Jackson Times-Journal (A) (C)
Kenton Kenton Times (A) (C)
Kettering Kettering-Oakwood Times (A) (C)
Lancaster Eagle Gazette (A) (C)
Lebanon The Western Star (A) (C)
Lima Lima News (A) (C)
Lisbon The Morning Journal (A) (C)
Logan Logan Daily News (A) (C)
London The Madison Press (A) (C)
Lorain The Morning Journal (A) (C)
Mansfield News Journal (A) (C)
Maple Heights Maple Heights Press (A) (C)
Marietta Marietta Times (A) (C)
Marion The Marion Star (A) (C)
Martins Ferry The Times Leader (A) (C)
Marysville Marysville Journal-Tribune (A) (C)
Mason Pulse-Journal (A) (C)
Massillon The Independent (A) (C)
McConnelsville Morgan County Herald (A) (C)
Medina Medina County News (A) (C)
Middletown Middletown Journal (A) (C)
Millbury The Press (A) (C)
Mount Vernon Mount Vernon News (A) (C)
Napoleon Northwest Signal (A) (C)
New Carlisle New Carlisle Sun (A) (C)
New London New London Record (A) (C)
New London The Firelands Farmer (A) (C)
New Philadelphia The Times Reporter (A) (C)
Newark The Advocate (A) (C)
Norwalk Norwalk Reflector (A) (C)
Ottawa Putnam County Sentinel (A) (C)
Oxford The Oxford Press (A) (C)
Pataskala The Pataskala Standard (A) (C)
Paulding The Paulding County Progress (A) (C)
Perrysburg Messenger Journal (A) (C)
Pickerington Pickerington Times Sun (A) (C)
Piqua Piqua Daily Call (A) (C)
Pomeroy Pomeroy Daily Sentinel (A) (C)
Port Clinton News Herald (A) (C)
Port Clinton The Beacon (A) (C)
Portsmouth The Portsmouth Times (A) (C)
Ravenna The Record-Courier (A) (C)
Ripley The Ripley Bee (A) (C)
Rossford Rossford Record Journal (A) (C)
Saint Marys St. Marys Evening Leader (A) (C)
Salem Salem News (A) (C)
Sandusky Huron County Morning Journal (A) (C)
Sandusky Sandusky Register (A) (C)
Shelby The Daily Globe (A) (C)
Sidney Sidney Daily News (A) (C)
Springboro Springboro Sun (A) (C)
Springfield Springfield News-Sun (A) (C)
Steubenville The Herald-Star (A) (C)
Stow Record Pub. Co.Newspapers (A) (C)
Struthers Hometown Journal (A) (C)
Sunbury The Sunbury News (A) (C)
Tiffin The Advertiser-Tribune (A) (C)
Tipp City Tipp City Herald (A) (C)
Tipp City Tipp City Independent Voice (A) (C)
Toledo La Prensa (A) (C)
Toledo Point & Shoreland Journal (A) (C)
Toledo Toledo Blade (A) (C)
Toledo Toledo City Paper (A) (C)
Toledo Toledo Free Press (A) (C)
Troy Troy Daily News (A) (C)
Upper Sandusky Daily Chief-Union (A) (C)
Urbana Urbana Daily Citizen (A) (C)
Van Wert Times-Bulletin (A) (C)
Van Wert Van Wert Independent (A) (C)
Van Wert VWTimes.com (A) (C)
Vandalia Vandalia Drummer News (A) (C)
Wapakoneta Wapakoneta Daily News (A) (C)
Warren Tribune Chronicle (A) (C)
Washington CH Record Herald (A) (C)
Waverly Pike County News Watchman (A) (C)
West Milton West Milton Record (A) (C)
West Union The People's Defender (A) (C)
West Unity Advance Reporter (A) (C)
Westlake Westlife (A) (C)
Willard Times-Junction (A) (C)
Willoughby Lake County Business Journal (A) (C)
Willoughby The News-Herald (A) (C)
Wilmington News-Journal (A) (C)
Wooster The Daily Record (A) (C)
Xenia Xenia Gazette (A) (C)
Yellow Springs Yellow Springs News (A) (C)
Youngstown Buckeye Review (A) (C)
Youngstown The Business Journal (A) (C)
Youngstown The Metro Monthly (A) (C)
Youngstown Vindicator Online (A) (C)
Zanesville Times Recorder (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Bluffton College The Witmarsum
Bowling Green BG News
Capitol Univ The Chimes
Case Western Reserve The Observer
Cleveland St Univ The Cleveland Stater
College of Wooster The Wooster Voice
Kent State Digital Kent Stater
Marietta College The Marcolian
Miami Univ-Oxford The Miami Student
Oberlin College The Oberlin Review
Ohio State The Lantern
Ohio State The Observer
Ohio Univ The Post On The Web
Univ of Akron The Buchtelite
Univ of Cincinnati The News Record
Univ of Dayton Flyer News
Univ of Toledo The Collegian
Wesleyan Univ The Transcript
Wright State The Guardian
Xavier Univ Xavier Newswire
Youngstown The Jambar

********

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 6 part compendium, posted in full at OpEdNews.com---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville,Tuscaloosa, Orlando
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station,New Haven,San Antonio,Columbus,Las Vegas,Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

********

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

Win the Battle for Nebraska's Editorial Pages with this Amazing "Live" List of Newspapers

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:28:51 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for NEBRASKA's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com; NEBRASKA'S NEWSPAPERS, Taken from this "LIVE URL": http://www.usnpl.com/NEnews.php

[plus six part OpEdNews Compendium of Major Editorial Page Endorsements Thus Far]

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Alliance Alliance Times-Herald (A) (C)
Ashland The Ashland Gazette (A) (C)
Aurora Aurora News-Register (A) (C)
Beatrice The Daily Sun (A) (C)
Bellevue BellevueLeader.com (A) (C)
Blair The Enterprise (A) (C)
Broken Bow Custer County Chief (A) (C)
Burwell Burwell Tribune (A) (C)
Columbus Columbus Telegram (A) (C)
Cozad Tri-City Tribune (A) (C)
Fremont Fremont Tribune (A) (C)
Gordon Sheridan County Journal Star (A) (C)
Gothenburg Gothenburg Times (A) (C)
Grand Island Daily Independent (A) (C)
Hastings Hastings Tribune (A) (C)
Hyannis Grant County News (A) (C)
Imperial The Imperial Republican (A) (C)
Kearney Kearney Daily Hub (A) (C)
Kimball Western Nebraska Observer (A) (C)
Lexington Lexington Clipper-Herald (A) (C)
Lincoln Lincoln Journal Star (A) (C)
McCook McCook Daily Gazette (A) (C)
Mullen Hooker County Tribune (A) (C)
Nebraska City Nebraska City News Press (A) (C)
Norfolk Norfolk Daily News (A) (C)
North Platte North Platte Bulletin (A) (C)
North Platte North Platte Telegraph (A) (C)
Omaha Omaha Reader (A) (C)
Omaha Omaha-World Herald (A) (C)
Ord Ord Quiz (A) (C)
Papillion The Times (A) (C)
Ralston Ralston Recorder (A) (C)
Scottsbluff Scottsbluff Star-Herald (A) (C)
Seward Seward County Independent (A) (C)
Sidney Sidney Sun Telegraph (A) (C)
South Sioux City Dakota County Star (A) (C)
Superior Superior Publishing Newspapers (A) (C)
Tekamah Midwest Messenger (A) (C)
Wahoo Wahoo Newspaper (A) (C)
Wauneta The Wauneta Breeze (A) (C)
Waverly The News (A) (C)
West Point West Point News (A) (C)
York News Times (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Creighton Univ The Creightonian Online
Doane College The Doane Line
Univ of Nebraska Daily Nebraskan Online
Univ of Nebraska The Gateway
Wesleayn Univ Reveille Online

__________________________________________________________

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 6 part compendium, posted in full at OpEdNews.com--->>

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

*********

Endorsements 5: Cleveland, Austin, St.Pete, Gainesville,Tuscaloosa, Orlando
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-5-Cleveland-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-341.html

*********

ENDORSEMENTS 6: College Station,New Haven,San Antonio,Columbus,Las Vegas,Lexington KY

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ENDORSEMENTS-6-College-St-by-Stephen-Fox-081020-511.html

*********

If your time permits, please TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

Win the Battle for NORTH DAKOTA's Editorial Pages with this Amazing "Live" List of Newspapers

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:13:43 EDT

There's still time to win the battle for NORTH DAKOTA's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com; OpEdNews Compendium of Major Endorsements Thus Far

Taken from this "LIVE URL":

http://www.usnpl.com/ndnews.php

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Ashley Ashley Tribune (A) (C)
Beulah Beulah Beacon (A) (C)
Bismarck Bismarck Tribune (A) (C)
Bismarck Farm & Ranch Guide (A) (C)
Center Center Republican (A) (C)
Crosby The Journal (A) (C)
Devils Lake The Daily Journal (A) (C)
Dickinson The Dickinson Press (A) (C)
Edgeley Edgeley Mail (A) (C)
Fargo The Forum (A) (C)
Finley Steele County Press (A) (C)
Grand Forks Grand Forks Herald (A) (C)
Harvey The Herald-Press (A) (C)
Hazen Hazen Star (A) (C)
Hebron Hebron Herald (A) (C)
Jamestown The Jamestown Sun (A) (C)
Kenmare Kenmare News (A) (C)
Lisbon Ransom County Gazette (A) (C)
Minot Minot Daily News (A) (C)
Napoleon Napoleon Homestead (A) (C)
New Town New Town News (A) (C)
Parshall Mountrail County Record (A) (C)
Underwood Underwood News (A) (C)
Valley City Times-Record (A) (C)
Wahpeton Wahpeton Daily News (A) (C)
Washburn Leader News (A) (C)
Watford City McKenzie County Farmer (A) (C)
West Fargo West Fargo Pioneer (A) (C)
Williston Williston Daily Herald (A) (C)

College Newspapers
North Dakota State NDSU Spectrum
Univ ND Grand Forks The Digital Student

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 4 part compendium---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

Win the Battle for Montana's Editorial Pages with this Amazing "Live" List of Newspapers

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:00:50 EDT

There's still time to win Montana's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com; OpEdNews Compendium of Major Endorsements Thus Far

Taken from this "LIVE URL":

http://www.usnpl.com/mtnews.phphttp://www.usnpl.com/mtnews.php

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Belgrade Belgrade News (A) (C)
Bigfork Bigfork Eagle (A) (C)
Billings Billings Gazette (A) (C)
Billings The Billings Outpost (A) (C)
Bozeman Bozeman Daily Chronicle (A) (C)
Browning Glacier Reporter (A) (C)
Butte The Montana Standard (A) (C)
Chester Liberty County Times (A) (C)
Choteau Choteau Acantha (A) (C)
Columbia Falls Hungry Horse News (A) (C)
Conrad The Independent-Observer (A) (C)
Cut Bank Cut Bank Pioneer Press (A) (C)
Eureka Tobacco Valley News (A) (C)
Glasgow Glasgow Courier (A) (C)
Great Falls Great Falls Tribune (A) (C)
Hamilton Ravalli Republic (A) (C)
Havre Havre Daily News (A) (C)
Helena Helena Independent (A) (C)
Helena Queen City News (A) (C)
Huson Clark Fork Chronicle (A) (C)
Kalispell Flathead Beacon (A) (C)
Kalispell The Daily Inter Lake (A) (C)
Laurel Laurel Outlook (A) (C)
Lewistown Lewistown News-Argus (A) (C)
Libby The Western News (A) (C)
Livingston Livingston Enterprise (A) (C)
Miles City Miles City Star (A) (C)
Missoula Missoula Independent (A) (C)
Missoula Missoulian (A) (C)
Pablo Char-Koosta News (A) (C)
Plains The Veterans Voice of MT (A) (C)
Red Lodge Carbon County News Online (A) (C)
Shelby The Shelby Promoter (A) (C)
Sidney Sidney Herald-Leader (A) (C)
Stevensville The Bitterroot Star (A) (C)
Townsend Townsend Star (A) (C)
West Yellowstone West Yellowstone News (A) (C)
Whitefish Whitefish Pilot (A) (C)
Wolf Point The Herald-News (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Univ of Montana Montana Kaimin

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 4 part compendium---

Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators, explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you, Stephen Fox Founder, New Millennium Fine Art Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe, NM

Win Missouri's Editorial Page Battle with this Amazing Free List from USNPL.com

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:48:25 EDT

There's still time to win Missouri's Editorial Pages: Please use this list at usnpl.com; OpEdNews Compendium of Major Endorsements Thus Far

taken from this "LIVE URL": http://www.usnpl.com/monews.php

Newspapers
Click ( A ) for Newspaper address
Click ( C ) for County summary

Ashland Boone County Journal (A) (C)
Bethany Republican-Clipper (A) (C)
Bolivar Bolivar Herald-Free Press (A) (C)
Boonville Daily News (A) (C)
Bowling Green Bowling Green Times (A) (C)
Branson Branson Courier (A) (C)
Branson The Branson News (A) (C)
Brookfield Linn County Leader (A) (C)
Buffalo Buffalo Reflex (A) (C)
California California Democrat (A) (C)
Camdenton Lake Sun Leader (A) (C)
Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian (A) (C)
Carthage The Carthage Press (A) (C)
Caruthersville Democrat Argus (A) (C)
Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune (A) (C)
Columbia Columbia Daily Tribune (A) (C)
Columbia Columbia Missourian (A) (C)
Cuba Cuba Free Press (A) (C)
Dexter The Daily Statesman (A) (C)
El Dorado Springs El Dorado Springs Sun (A) (C)
Eldon Eldon Advertiser (A) (C)
Eldon Vernon Publishing Newspapers (A) (C)
Ellisville WestNews Magazine (A) (C)
Elsberry Elsberry Democrat (A) (C)
Eminence Shannon County Current Wave (A) (C)
Fulton Fulton Sun (A) (C)
Gainesville Ozark County Times (A) (C)
Gallatin Gallatin North Missourian (A) (C)
Gladstone Dispatch Tribune (A) (C)
Hamilton Caldwell County News (A) (C)
Hannibal Hannibal Courier-Post (A) (C)
Harrisonville Democrat-Missourian (A) (C)
Hermann Hermann Advertiser Courier (A) (C)
Houston Houston Herald (A) (C)
Independence The Examiner (A) (C)
Jackson Cash-Book Journal (A) (C)
Jamesport Tri-County Weekly (A) (C)
Jefferson City Jefferson City News Tribune (A) (C)
Joplin Joplin Business Journal (A) (C)
Joplin Joplin Globe (A) (C)
Joplin Joplin Independent (A) (C)
Kansas City Business Journal (A) (C)
Kansas City Kansas City Star (A) (C)
Kansas City PitchWeekly (A) (C)
Kennett Daily Dunklin Democrat (A) (C)
Kirksville Daily Express (A) (C)
Lamar Lamar Democrat (A) (C)
Laurie Highway Five Beacon (A) (C)
Lebanon Lebanon Daily Record (A) (C)
Lees Summit Lee's Summit Journal (A) (C)
Louisiana Louisiana Press Journal (A) (C)
Macon Chronicle-Herald (A) (C)
Marshall The Marshall Democrat-News (A) (C)
Marshfield Marshfield Mail (A) (C)
Maryville Nodaway News Leader (A) (C)
Memphis Memphis Democrat (A) (C)
Mexico The Mexico Ledger (A) (C)
Moberly Monitor-Index/Evening Democrat (A) (C)
Monett The Monett Times (A) (C)
Monroe City The Lake Gazette (A) (C)
Mound City Mound City News (A) (C)
Neosho Neosho Daily News (A) (C)
Nevada Nevada Daily Mail (A) (C)
New Haven New Haven Leader (A) (C)
Nixa Nixa News-Enterprise (A) (C)
Ozark Christian County Headliner (A) (C)
Paris The Monroe County Appeal (A) (C)
Park Hills The Daily Journal (A) (C)
Perryville Republic-Monitor (A) (C)
Piedmont Wayne County Journal-Banner (A) (C)
Pineville McDonald County Press (A) (C)
Platte City Platte County Citizen (A) (C)
Platte City The Landmark Newspaper (A) (C)
Poplar Bluff Daily American Republic (A) (C)
Richland Richland Mirror (A) (C)
Richmond Richmond Daily News (A) (C)
Rock Port Atchison County Mail (A) (C)
Rolla Rolla Daily News (A) (C)
Saint Joseph St. Joseph News-Press (A) (C)
Saint Louis Chinese American News (A) (C)
Saint Louis St. Louis American Newspaper (A) (C)
Saint Louis St. Louis Business Journal (A) (C)
Saint Louis St. Louis Post-Dispatch (A) (C)
Saint Louis The Riverfront Times (A) (C)
Saint Louis The Suburban Journals (A) (C)
Saint Louis The Vital VOICE (A) (C)
Saint Robert Pulaski County Democrat (A) (C)
Sainte Genevieve The Herald (A) (C)
Sedalia Sedalia Democrat (A) (C)
Sedalia Sedalia News-Journal (A) (C)
Sikeston Standard Democrat (A) (C)
Springfield Community Free Press (A) (C)
Springfield News-Leader (A) (C)
Springfield Springfield Business Journal (A) (C)
Steelville Star - Mirror (A) (C)
Stover Morgan County Press (A) (C)
Sullivan Sullivan News (A) (C)
Sullivan The Sullivan Journal (A) (C)
Tipton Tipton Times (A) (C)
Troy Lincoln County Journal (A) (C)
Tuscumbia Miller County Autogram-Sentinel (A) (C)
Vandalia Vandalia Leader (A) (C)
Versailles Versailles Leader-Statesman (A) (C)
Warrensburg digitalBURG.com (A) (C)
Washington Washington Missourian (A) (C)
Washington WashMo.com (A) (C)
Waynesville The Daily Guide (A) (C)
Webster Groves Times Newspapers (A) (C)
West Plains Daily Quill (A) (C)

College Newspapers
Drury University The Drury Mirror
Missouri Southern St. Univ The Chart
Missouri St. Univ The Standard
Missouri Western Griffon News
Missouri-Rolla Miner
Northwest Missouri NW Missourian Daily
Southwest Baptist Omnibus Online
St. Louis Univ University News
SW Missouri State Southwest Standard
Truman State New Media Index
Univ of Missouri The Current
Univ of Missouri The Greek Chronicle
Univ of Missouri The Maneater
Univ of Missouri University News
Washington Univ Student Life Online
Webster Univ The Webster Journal

Editorial Page Victories clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 4
part compendium---Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston,
Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake,
Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacramento, Kansas City (4 former Red States)

OpEdNews has been the site of choice to post the growing list of major and
minor newspaper endorsements for Obama. The Editorials are quoted generally
in full, with interspliced commentaries from major editors and commentators,
explaining what is behind the Editorials.

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel
Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune,
San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick,
Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/EndorspLements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston
Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO COMMENT AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS, which become a
vital part of a larger on-going dialogue.

Thank you,

Stephen Fox
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
Contributing Editor New Millennium Fine Art
Santa Fe, NM

OBAMA ENDORSEMENTS, CHAPTER 5 Cleveland Plain Dealer, Austin American Statesman, Illinois (Rockford and Arlington Heights), New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, Raleigh Observer, St.Petersburg Times, Gainesville Sun, Tuscaloosa News

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:25:34 EDT

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER:

Plain Dealer endorses Obama for president
Posted by The editors October 18, 2008

Members of The Plain Dealer's editorial board voted on this endorsement. They are Publisher Terrance C.Z. Egger, Editor Susan Goldberg, Editorial Page Director Brent W. Larkin, Deputy Editorial Page Director Kevin O'Brien and Associate Editors Sharon Broussard, Christopher Evans, Joe Frolik and Elizabeth Sullivan.

After eight years of George W. Bush, America needs a change in direction and a change in tone.

It needs a president who understands that, yes, the world can be dangerous, but it is also complex. That the United States cannot defend its freedom by abandoning its principles. That it cannot ignore its allies one day and demand their help the next.

It needs a president who knows that optimism, not fear, defines America. That tax cuts and deregulation alone are not an economic strategy. That Washington cannot sit idle when a great city is devastated by nature or when millions of hardworking Americans are devastated by losing their homes, their jobs, their health care.

It needs a president who will listen and learn, and not confuse loyalty with competence. Who will ask Americans to sacrifice in the service of their country, not their party or self-interest. Who will be the leader Bush promised eight years ago -- a unifier, not a divider.

Barack Obama can be that leader. He is young and obviously cannot match the government experience of his Republican opponent, John McCain. But from the moment he electrified the 2004 Democratic Convention by declaring that America's shared values must trump its racial, religious and ideological divisions, Obama has demonstrated uncommon grace, confidence and intelligence.

Obama has challenged Americans to dream and to hope, to be realistic in the face of great problems and to trust in one another. To minorities and other Americans on the margins, he offers living proof that this nation can fulfill its ideals. To the world, he offers quite literally a different face, one that embodies America's diversity and boundless opportunity.

That is a recipe for the fresh leadership this nation desperately needs. And it is why we urge his election as the 44th president of the United States.

Like you, we have watched this presidential campaign unfold for almost two full years. We have listened to the candidates, read their position papers, studied their backgrounds. We have watched them debate. We have seen them react when things were going well and when they were not. We have seen them choose running mates who could be asked to lead this nation on a moment's notice.

We find much to admire about both Obama and McCain. Obama's background is an only-in-America amalgam of Kansas and Kenya, Hawaii and Indonesia, Harvard Yard and Hyde Park. McCain is every bit as much a biographer's dream: a son and grandson of admirals who embraced their tradition of service, then forged his own through war, the Hanoi Hilton and 26 years in Congress. Traveling very different paths, each man has come to know and to benefit from the best of this country.

Having endorsed McCain and Obama in their respective party primaries, we have little doubt that either could serve capably as president. Certainly, either would be a huge improvement over the incumbent.

We also believe that either would govern more effectively and lead more inclusively than they have campaigned these last two months. They had better, because this fall has degenerated into a disappointing cacophony of attack ads and banality.

McCain has shamelessly exaggerated Obama's supposedly radical ties and tried to place him far outside the political mainstream. Obama has twisted McCain's record beyond recognition and attempted to tie him to Republican ideologues he has fought his whole career.

Such campaigning insults the American people and degrades those who engage in it. Voters who hunger for straight talk about the most frightening economy in 70 years, or who long for hope in the face of two grinding wars, deserve better.

We endorse Obama, knowing full well that doing so involves some risk.

If he is elected on Nov. 4, he will govern with a Congress dominated by fellow Democrats. That should help him fulfill his promises to reform health care, invest in green energy and raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. But if a President Obama believes he can simply impose his will -- or even worse, must buckle to the will of doctrinaire congressional barons -- he may fall prey to the one-party hubris that so damaged both the Bush presidency and the GOP brand. Obama will have to be tough enough to push back if Democrats on Capitol Hill try to draw him into the mindless partisanship he has often and rightly renounced. Polarization is a bad way to campaign; it's a worse way to govern.

Those who have known Obama the longest say he instinctively seeks win-win solutions and understands that there usually is more than one way to reach a worthy goal. Let's hope so. He has an ambitious agenda, but will inherit a federal deficit approaching $1 trillion, as well as long-term financial obligations that could cripple future generations. He'll have to make harder choices than he has been willing to acknowledge in this campaign.

If they had not become bitter rivals, Obama might have found a useful ally and role model in McCain, who has spent a lifetime marching to the beat of a different drum. In the Senate, McCain has challenged his party on immigration, taxes and torture, campaign finance and pork-barrel spending. He supported Bush's ill-informed decision to invade Iraq, then quickly became a loud critic of the president's equally flawed strategy to win the peace.

We salute McCain as an exemplary citizen and a Washington rebel. But as a presidential nominee, McCain has been a disappointment. He was late to understand the primacy of economic pain. He has failed even to define a rationale for a McCain presidency. Experience is useful, but it's not vision.

In their first debate, McCain haughtily said that Obama did not understand the difference between strategy and tactics. His campaign suggests that he doesn't, either.

Take his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. McCain seemed too caught up in the game-changing possibilities of teaming with a woman reformer to scratch the smiling surface. Had he, McCain might have realized that Palin is utterly unprepared for the job he offered -- let alone the one that might fall to her. His trust in her undermines our trust in him.

Trust is essential to the presidency. Americans want to believe that the chief executive understands their lives, will protect their interests and will not compromise their safety. They want a president who represents what America can be, not what it has been.

Electing any president involves a leap of faith -- a risk. Such is the power of the office.

For a country in need of a new direction and a new tone, Barack Obama is a risk worth taking.
______________________________________________

ROCKFORD REGISTER (ILLINOIS) STAR:

Our pick for president: Obama
Posted Oct 18, 2008 @ 03:43 PM

With nothing on a firm footing -- not the economy, not the war, not health care -- the leader of the free world should be just that: a leader.

In endorsing Obama over Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain, we're choosing a man who we've come to know as an earnest, smart and, yes, charismatic politician who has visited this Editorial Board several times.

We know the Obama who doesn't just give you his opinion but leads you through his thought process. He's confident but deliberative. He's certain but deferential. If those qualities seem to be in conflict, you don't know Obama.

We know the Obama whose grace under pressure is a tonic for the my-way-or-the-highway style of governing that isn't just getting old. It's getting dangerous. We are in a global economic crisis that demands cooperation.

We know the Obama whose allure doesn't rest in the size of his crowds or the color of his skin, but in his superb judgment, his careful reasoning, his measured temperament. He redefines dignity, both the dignity he possesses and the dignity he allows other people -- even when (especially when) he disagrees with them.

For the past eight years, we've seen the government spend money it didn't have, manipulate intelligence to wage a war with unclear goals, trample on privacy and leave pirates to raid our financial institutions.

When Obama says he can change that, we believe it's more than campaign rhetoric. We believe he can make it happen because Obama is the kind of man who wants the same things that mainstream Americans want: affordable and accessible health care, a phased withdrawal for our soldiers in Iraq, a foreign policy that repairs damage to our international reputation and restores confidence in our ability to lead the world.

On the economy, we need someone suited to take us through unchartered territory. We are in scary times. Economists predict a recession deeper than any in recent memory. The government has taken extraordinary steps to stop the free fall on Wall Street. We need a steady hand to guide us.

Unfortunately, steady is not an adjective that can be applied to Sen. McCain. The McCain we have seen in this campaign is not the man -- not the politician -- we have admired all these years. He's not a maverick; he's the puppet of reckless political advisers.

The McCain we have idolized for his heroism and his willingness to speak unpopular truths has become a desperate politician who is erratic, angry and unpredictable.

By choosing an unqualified and inexperienced running mate in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain has reinforced the belief he is not to be trusted. In a McCain presidency, the chances would be good the vice president could assume the presidency. McCain would be older than any man elected to a first term as president. Although he has proved resilient, he has been treated repeatedly for melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer.

We applaud him for releasing nearly 1,500 pages of medical records, but we still wonder where his head's at -- and we pine for the politician we thought we knew.

However, we do have some concerns, which were reflected in the 7-2 endorsement vote.

We wish Barack Obama had more experience. We wish he didn't seem so smitten with government solutions. We wish he could have waited to run for president so that his record spoke more forcefully for him.

Even so, he has had nearly 12 years in elected office, four years in the U.S. Senate and eight in the Illinois Senate. Comparing Palin's lack of experience to Obama's is just not fair. Nor is it fair to begrudge his background as a community organizer. That work gave him great faith in the ability of people to solve their own problems, if only given the resources.

Not much seems fair or decent this election. Both campaigns have waged assault on the truth; the recent presidential debate was remarkably personal and down and dirty. While McCain's campaign has been more negative, Obama has told some half truths about McCain's positions. And Obama disappointed when he backed away from federal financing of his campaign and a promise he made to accept the limitations that come with that financing.

Missteps are not characteristic for Obama. He strikes us mostly as a man who doesn't just mouth the rhetoric on renewal and change; it's in his DNA. Before he went to Capitol Hill, he was well-liked in Springfield because of his knack for seeking common ground. He knows how to listen and he knows how to disagree. "If I'm clear on my principles," he said in 2004, "then I have the luxury of being courteous."

If there's any quality this country is hungering for, it's courtesy. That's also a hallmark of Obama's running mate, the seasoned and capable Sen. Joe Biden. If anything should happen to Obama, Biden -- unlike Sarah Palin -- is ready to be president.

We ask readers the same thing Obama asked delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 2004: "Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?"

In America, hope has no ceiling for deposit or withdrawal. It's our ultimate insurance policy and our only safe investment. In this election, Barack Obama is the candidate who understands a simple calculus -- hope equals change.

__________________________________

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS DAILY HERALD CHICAGO'S LARGEST SUBURBAN DAILY

For president: Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois
Daily Herald Editorial Board
Published: 10/19/2008 12:02 AM
In almost every political campaign, as the candidates go before the voters, they describe the election as one of the most important in history. Usually, that overused description is little more than hyperbole, flattering rhetoric meant to engage the voters.

This election, it is actually true.

This year, our foreign policy is in disarray, our country is polarized, our politics is unduly partisan and out of touch, and our economy is on the brink of the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression.

To respond to those challenges, the nation needs a confident change in direction. We believe Sen. Barack Obama is best suited by temperament, judgment and vision to bring about that change, and we strongly endorse Illinois' favorite son for the presidency.

We don't oppose Sen. John McCain of Arizona. We endorsed him in the Republican primary, and we believe he is a true war hero who possesses many good attributes.

But Obama has the potential to offer more. He can be, as we said in January, a transcendent figure on the landscape of history.

He has, we believe, two great talents: A talent to inspire great masses of people, to stir the imagination and provide a call to action. And a talent for partnership rather than polarization, a genuine respect for disparate views that helps him see the country more as a whole than as a collection of interest groups.

His experience is limited, it's true. But his judgment, insight and calm stand him ready to lead the country and ready to manage the government. He, better than McCain, saw the engagement in Iraq for the mistake it was to become. He, better than McCain, provided reassurance when the financial crisis dawned.

This is a unique public servant, our Sen. Obama. He is practical, common sensed, inclusive and solutions-oriented.

He has a chance to be a great president. Not just the country's first black president, a notable achievement for him and for the nation. But also a great president.

He offers a new kind of politics. A politics that breaks down the old partisan walls. A politics that strives to bring people together. A politics of hope.

And we all need hope these days.

The legacy of George Bush, abetted by an enabling Congress during his first six years, will cast a heavy shadow over the next presidency.

An unnecessary war in Iraq. A so-far bungled effort to deprive al-Qaida of its base in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A failure to secure our ports and our borders. Shameful acquiescence to torture and prisoner abuse abroad. Dangerous violations of civil protections at home. A breathtaking national debt. Unaddressed challenges with energy and climate change. Deteriorating infrastructure across America. Health care that's out of reach to millions and sorely expensive to those who touch it. Threats to baby boomer retirements. So many mortgages in default that the banks can't foreclose on them all. The list goes on.

The ineptitude, corruption and wrongheadedness that have poisoned America's ability to address these challenges are not the work of one man, but they do add up to one disastrous presidency.

No wonder McCain spends half his energy running against the record of his own party.

Unfortunately, he can't run fast enough. He was an early cheerleader to go to war in Iraq. He proposes to continue the spend-and-borrow policies of Bush. Despite his age and history of serious health issues, he selected as his backup a person who is disastrously ignorant of national and international issues.

McCain's campaign does not offer the promise or hope this country needs.

Barack Obama's does.

_____________________________________

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Daily News endorses Obama for President:

He has the promise to renew America at home and abroad
Updated Sunday, October 19th 2008, 2:22 AM

The need for a fresh start in America has grown markedly in the two years of this presidential campaign, and became imperative as the crippled financial system punishes workers, families and retirees in the country.

The U.S. is in want of leadership that repairs a damaged economy, restores faith in government as an engine for the common good and returns competence to the White House after the spectacular failures of the Bush administration.

Barack Obama holds the greater promise of accomplishing the mission than does John McCain. The Daily News endorses the 47-year-old Democrat, the first black American to win a major party nomination, for President.

Even his detractors agree Obama is an extraordinary politician. His campaign elevated a freshman senator to preeminence with a message that he represents a chance to make fundamental change in Washington.

Gifted in oratory and gracefully bearing the mantle of history, Obama stood as the repudiation of the record of George W. Bush. No one capitalized on the blunders of the last eight years more skillfully than he did, while aligning a liberal Democratic agenda with the country's decided shift away from the status quo.

Obama has been called audacious, and he certainly is. But his confidence is supported by both a high intelligence and a clear-eyed pragmatism, qualities that enabled him to best more established competitors - now to stand within reach of breaking America's ultimate racial barrier.

A brilliant mind combined with practicality would well serve any President, and the reserves shown by Obama suggest he would bring nimbleness and judgment to the Oval Office. So does his crucial vow to reach across the aisle for solutions frozen in partisan gridlock.

Obama has the potential to reinvigorate a nation fed up with the dysfunctional behavior of its leaders. But he would face tests - deciding, not speaking; governing, not campaigning - that dwarf any he encountered in his slim 12 years in the Illinois Legislature and the U.S. Senate.

The challenges are of historic proportions and growing.

The American standard of living is threatened with severe erosion from the global financial crisis. There's a war in Iraq to wind responsibly down, and there's a war in Afghanistan that demands smart new strategies. Iran is defiantly acquiring nuclear capability; Russia is flexing its muscles. Energy independence and global warming demand action.

And, never forget, the home shores must be protected.

The times call for boldness backed by expertise, not by ideology. We support Obama in the expectation that he would tap the brightest minds, regardless of political affiliation. He would need seasoned advice on every front, not least in adjusting from the rhetoric of a hasty Iraq withdrawal to the facts-on-the-ground duty of commander in chief.

We also expect that Obama would fulfill that oft-stated pledge to bring bipartisanship to the White House in forging solutions that work. That spirit will be essential to engaging the gears of government on issues that cannot wait. What Obama gives up - and some of his ideas must be tossed or refocused - would strengthen a presidency dedicated to the welcome notion of advancing the interests of the average Joe and Jane.

John McCain is an outstanding U.S. senator and a man of character. His courage in the face of torture and imprisonment as a Navy flier in North Vietnam met the highest standards of honor.

Typical for McCain, he fought his way to winning the nomination of a resistant party, and the Republicans are the better for it. In what was often predicted to be a Democratic blowout, McCain has kept the contest competitive.

His strongest suits are foreign affairs and the military. Tough-minded on both, he was dead-on regarding Iraq. From the start, he advocated more boots on the ground so the military could provide security to the Iraqi people, not just topple Saddam Hussein. Then, in the war's darkest hours, he held fast against overwhelming opposition to urge a bigger troop deployment.

Thus was born the surge that opened the way for Iraqis to begin building a civil society and pointed America toward withdrawal by the next President - perhaps, ironically, Obama.

McCain's insistence on persevering in Iraq - and on getting it right - reflects a core belief in promoting U.S. interests with a wise use of America's assets, from ideals to arsenal.

He has complemented global savvy with walk-the-walk bipartisanship. Among the highlights were battles for immigration and campaign finance reform, as well as a readiness to attack pork-barrel spending by both parties.

McCain's misfortune is that he is the standard-bearer of a party whose leadership, starting at the top, ran the U.S. onto the rocks.

There is no question he would bring change - but not as much as is needed after a presidency that enriched the wealthy over the working and middle classes with excessive tax cuts; gorged on spending; failed to address America's energy needs and global warming; undermined the credibility of U.S. military power, and got blindsided by the Wall Street meltdown, thanks in part to deregulatory zeal.

With the latest poll showing that fully 90% of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the Republican Party has precious little credibility in laying claim to continued leadership. And the necessity of making a sharp break became all the more pressing with the sudden arrival of financial distress.

Unfortunately, a centerpiece of McCain's economic plan is an extension of Bush tax policy - a bad idea anytime, but horrible in these newly dire circumstances.

As the fates would have it, now is simply not the moment for this fine public servant.

Millions of Americans vest great hope in Barack Obama - and there is good reason why. It has been a long time since many have felt the government was in their corner. And here came an accomplished, fresh figure - a black man, at that - with plans for restoring the faith.

The agenda is sweeping, but the theme is clear. Whether on tax fairness or health care or the cost of college, Obama pushes the balance toward the working and middle classes and those farther down the ladder.

Still, reservations persist about specifics of his proposals.

On the international front, Obama faces tough calls regarding the war in Iraq. When he visited the country in July, Sunni leaders pleaded with him to drop the thought of pulling out before they and Shiite chiefs had forged working political relationships.

The Sunnis were right, because bringing the troops home prematurely could well unleash an upsurge in violence with disastrous consequences. Among them: an opening for Iran to play a dominant role in Iraq, the alienation of Sunni-led countries in the Mideast and a dramatic loss of credibility in Afghanistan.

Obama would have to recognize that combat troops must stay in Iraq at appropriate levels until the situation is resolved.

Domestically, Obama would have to shift to some more effective approaches while trimming sails to match fiscal realities.

It's a solid idea to raise the low tax rates enjoyed by the wealthy, but it would be counterproductive to increase capital gains levies. The first would boost revenue and fairness; the second would crimp investment.

Providing tax breaks to those at the low end is attractive, but Obama would achieve greater economic stimulus with aggressive spending on infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges and, especially, mass transit.

Enabling homeowners to get relief from mortgage debt in bankruptcy court, as Obama proposes, would further disrupt housing finance. But directing the government to buy up troubled mortgages would help stabilize housing prices and bail out families, not just Wall Street.

In sum, we are banking on practicality trumping political dogma in an Obama White House. The fantasy that the U.S. can move toward energy independence without fully committing to domestic drilling and nuclear power must be banished. The reality that America can't make strides toward universal health care without fiscal discipline elsewhere must sink in.

At this critical juncture, the nation must elect a President who will renew bipartisanship and hard-headed pragmatism to rescue America's standard of living, secure the country from global threats, whether of arms or of climate, and lay a foundation to meet 21st century challenges.

That is our hope for Barack Obama.

____________________________________________

The Orlando Sentinel

Oct. 19:

As the primary season began, the candidate who seemed best qualified to be that leader was Republican John McCain. But Mr. McCain then was a different candidate from the one before us now. He has abandoned positions we admired. He has reacted inconsistently, even haphazardly, to events. In making the most important decision of his campaign, he showed shockingly poor judgment.

In contrast to Mr. McCain, Democrat Barack Obama has exceeded our expectations during this campaign. He has demonstrated sound judgment and grace under pressure. Because we are now more confident in his ability to steer America through the rough waters ahead, the Orlando Sentinel is endorsing Barack Obama for president.

___

The (Raleigh) News & Observer

Obama on Oct. 19:

There is a crisis of spirit, and Barack Obama knows it. He has spoken to it with a call for change. His vision is not obscure, and not out of reach. And there is meaning in his words, from his pledge to realize universal health care to his promise to get the United States out of the mire of Iraq honorably, to his plan to restore economic stability and opportunity. His would be a government of thought before deed and of strength given by the people, not just exercised from above.

___________________________

AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN:

President: Obama answers call for change, hope, leadership

On taxes, on foreign policy, on questions of energy, Sen. Barack Obama shows a firm grasp on the problems and a solid grip on solutions
Sunday, October 19, 2008

Each of the two major presidential candidates fill the air with different words that all say "change," but only Sen. Barack Obama defines change clearly and positively.

It is a time of peril, both at home and abroad, and the nation needs the focused, energetic leadership Obama has projected and delivered since he announced his presidential candidacy in early 2007.

It's true that Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, is a relative newcomer. In making the national acquaintance, however, he not only has offered solid ideas but also rallied a mix of discipline and organization to propel him from long shot to the top of the ticket.

In the third and final debate last week, John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, tried to bait him into the gutter, but Obama refused to get down there. Political wisdom dictates that candidates who are attacked return double the fire directed at them. Obama responded calmly, defending himself but declining to respond in kind.

Now that's change.

A vote for Obama would be a vote for change on an array of fronts. Obviously, he would become the first U.S. citizen of color to hold the nation's highest office. But more important than his biracial bloodline are his ideas.

On taxes, on foreign policy, on energy and on health care, Obama shows a firm grasp on the problems and a solid grip on solutions.

Obama would not isolate our nation's enemies but talk to them. There is no dishonor in diplomacy, as President Nixon demonstrated when he went to China.

Obama, an opponent of the long, expensive war in Iraq, wants to withdraw troops from that country -- not a retreat but a phased withdrawal over 16 months. Iraqis want us out, and we should accommodate them as quickly as is practical. That would free up resources to confront the growing dangers in Afghanistan.

On energy production, McCain spotlights a false promise of cheap gasoline. He mentions renewable resources, but almost in passing. Obama concentrates his discussion of energy on moving the country beyond the talking stages of diversifying its energy sources and making that talk reality. Offshore drilling alone won't lower the price of gasoline immediately -- and maybe not ever.

We can't wait any longer to diversify the nation's energy production, and we can't base our energy future on pining for the long lost days of cheap gasoline.

On the economy, McCain offers warmed-over tax cuts and an economic policy that is contributing to the credit crisis that is rocking Wall Street and putting stress fissures on Main Street.

While McCain would continue tax cuts for the affluent, Obama's tax plan makes the much larger middle class -- the people on whose spending the economy relies -- the beneficiaries of tax cuts.

Now that's change.

Beyond the wonkism, however, is a fundamental question of who is best equipped to lead.

Truth be told, neither McCain nor Obama could be expected to deliver 100 percent of his agenda. What economic reality won't limit, the vagaries of getting legislation through Congress will.

McCain, whose heroic military service to the nation we enthusiastically salute, is a fellow who built a political career saying "no." He served two terms in the U.S. House before being elected to the Senate in 1986. His accomplishments are mixed, but the Washington he vilifies rubbed off on him. For example, his effort to bring about comprehensive immigration reform was truly a bold, bipartisan move. But it died. So he turned his back on it because a comprehensive approach is politically incorrect with his party's right wing?

McCain might have made a fine president once, but he is not what the country needs now.

What the country needs now is the bold energy of Obama, who is not saddled with Washington cynicism -- a leader who sees not roadblocks but highways.

Obama represents what we all profess to love about our country: an intelligent youngster who grew beyond his family's modest circumstances to earn an Ivy League education and eventually win a seat in the U.S. Senate and from there launch a bid for the presidency.

That experience makes him best suited to show the world that the United States is still the shining city on the hill that President Reagan envisioned.

Should he win office, Obama will need that sense of hope tempered by his calm resolve to restore confidence in the U.S. economy -- here and abroad -- as well as instill confidence in the nation's ability to conduct its foreign affairs with honor.

He will also need that strength to restrain fellow Democrats -- who have the potential to widen their majorities in both the House and Senate -- from drinking excessively from the fountain of power.

The country doesn't need another show of leadership staggering around drunk on authority.

Obama has demonstrated his toughness, his determination and his focus through the primaries and through a very personal general election campaign. The country will be in very capable hands in an Obama presidency.

___________________________________

St. Petersburg Times:

In Clinton, we see the past; in Obama, we see a fresh start. Clinton is a divisive political figure; Obama's appeal transcends racial and party lines. She exudes competence; he radiates optimism. She came to the campaign with a sense of entitlement; he came to it with a sense of possibilities. She can be evasive, even misleading; he can be refreshingly candid about his own shortcomings and his political mistakes. She represents business as usual in politics; he at least offers the hope of something better.

The Gainesville Sun:

As much as any candidate in either party, Obama has electrified audiences, engaged those who normally disdain politics and captured the imagination of younger Americans who need to be more engaged. The biracial candidate who rarely talks about race, he resonates the politics of hope and personifies the politics of change.

The Tuscaloosa News:

[H]e has leadership qualities beyond his years. He is a brilliant and persuasive speaker. He is a unifier who honestly hopes to break the capital's partisan gridlock. And while some of his rivals for the nomination have more years of experience, Obama has quickly learned the territory in his relatively short time in Washington.

Editorial Page Victories Clarify: Obama will win 2-1 in Electoral College! 4 part compendium: Endorsements at OpEdNews: Washington Post, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake,Philadelphia, Portland, Bangor, Sacram

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:56:46 EDT

Part I Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

*******

Part II Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Editorial-Page-Endorsement-by-Stephen-Fox-081017-544.html

********

Part III New Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Endorsements-Salt-Lake-Ci-by-Stephen-Fox-081018-476.html

********

More Obama Endorsements IV: Sacramento, Katie Couric, Malaysia, Houston Chronicle, Detroit, Waco Tx (sort of)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/More-Obama-Endorsements-IV-by-Stephen-Fox-081019-492.html

More Obama Endorsements: Salt Lake City Tribune, Bangor and Brunswick, Maine, Philadelphia, Miami, Portland, Kansas City: Please put these to good use!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:33:10 EDT

WHY ENDORSE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Stephen J. Winters, former Connecticut Post opinion editor:
   "Here are reasons why we endorse:
   * "to fulfill our obligation and responsibility as a constitutionally-
protected media enterprise to not only be a part of our communities but to
also help improve those communities.
   * "to offer information and perspective that voters can use in evaluating
candidates.
   * "to create dialogue with our readers.
   "Our endorsements are not made:
   * "to tell readers who they should vote for.
   * "to make a compact with any candidate.
   * "to figure out who's most likely to win a contest."

_______________________________________

Time magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel recently:

"During the 1936 presidential campaign, the Chicago Tribune, under its
archconservative owner, Colonel Robert McCormick, wholeheartedly endorsed
the candidacy of the Republican Alf Landon. The paper was so vehemently anti-
F.D.R. that 10 days before the election, switchboard operators at the
newspaper answered the phone by saying 'Hello. Chicago Tribune. Only 10 days
left to save the American way of life.' I confess that I've never quite
understood why newspapers endorse presidential candidates. Sure, I know the
history and the tradition, the fact that newspapers in the 18th and 19th
centuries were often affiliated with political parties, but why do they do
it now? Why do it at a time when the credibility and viability of the press
are at all-time lows? More important, why do it at a time when readers,
especially young readers, question the objectivity of newspapers in
particular and the media in general?"

BEHIND THE SCENES ON THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE'S ENDORSEMENT

In a column discussing the Chicago Tribune's historic endorsement of
Sen. Barack Obama for president, Paul Weingarten, a member of the paper's
editorial board, wrote on Friday:

"Of all the articles that appear in this newspaper, few are as mysterious
to readers as its presidential endorsements. Readers ask Tribune editorial
board members all the time how those decisions are reached. Was there a lot
of shouting? And finally, who really decided?

This year, with the Tribune's endorsement of its first Democrat, Sen. Barack
Obama, we expect even more questions. A lot of readers will be surprised by
the decision to endorse Obama. But maybe you don't know the Tribune as well
as you think.

So let us remind you of the paper's long record of independent thought, of
reporting - and sometimes making - history. Yes, the paper has stood for
Republican principles for a long time. In 1855, a young politician named
Abraham Lincoln wandered into the offices of the Tribune on Clark Street.
Lincoln handed over $4 for a subscription and complimented the new co-owner
and managing editor, Joseph Medill, on his stand against intolerance. 'I
didn't like it before you boys took hold of it,' he said of the Tribune."
___________________________________

The Salt Lake Tribune's endorsement policy explained by Editorial Page
Editor Vern Anderson: - "Utah's Independent Voice Since 1871":

We endorse candidates as a public service to our readers. We also believe
endorsements are part of our responsibility as a newspaper to enlighten,
inform and promote public dialogue. With the exception of the presidential
endorsement, which is scheduled to run on Sunday, they are based on face-to-
face meetings with each candidate and on our own research.

Our endorsements are not intended to tell people how to vote. Rather,
they reflect how the editorial board would vote, and why, if it had a
ballot. Most often our endorsements are based on positions we have taken
over time on a number of public policy issues. But not always. Sometimes we
see particular strengths in a candidate that are well-suited to the office,
even if we disagree with many of their views. We endorse both Democrats and
Republicans, sometimes heartily, sometimes not. As readers know, we are far
from infallible. We've made several endorsements we'd take back if we could.

_________________________

BRUNSWICK MAINE TIMES RECORD: Obama for President
letters@TimesRecord.Com
10/17/2008

His vision for reuniting this fragmented nation, not audacity, makes Barack
Obama the best hope to lead the United States for the next four years. His
perspectives on the challenges that will confront the next president reflect
the intelligence, wisdom and modernity required to position America to
thrive in the 21st century.

Obama's action plan for addressing the critical issues that the 44th U.S.
president will encounter on Jan. 21, 2009, offers more depth and innovation
than that of his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain.

In his bearing and his thinking, Obama better reflects the long-held — but
recently tarnished — American values of equality, justice, fairness and
civil liberty. He recognizes that government affects everyday Americans'
lives, so policies should be crafted to benefit the middle class directly
rather than indirectly via crumb-spreading by those who have been allowed to
consolidate wealth and power during the Bush administration.

On key issues, here are capsule summaries of why Obama would be a better
president than McCain:

Economy: Obama's proposed tax restructuring would begin reversing the
devastating impact of the Bush tax cuts on the federal budget and provide
direct relief to workers, whose wages have stagnated. He acknowledges that
war saps the economy.

Conversely, McCain continues to hold fast to the philosophy that maintaining
tax breaks for the nation's wealthiest residents will spur economic growth,
the benefits of which will trickle down to average citizens. That's
happening now, right?

Energy: From his earliest days as a candidate, Obama has advocated
significant investment in wind, solar and other "clean" alternative energy
sources as a way of creating jobs, minimizing human impact on climate change
and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

McCain counters with, "Drill, baby, drill," the 2008 campaign's equivalent
of "Toga, toga, toga," a chant frat boys in the film "Animal House" repeated
to make them feel better and forget that they were all failing. — like
fossil fuel-based energy policy.

Health care: Obama's plan focuses on better oversight of insurers, which is
long overdue; more aggressive cost containment; and better access to
preventive medicine.

Again, McCain's belief that unfettered market forces will drive down prices
ignores precedents in the energy and food sectors and fails to recognize
that health care cannot be treated like other commodities.

Supreme Court: Contrary to the rhetoric that became conservative dogma
during the 1980s, all courts are activist courts. The only variable is which
political agenda will drive that activism.

President Bush's two appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, caused the
court to lurch to the right. McCain endorses that swing, which has already
manifested itself in decisions that erode privacy rights and civil liberties.

With as many as three Supreme Court seats opening during the next four
years, an Obama presidency would balance the recent ascendancy of the
court's conservative wing.

Foreign policy: Obama and McCain split markedly on how the United States
should conduct itself in the global community, with Iraq as a centerpiece.
The Bush administration's discredited rationale for launching the war and
its mismanagement of reconstruction have gravely undermined other nations'
trust in and respect for the United States. McCain's perspective on Iraq and
foreign policy in general derives from his experience in the Navy. Hence,
his strategy subjugates diplomacy to military orthodoxy and a "duffer's
mulligan" of the same counterinsurgency tactics that failed in Vietnam.

Obama's personal history and deep knowledge of world history make him far
more likely to strengthen frayed alliances by re-establishing a coalition of
the willing rather than of the coerced.

Character: Frankly, the next president will inherit a mess of epic
proportions from a short-sighted and small-minded administration that
diminished the United States' stature at home and abroad by adhering to
a "you're with us or you're evil" approach to domestic and foreign policy.

Electing Barack Obama would demonstrate that America is better than the way
our government has conducted the people's business during the last eight
years. It would repudiate outside claims that this nation has become a
hypocritical, floundering empire and affirm that we remain a civilization
founded on opportunity, equality and each person's freedom to fulfill his or
her promise.

McCain served our parents well. Obama will serve our children better.

_____________________________________

Barack Obama for President BANGOR MAINE

Change has become an overused buzzword this election, but change is what
this country needs. Change from a misguided foreign policy that indefinitely
leaves U.S. troops in Iraq more than five years after an invasion based on
dubious evidence. Change from a hands-off approach to financial markets that
have paralyzed the U.S. economy. Change from a fiscal policy that has
ballooned the federal deficit and shortchanged domestic programs. Change
from an administration veiled in secrecy with little regard for the
Constitution and American principles. Barack Obama represents that change.

This paper has long respected and supported John McCain, especially his
efforts, often along with Maineâ€™s senators, on climate change, campaign
finance reform and government spending. That John McCain is not running for
president.

The Sen. McCain on the Nov. 4 ballot favors extending the fiscally
irresponsible Bush tax cuts when the "maverick" voted against them in
the Senate. The Sen. McCain running for president says he is firmly pro-life
although he previously said he would oppose overturning Roe v. Wade because
that would cause women to have dangerous illegal abortions.

Sen. McCain, who has a long record of distinguished service to his country,
has compromised his principles to get elected. His reckless choice of Sarah
Palin, the folksy but untested and incurious governor of the countryâ€™s
most government-dependent state, as his running mate is a prime example.
Worse is his tolerance of his campaign's desperate attempts to paint Sen.
Obama as a friend of terrorists because he served on a board with William
Ayers, a member of the radical 1960s group the Weather Underground.

As conservative columnist George Will wrote last month: â€œIt is arguable
that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It
is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless
reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be
corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying
temperament be fixed?

With a record number of Americans believing the country is on the wrong
track, strong leadership and a commitment to moving in a new direction are
needed. While his opponents have derided Sen. Obama's talk of hope and
unity as empty slogans, the popularity of his campaign shows that the
country is eager for positive leadership, not a continuation of the
divisiveness fostered by the Bush administration.

Backing hope and unity ensures that Maine remains focused on the future,
where a return to the country's positive prospects lies.

A positive message, of course, is not enough to be elected president, and we
do have reservations about Sen. Obama's limited experience: he has served
only four years in the U.S. Senate and three terms in the Illinois
Senate. But he has shown an eagerness to surround himself with well-informed
advisers and, as important, a willingness to listen to dissenting views.

If elected, Sen. Obama will work with a Congress controlled by Democrats. He
and party leaders have a responsibility to restrain government spending,
resist growth in government programs and foster moderate policy shifts,
which requires building on good ideas from Republicans and Democrats alike.

This is especially necessary because Sen. Obama will have a difficult time
finding ways to pay for the needed, but expensive reforms he proposes for
health care, education and the tax code. Addressing voters' top concerns:
righting the economy, ending the war in Iraq and moving America toward
energy independence will only come through bipartisan negotiations, in
which Sen. McCain can play a key role as he has on important issues such as
climate change and military contracting.

At a cost of $10 billion a month, the loss of more than 4,000 American
soldiers' lives and the constraints it placed on the U.S. military, the
current strategy in Iraq is not sustainable. Sen. Obama understands this.

He also understands that drilling for oil without conservation and support
for renewable energy won't move the U.S. toward energy independence. He
understands that reducing taxes and health care costs for the middle class
and small businesses are essential to rebuilding the economy.

For these reasons, the policies of the Barack Obama and Joe Biden ticket and
its serious focus on our most pressing issues will better serve Maine and
America.
_________________

The Kansas City Star endorsed Obama on Oct. 17:

We believe Sen. Barack Obama is the right person to lead the country
forward. He is a man of strength, empathy, energy and intelligence.

The Illinois Democrat understands the challenges that await George Bush's
successor. A gifted public servant whose roots extend to his mother's
birthplace in Kansas, Obama has a rare ability to encourage hope among the
dispirited and to inspire young people.

Obama's sound judgment is reflected in his choice for a running mate. Sen.
Joe Biden is a passionate advocate of ordinary Americans and a foreign-
policy expert who would be prepared to assume the Oval Office on a moment's
notice ...

McCain has been a less impressive candidate this year than when he ran for
president in 2000. Although claiming to be a change agent, he is following
in Bush's footsteps on everything from the war in Iraq to tax breaks that
favor the wealthy over the middle class.

Despite his age and previous health problems, McCain chose a vice
presidential candidate who is so clearly unqualified for high office that
the thought of her stepping into the presidency is frightening.
_________________________________

Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune endorsed Obama on Oct. 17:

Out of nowhere, and without proper vetting, the impetuous McCain picked
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. She quickly proved grievously
underequipped to step into the presidency should McCain, at 72 and with a
history of health problems, die in office. More than any single factor,
McCain's bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically
challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency. ...

The country desperately needs a new and well-defined road map for the 21st
century and leadership that can unite the country behind it.

We believe that Barack Obama can give us both.

___

The (Portland) Oregonian endorsed Obama on Oct. 18:

Obama has the best chance, and the best abilities, to rebuild an American
economy that has grown dangerously unstable, with government, consumers and
the nation itself spiraling deeply into debt and selling off the national
future to pay for daily expenses. He is the best choice to rebuild the
American position in the world, to restore our ties with traditional allies,
to re-make the American argument to the rest of the world.

Crucially, Barack Obama can recall the United States to its own highest
principles and priorities. He can change course after an administration that
has often cut constitutional and legal corners, and frequently stumbled into
policy and philosophical embarrassment.

___

The Miami Herald endorsed Obama on Oct. 18:

The way the two candidates responded to the economic meltdown offers a
lesson in contrasting styles of leadership. Both have put forth a series of
worthwhile policy options, but where Sen. Obama was calm, Sen. McCain was
frantic. He first put his campaign "on hold" and suggested he would cancel
the first debate, and then suddenly decided to take part even as the first
bailout deal cratered. He said the fundamentals of the economy were strong,
then a few days later vowed to "name the names" of those responsible for the
financial crisis.

In other elections, voters have complained of having to make a choice
between two bad candidates. That is not the case this time. The nation is
fortunate to have good candidates and a clear choice. Sen. Obama represents
the best chance for America to make a clean break with the culture wars and
failed policies of the past, and begin to restore the hope and promise of
America as the world's greatest democracy.

___

The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Obama on Oct. 18:

If America is going to fight its way out of a worldwide economic crisis that
has people fearful of losing not only their homes but also their jobs, and
fearful of unending war, then it must have better leadership than it has had
the past eight years. ...

Both major candidates are trying to avoid association with Bush's failed
policies. But only one does so successfully. On every issue important to
America, Barack Obama offers a plan that would pull this nation from the
precipice built by bad Bush decisions. The Inquirer endorses Barack Obama
for president.

While John McCain also promises "change," it's hard to believe that's
possible from someone who, by his own admission, has voted with Bush 90
percent of the time. ...

More troubling was McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his
running mate. This blatant overture to women voters and evangelical
Christians who share her views on abortion backfired when Palin in
interviews proved she is not prepared to be a heartbeat away from the
presidency. ...

There's another reason to vote for Obama. It would tell the world that the
melting-pot America of legend has finally become a reality. ... With his
eloquent oratory, Obama has already taken big steps to bridge America's
racial divide.

[BIO: In 1980, Stephen Fox founded New Millennium Fine Art, a Santa Fe gallery
specializing in Native American and Landscape, and is very active in New
Mexico Legislative consumer protection politics, trying above to get the FDA
to rescind its approval for the neurotoxic and carcinogenic artificial
sweetener, Aspartame. [http://www.prlog.org/10070694] In a strictly
legislative context, his most important writing has been for the Hawaii
Senate: http://www.prlog.org/10056715-hawaii-senate In his capacity as
Contributing Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox recently interviewed
Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev He has
been adamant and resourceful about exposing the charlatans of the sometimes-
organic food movement. Take the time to read this press release concerning
California Attorney General Jerry Brown's suits against Whole Foods, Avalon,
and others, for either knowingly or negligently adding a deadly carcinogen
to their body care products and soap, as in Whole Foods 365 Label products:
http://www.prlog.org/10079593]

Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama Part II Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francsico Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Cincinnati City Beat; Please put these to good use!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:57:35 EDT

[For months, I have been urging and coaching and doing free editing to help Obama supporters write letters to the Editor, and always recommended to them that they consult EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, a guide to newspapers in America which lists the name of the Editorial Page Editor, to call ahead and discuss op/ed lengths rather than just letter to the editor lengths.

To see this latest blast of endorsements reaffirms my faith both in independent and discerning American Editorial Pages and the strength of my tactical approach to Presidential Politics, but above all, faith in the intelligence, compassion, and coolness of our best candidate, Obama, who has rightly convinced hundreds of millions of American he is the right choice!---note from Stephen Fox]

__________________________

How we decided: Denver Post

By Dan Haley
Up until late this week, our editorial board was torn over our
presidential endorsement.

Just like Colorado, we were divided neatly between Barack Obama and John McCain.

We had many of the same conversations in our board room that many of you have had over your own kitchen tables or in coffee shops or at cocktail parties.

Obama is too inexperienced. McCain's health care plan is a disaster.

Neither man has articulated a clear plan for the economy. Obama won't say what programs he'll cut given the economic crisis, while McCain still thinks he can balance the budget through tax cuts and lucky charms.

Sarah Palin isn't qualified to be president. Joe Biden is a blooper waiting to happen.

Of course, we even had a few nice things to say about the candidates, but being skeptics, we often gravitated back to the negatives.

That seems to be where we are as a nation, too: the negatives. Maybe Obama can change that. I have my doubts. But wouldn't it be nice?

Anyway, as you can see, we eventually found ourselves at Barack Obama.

"Typical left-wing Denver Post," many of you will mutter. Others may be surprised. Since we endorsed George W. Bush in 2004, many readers have assumed, according to the e-mails we still receive, that we're in the pocket of Republicans. (They forget, or just don't know, that we actually endorsed Al Gore in 2000.)

The Post is an independent newspaper that doesn't care what's good for Republicans or what's good for Democrats. We owe nothing to either party.

Today, with our endorsement of Obama, we lean further to the left than my own personal compass. But it's where the majority of our board is, and that's OK.

We know our endorsement is likely to anger about, oh, 47 percent of the people in Colorado. And that's OK, too.

Endorsements are meant to stoke a public dialogue.

Since 1946, when Palmer Hoyt re-established the editorial page, we've endorsed a candidate in 14 presidential races. Until today, we had endorsed seven Democrats and seven Republicans.

In 1974, in an editorial written after Hoyt's retirement, The Post wrote:

"An editorial endorsement of a candidate is nothing more nor nothing less than an opinion intended to stimulate public discussion and to give the newspaper's best judgment for its readers to ponder and weigh as they see fit. Our endorsement system is not beyond criticism. We are seeking improved government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and so far we have not found a better way to express election opinion than the endorsement system."

And since "lively disagreement is the lifeblood of opinion pages," as the late Sue O'Brien once wrote, one of our board members, Chuck Plunkett, has penned a dissent column, also found on this page.

The endorsement process often isn't pretty. It can be a fierce debate, fueled by high emotions. But it tells you where we stand today as a newspaper.

After all the debates, YouTube videos, and the endless loop of campaign ads, our hope is to give you something else of substance to chew on as you mull the election.

Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.

_________________________________

LOS ANGELES TIMES

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-endorse19-
2008oct19,0,5198206.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
Endorsement: Barack Obama for president
He is the competent, confident leader who represents the aspirations of the United States.

11:01 AM PDT, October 17, 2008

It is inherent in the American character to aspire to greatness, so it can be disorienting when the nation stumbles or loses confidence in bedrock principles or institutions. That's where the United States is as it prepares to select a new president: We have seen the government take a stake in venerable private financial houses; we have witnessed eight years of executive branch power grabs and erosion of civil liberties; we are still recovering from a murderous attack by terrorists on our own soil and still struggling with how best to prevent a recurrence.

We need a leader who demonstrates thoughtful calm and grace under pressure, one not prone to volatile gesture or capricious pronouncement. We need a leader well-grounded in the intellectual and legal foundations of American freedom. Yet we ask that the same person also possess the spark and passion to inspire the best within us: creativity, generosity and a fierce defense of justice and liberty.

The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president.

Our nation has never before had a candidate like Obama, a man born in the 1960s, of black African and white heritage, raised and educated abroad as well as in the United States, and bringing with him a personal narrative that encompasses much of the American story but that, until now, has been reflected in little of its elected leadership. The excitement of Obama's early campaign was amplified by that newness. But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama's character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity.

These are qualities American leadership has sorely lacked for close to a decade. The U.S. Constitution, more than two centuries old, now offers the world one of its more mature and certainly most stable governments, but our political culture is still struggling to shake off a brash and unseemly adolescence. In George W. Bush, the executive branch turned its back on an adult role in the nation and the world and retreated into self-absorbed unilateralism.

John McCain distinguished himself through much of the Bush presidency by speaking out against reckless and self-defeating policies. He earned The Times' respect, and our endorsement in the California Republican primary, for his denunciation of torture, his readiness to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and his willingness to buck his party on issues such as immigration reform. But the man known for his sense of honor and consistency has since announced that he wouldn't vote for his own immigration bill, and he redefined "torture" in such a disingenuous way as to nearly embrace what he once abhorred.

Indeed, the presidential campaign has rendered McCain nearly unrecognizable. His selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was, as a short-term political tactic, brilliant. It was also irresponsible, as Palin is the most unqualified vice presidential nominee of a major party in living memory. The decision calls into question just what kind of thinking -- if that's the appropriate word -- would drive the White House in a McCain presidency.
Fortunately, the public has shown more discernment, and the early enthusiasm for Palin has given way to national ridicule of her candidacy and McCain's judgment.

Obama's selection also was telling. He might have scored a steeper bump in the polls by making a more dramatic choice than the capable and experienced Joe Biden. But for all the excitement of his own candidacy, Obama has offered more competence than drama.

He is no lone rider. He is a consensus builder, a leader. As a
constitutional scholar, he has articulated a respect for the rule of law and the limited power of the executive that make him the best hope of restoring balance and process to the Justice Department. He is a Democrat, leaning further left than right, and that should be reflected in his nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a good thing; the court operates best when it is ideologically balanced. With its present alignment at seven justices named by Republicans and two by Democrats, it is due for a tug from the left.

We are not sanguine about Obama's economic policies. He speaks with populist sweep about taxing oil companies to give middle-class families rebates that of course they would welcome, but would be far too small to stimulate the economy. His ideas on taxation do not stray far from those put forward by Democrats over the last several decades. His response to the most recent, and drastic, fallout of the sub- prime mortgage meltdown has been appropriately cautious; this is uncharted territory, and Obama is not a master of economic theory or practice.

And that's fine. Obama inspires confidence not so much in his grasp of Wall Street finance, but in his acknowledgment of and comfort with his lack of expertise. He will not be one to forge far-reaching economic policy without sounding out the best thinkers and practitioners, and he has many at his disposal. He has won the backing of some on Wall Street not because he's one of them, but because they recognize his talent for extracting from a broad range of proposals a coherent and workable program.

On paper, McCain presents the type of economic program The Times has
repeatedly backed: One that would ease the tax burden on business and other high earners most likely to invest in the economy and hire new workers. But he has been disturbingly unfocused in his response to the current financial situation, rushing to "suspend" his campaign and take action (although just what action never became clear). Having little to contribute, he instead chose to exploit the crisis.

We may one day look back on this presidential campaign in wonder. We may marvel that Obama's critics called him an elitist, as if an Ivy League education were a source of embarrassment, and belittled his eloquence, as if a gift with words were suddenly a defect. In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be.

________________________________________________

CHICAGO TRIBUNE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS 161 YEAR HISTORY ENDORSES
DEMOCRAT: OBAMA!

However this election turns out, it will dramatically advance America's slow progress toward equality and inclusion. It took Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary courage in the Civil War to get us here. It took an epic battle to secure women the right to vote. It took the perseverance of the civil rights movement. Now we have an election in which we will choose the first African-American president . . . or the first female vice president.

In recent weeks it has been easy to lose sight of this history in the making. Americans are focused on the greatest threat to the world economic system in 80 years. They feel a personal vulnerability the likes of which they haven't experienced since Sept. 11, 2001. It's a different kind of vulnerability. Unlike Sept. 11, the economic threat hasn't forged a common bond in this nation. It has fed anger, fear and mistrust.

On Nov. 4 we're going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.

The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama. The Tribune is proud to endorse him today for president of the United States.

____________________________________________

NOTES FROM WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT:

[It's no surprise that the liberal media would support its favorite son. However, as the Tribune notes in its editorial, this marks the first time in the newspaper's history that it has endorsed a Democrat for the nation's highest office. The Los Angeles Times has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race since 1972, and it has never supported a Democrat before either.

The four newspapers all pointed to Sen. John McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as a key reason for endorsing Obama. McCain has largely ignored or brushed aside questions about Palin's lack of experience -- and by extension, his judgment. The Los Angeles Times was the most scathing:

Indeed, the presidential campaign has rendered McCain nearly unrecognizable. His selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was, as a short-term political tactic, brilliant. It was also irresponsible, as Palin is the most unqualified vice presidential nominee of a major party in living memory. The decision calls into question just what kind of thinking -- if that's the appropriate word -- would drive the White House in a McCain presidency.
Fortunately, the public has shown more discernment, and the early enthusiasm for Palin has given way to national ridicule of her candidacy and McCain's judgment.

_______________________________________

THE CHRONICLE RECOMMENDS: Barack Obama for president
Why Obama is the choice
The Illinois senator has shown beyond a doubt that he is the one to lead the nation in troubled times.

Friday, October 17, 2008

The stakes were extraordinarily high even before our economy began to spasm and hurtle toward the abyss.

From the start of the campaign, Americans were confronted with profound policy choices about how and when to extricate this nation from a war it initiated, how to temper a looming recession, and whether to continue Bush administration policies that had widened the gap between rich and poor, eroded individual liberties, strengthened presidential power, shifted the Supreme Court to the right, weakened relations with our allies, and delayed action necessary to slow the warming of the planet.

Then, suddenly, the emergence of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression gave Americans an opportunity to see the two major-party candidates under heightened stress. It was a rare chance to see the two senators encounter the type of pressure that comes with the job description of president of the United States.

Even though each ultimately voted for the same solution - the $700 billion bailout-their demeanors could not have been more different. Sen. John McCain magnified the aura of crisis, "suspending" his campaign to return to Washington, where his role in negotiations was at best tangential. Sen. Barack Obama was a portrait of calmness and deliberation, reminding Americans that it is possible for a leader to juggle more than one task at a time.

Obama showed steadiness in a moment of anxiety, with Americans' portfolios withering and policymakers scrambling to do something - anything - to staunch the panic. The Illinois senator was similarly deliberative - in contrast with McCain's quick-draw provocation - when Russia invaded Georgia in August.

In those crises, and in the hot lights of three debates, Obama demonstrated a presidential depth and temperament. His performance under the unrelenting scrutiny of the past 20 months has helped quell the "experience issue" for a 47-year-old senator who was elected in 2004.

Still, the breadth of the job of the presidency is such that even the most capable and experienced leader must rely on the advice and judgment of seasoned and specialized appointees. A president's success is determined not only by his aptitude, instincts and communication skills - which Obama demonstrated throughout the campaign - but also by the quality of the advisers around him. Do they have the mettle to challenge a president? Does he have the self-confidence, and the trust in them, to encourage such challenges?

Obama's selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate suggests that he would encourage vigorous input in his administration. Biden, 65 and a senator since 1972, has established himself as one of Washington's pre-eminent authorities on foreign policy - and a man who is famously unafraid to volunteer his opinion.

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has been largely sequestered from the news media since her selection in late August. She has yet to have anything resembling a traditional news conference, where the full range of her knowledge and views can be explored. Her avoidance of questions and reliance on cue-card talking points in the one vice presidential debate did
nothing to allay doubts about whether the 44-year-old governor of two years is capable of assuming the reins of the presidency. Her selection was but an act of political calculation by McCain.

The erstwhile appeal of "maverick" McCain, 72, has been further undercut by his tack to the right on the Bush tax cuts (which he initially resisted), his newfound allegiance to the religious right (in 2000, he called its leaders "agents of intolerance") and the low tone of his campaign in recent weeks (with attempts to portray Obama as a "pal of terrorists").

While both candidates speak of "change," on the issue that matters most to Americans at this moment - the economy - there is no question about which candidate's policies represents a distinct departure from the approach of the last eight years. McCain's agenda largely reflects the orthodoxy of deregulation and top-weighted tax cuts that defined Republican politics for almost 30 years. McCain has poured forth more proposals to stimulate the economy with cuts on capital gains taxes and allowing certain early withdrawals on retirement accounts. He also has floated a plan to purchase troubled mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and stay in their
homes.

Obama draws on some of the traditional Democratic themes: a more active government role in regulating businesses and trade agreements, more tax relief for the middle class, and stimulating the economy with public-works projects.

Both candidates have been less than forthcoming about how their tax-cut and spending plans might be derailed if the economy continues to tank or the bailout proves less effective and more expensive than anticipated.

At the start of the year, it looked as if the war in Iraq might be the defining issue of 2008. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars - and lost more than 4,100 troops - since President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq more than five years ago. McCain's stubborn insistence on "victory" before withdrawal runs the danger of extending the quagmire.

Meanwhile, the threat of terrorism has not gone away. As Obama has noted, the invasion of Iraq diverted resources and attention from what should be the main front on terrorism: the rugged terrain along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where al Qaeda and, presumably, its leader, Osama bin Laden, retreated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Beyond Iraq, the president who walks into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2009, will need to rebuild alliances that have been frayed by the unilateralist approach of the Bush White House. McCain has mocked Obama for his willingness to open dialogue with Iran and other rogue nations, but, again, the go-it-alone, world-opinion-be-damned approach of the past eight years has not made us safer. The challenges of our times - curbing global warming, addressing the global economic crisis, combatting terrorism - require international cooperation.

Throughout a campaign that has been intense - and at some points ugly - Obama has kept his composure and maintained a vision of optimism that has drawn an unparalleled wave of young people into the political process. His policies and his persona have offered hope to a nation that is deeply polarized, swimming in debt, mired in war and ridden with anxiety. He taps into that treasured American reservoir - patriotism - with his calls for sacrifice and national service.

Barack Obama is the right president for these troubled times.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/17/EDLP13H6V9.DTL

____________________________

BY GREG MITCHELL EDITOR AND PUBLISHER:

NEW YORK The Obama-Biden ticket maintains its strong lead in the race fornewspaper endorsements, picking up 12 more papers in the past day, including the giant Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune on Friday afternoon. This brings his lead over McCain-Palin by this measure to over 3-1 so far, at 51-16, including most of the major papers that have decided so far. In contrast, John Kerry barely edged George W. Bush in endorsements in 2004, by about 220 to 205.

The readership of the 51 newspapers backing Obama now stands at 6,299,363 daily circulation. He gained two biggies yesterday in The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, and today picked up the Modesto Bee in addition to the L.A. Times, plus el Diario La Prensa and La Opinion.

The Columbian in Washington was an unexpected win for Obama, since the newspaper endorsed President Bush in the 2004 election. Obama has now picked up at least seven "flip-flops" of this type.

The Mountain Valley News in Colorado adds to McCain's endorsement list, bringing his total to 16 newspapers. The daily circulation of hisnewspapers now stands at 1,502,163.

________________________________________

SKY NEWS:

In Pennsylvania, Conservative radio host Michael Smerconish said he was also throwing his support behind Mr Obama.

"John McCain is an honorable man who has served his country well. But he will not get my vote. For the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago, I'm voting for a Democrat for president."

And there are reports that former Secretary of State Colin Powell - who served the last three Republican presidents including George W Bush - may come out in support of the Democrat too.

Sky News political analyst Jon-Christopher Bua said: "Although no one endorsement can turn the tide for a candidate, each one helps push some segment of the undecided voters closer to their choice.

He added: None of this is very good news for John Mc Cain."

The latest endorsements come after the Republican failed to land a knock-out blow in the third and final presidential debate in New York and as voters swing behind Mr Obama in states which have previously been Republican strongholds.

The Illinois Senator now has an eight point lead in Virginia which hasn't backed a Democrat since 1964. He is also challenging Mr McCain in Indiana. The state has only backed a Democrat once since 1940.

-----------------------------------------

Cincinnati CityBeat:

As Election Day creeps ever closer, it's time for CityBeat to start
publishing election endorsements and help those remaining undecided voters get their act together. Given our niche in Greater Cincinnati as a voice for progressive causes, we've recommended candidates and ballot issue positions since our founding in 1994 and take that role seriously.

Let's begin with the big enchilada this fall, the presidential race. It should come as no shock that CityBeat endorses Sen. Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States.

There's no shock in our choice because Obama is truly the only candidate on the presidential ballot who can turn this country around. And the country needs turned around in a big way and in a hurry.

The litany of Bush administration failures and scandals is too long to list here, but we can boil down the past eight years to these truths: Bush and his cronies have abused the power of the federal government (torture of accused terrorists and others, domestic spying of U.S. citizens, politicization of U.S. Attorneys, etc.) while failing to make the government effective where it should be (poor Iraq War planning and reconstruction, poor oversight of the financial markets, poor management of disaster aid, etc.).

In short, they've overstepped government boundaries when restraint was required and blew off responsibilities when they felt like it. An Obama presidency will move 180 degrees from Bush's cynical, disinterested, manipulative approach.

Obama has run a serious, focused, organized and inspirational campaign for president and at every step of the long, long process has emerged both victorious and humble. His management of the big picture atop a two-year-long 50-state campaign organization bodes very well for his ability to lead the Democratic Party, Congress and the country over the next four to eight years.

Much of the excitement around Obama flows from his compelling personal story, starting (and in some cases ending) with his standing as the first African-American major party presidential nominee and soon to be the country's first black president.

It's difficult to overstate the significance of this accomplishment, as his election would impact the country and world in so many ways, but it would also be wrong to reduce Obama simply to a symbol.

As with anyone, who Obama is and how he behaves tie directly back to how he was raised and the decisions he made along the way as an adult. Brought up by a single white mother, white grandparents and an Asian stepfather in exotic Hawaii and Indonesia, dealing with abandonment by his own father, trying to find a path in both the black and white worlds while assimilating with the establishment at Ivy League universities, Obama faced and overcame challenges before age 30 that few of us can relate to.

He learned his politics fighting against and later collaborating with the Daley Machine in Chicago, and he caught some breaks along the way.

Would Obama have been elected to the U.S. Senate in Illinois if his better-known Republican rival hadn't flamed out in a sex scandal? Would he have beaten Hillary Clinton if she hadn't made so many tactical mistakes
throughout the early Democratic primary season? Would he be on the verge of becoming president if John McCain were running even a halfway decent campaign? Who knows?

Ultimately, the most impressive thing about Obama's run for the presidency is that his campaign has come across as planned out, strategic and thoughtful. Imagine a president who plans, strategizes and thinks. A crazy concept, we know, but that sort of leader is desperately needed right now.

Obama will enjoy about a two-year honeymoon as president. Both houses of Congress will have more Democrats, and the Senate might even feature a filibuster-proof 60-40 Democratic advantage.

Obama will have the necessary support in Congress to enact his reform plans for health care, financial markets, taxes, the wars in the Middle East and just about everything else. Given how the polls look these days, he should beat McCain so decisively that he'll be able to claim a "mandate" from voters for fundamental change.

He'll also inherit two of the most daunting problems of modern times: the threat of Middle Easternbred terrorism against the West and the global financial meltdown. Both situations continue to drain attention and money that could be used to improve everyday life for most of us via better schools, fairer health care, better retirement plans, cleaner environment, better transportation and better planning.

If Obama isn't able to get his team focused on accomplishing his stated goals and if world events interfere with his plans, the public will be ready to punish him and the Democrats in the mid-term Congressional elections in two years -- much like they punished President Clinton in 1994. So he has two years to get something done.

Obama reminds us of the two most popular Democratic presidents since World War II, John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Like them, he's youthful, optimistic and oozes personal charm and warmth. He represents the "best and brightest" of his generation.

The warning for Obama, of course, is that both Kennedy and Clinton are often remembered more for their personal foibles than for their breakthroughs and accomplishments. Still, they remain revered presidents in many American households.

Will Obama be able to join the ranks of the revered? Will he fulfill his promises? Will he really be different?

One thing is for sure: When Barack Obama takes the oath of office at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2009, the world changes and everything becomes possible. That sounds like a future we can all believe in.

EDITORIAL PAGE ENDORSEMENTS PART ONE HEADLINED TODAY AT OPEDNEWS!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:33:32 EDT

Obama's Editorial Endorsements: including Washington Post, Fidel Castro, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, & more!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Endorsements-The-by-Stephen-Fox-081016-633.html

I hope you take a few moments to share your insights in a comment here and at OpEdNews, which then becomes a vital part of a larger dialogue.

Thanks, Stephen Fox
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art Santa Fe NM

Washington Post Endorses Obama! one of the most insightful, eloquent, and accurate endorsements in the whole campaign thus far! Please put this to good use.

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:32:08 EDT

Barack Obama for President

Friday, October 17, 2008; A24

THE NOMINATING process this year produced two unusually talented and qualified presidential candidates. There are few public figures we have respected more over the years than Sen. John McCain. Yet it is without ambivalence that we endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president.

The choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain's disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president. It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Mr. Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race. Yes, we have reservations and concerns, almost inevitably, given Mr. Obama's relatively brief experience in national politics. But we also have enormous hopes.

Mr. Obama is a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building. At home, we believe, he would respond to the economic crisis with a healthy respect for markets tempered by justified dismay over rising inequality and an understanding of the need for focused regulation. Abroad, the best evidence suggests that he would seek to maintain U.S. leadership and engagement, continue the fight against terrorists, and wage vigorous diplomacy on behalf of U.S. values and interests. Mr. Obama has the potential to become a great president. Given the enormous problems he would confront from his first day in office, and the damage wrought over the past eight years, we would settle for very good.

The first question, in fact, might be why either man wants the job. Start with two ongoing wars, both far from being won; an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan; a resurgent Russia menacing its neighbors; a terrorist-supporting Iran racing toward nuclear status; a roiling Middle East; a rising China seeking its place in the world. Stir in the threat of nuclear or biological terrorism, the burdens of global poverty and disease, and accelerating climate change. Domestically, wages have stagnated while public education is failing a generation of urban, mostly minority children. Now add the possibility of the deepest economic trough since the Great Depression.

Not even his fiercest critics would blame President Bush for all of these problems, and we are far from being his fiercest critic. But for the past eight years, his administration, while pursuing some worthy policies (accountability in education, homeland security, the promotion of freedom abroad), has also championed some stunningly wrongheaded ones (fiscal

Editorial Page Endorsements of Obama>>> Part I >>>The Best of the Best, from the Editorial Pages of America

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:22:44 EDT

Recent newspaper endorsements of the presidential candidates, selected for the quality of their writing and the depths of their insights

___

Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times endorsed Democrat Barack Obama on Oct. 5:

We now face a future fraught with difficulty. It is no time to fear, but rather to change directions and unite behind a dynamic, thoughtful and progressive leader, Democrat Barack Obama.

He has stirred hope among millions of Americans, many of whom were alienated from politics or marginalized in society. He has restored a sense of idealism and promise that American values will again be our respected guide in the world, that the American dream is still very much alive in our nation, and that what is wrong can be fixed.

Sen. Obama's opponent, Republican John McCain, has long served his country, and as a young man, at great personal sacrifice. But he is not ready to lead America in the 21st century. His view of the world is outdated and unduly restricted by a military lens.

___

The Durango (Colo.) Herald endorsed Obama on Oct. 12:

The United States faces a pivotal choice in this presidential election, and
the alternatives are clear. What is needed in that decision, as in our markets and our dealings with the world, is to act like Americans and approach the future with optimism. Voters should reject the politics of fear and elect Barack Obama.

Obama offers what America now needs: Confidence without swagger,
intelligence without condescension, a mind unencumbered with the baggage of the '60s, and an optimistic outlook eloquently expressed.

After the feckless leadership of the last eight years, the offer of hope is
beyond appealing. It is essential. We need to restore this country's
position as a bastion of human rights and re-establish respect for the
United States government at home and abroad. We must reinvigorate and
restructure our economy, revive the idea that children will be better off
than their parents, and face the 21st century with confidence.

John McCain cannot do that. He is intellectually and emotionally trapped in
a bygone era. And since his 2000 run, the maverick McCain has been replaced by one with a wet finger in the wind.

Obama, however, offers a clear and certain break with the past. And that is
absolutely necessary. It is taking a chance, of course, but that risk is
less than that of continuing Bush's work.

___

The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., endorsed Obama on Oct. 16:

American adults are asking a terrible question as Nov. 4 approaches: Will my children have the opportunities that I was afforded in my youth?

The times call for a steady hand, a confident voice and a messenger who
delivers hope rather than fear.

While the country negotiates some of the most treacherous waters in the last 50 years, (Obama) is the candidate most capable of leading it to a safer shore.

-----------

COLUMBIAN, WASHINGTON STATE
In Our View: Obama for President
As voters consider unprecedented change, this race hinges on leadership and judgment
Thursday, October 16 | 1:00 a.m.

Americans face what is arguably the nation's most historically significant presidential election ever. Either the first black president or the first
female vice president will be elected Nov. 4.

But this election also is a milestone for a reason unrelated to race or
gender. For the first time in 20 years, the next president will not be a
Bush or a Clinton. Never have just two families occupied the White House for so long. Today's typical college freshman has never lived under a president by any other name. It's time for a change.

So it's no surprise that John McCain and Barack Obama are campaigning as
agents of change. All the more reason for voters to participate. In Clark
County, ballots were mailed yesterday.

Any successful reformer must excel in leadership and judgment. In the past
several months, Obama has distanced himself as the superior candidate in
those two areas, and today he receives The Columbian�s endorsement for president. Two quick reminders:

Our opinion is only that, refuted by many, carrying no distinguishable
impact. Our opinion is offered more to stimulate conversation than to change minds.

No candidate is perfect, as evidenced by our 2004 endorsement: Bush,
Reluctantly

Obama carries baggage we consider unsightly, such as the unfair advantages he would grant labor unions. We also are wary of a few past relationships he's had with controversial figures. McCain carries that same baggage, to a lesser degree.

But as we examined leadership qualities of both men, we saw Obama's massive strides in uniting his own Democratic party, even reaching beyond his party to speak to all Americans. McCain, in stark contrast, continues to slog through a fractious Republican Party that often is his worst enemy.

It takes strong leadership skills to enlist record numbers of volunteers and
to continually explore new heights in the polls, as Obama methodically
demonstrates.

As for judgment, Obama chose a running mate who neither hurt him in the
polls nor diverted the spotlight from the main man on the ticket. McCain's
choice has done both. McCain tries to masquerade this recklessness as the
virtue of a maverick. Would he use that same recklessness in appointing
Supreme Court justices and Cabinet members? Which candidate in recent weeks has shown a presidential demeanor? Which could best restore worldwide respect for the U.S.? Which man has tried to soothe not stoke rancor in the homestretch of this campaign? Clearly, that man is Obama.

On the issues, Obama and McCain share similar views on immigration, Social Security and Medicare. Their differences on how to repair the economy are
not overly contradictory. On the Iraq War, Obama prefers a quicker
withdrawal of troops than we would like, but his proven leadership and solid judgment indicate he can resolve the Iraq dilemma collaboratively, certainly not by waving a white flag as McCain repeatedly claims. Both men urge public investment in science and technology. On health care, Obama believes it is a right; McCain believes it is a responsibility. Obama would raise taxes on the rich but not the rest of us, while McCain wants to make permanent the Bush tax cuts of 2003.

Beyond these issues, let's review two popular but empty charges against
Obama. His supposed lack of experience, history reveals, is a red herring.
His 12 years in elected office are more than Abraham Lincoln, Teddy
Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan each brought to the presidency. Too young at 47? Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton were younger. (Also on the
subject of age, is McCain too old at 72? Certainly not.)

America's comparison between the upstart reformer and the venerable war hero inexorably returns to the qualities of leadership and judgment. Obama wins that comparison, and his message of partnerships at home and abroad seals the deal for us.
--------------
THE TENNESSEAN

This newspaper believes Obama would be an inspiring choice at an
extraordinary time for the nation. The country needs a fresh, energetic face
in the White House. Every race for president is important, but the current
confluence of events, including the war on terror, mountainous challenges in the economy and a growing strain upon the nation's health-care system make the current race a call for vigorous new approaches and enthusiasm.

Obama has managed to put a tone of optimism in his campaign at a time it
would be very easy to be downhearted, worried and pessimistic. That
characteristic alone goes a long way in demonstrating the kind of leadership the nation needs.

Obama has made the case effectively that his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, represents too much of the same failed policies that have plagued the nation during the Bush administration. McCain, it must be said, is a genuine military hero and an honorable candidate. His years of service both in the military and in Congress are traits any American should admire. But at this time, at this juncture, McCain does not embody the motivational leader Americans deserve for such crucial issues.

There is no question the economy is foremost on the minds of many Americans today. People are witnessing a financial system in chaos, and they are seeing their personal lives in upheaval because of the problem. People are fearful about their jobs, their retirement, their ability even to meet day-to-day needs. At the moment, the nation is still trying to get a handle on exactly what is happening in its economy, as some of the best economic minds in the country try to sift through possible solutions. Obama offers no magic wand, but he has been effective in linking the crisis to failed economic policies, and he expresses a keen understanding of how the crisis is creating hardship on American families....

Further, Obama demonstrated sound judgment in selecting as his running mate Sen. Joe Biden, whose experience and knowledge of foreign policy prepare him to step in if need be as chief executive. McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin, by comparison, may have shown political savvy, but at the expense of offering a vice president the country could rally around....

The nation could ask for no more. Obama has the opportunity to lift the
United States at a time when its burdens are heavy. His campaign has carried a theme of "Yes We Can," which is exactly the message the nation needs to hear most now.

THE POST-GAZETTE PITTSBURGH

In three weeks, Americans will be called upon to make an exceptional
judgment worthy of the times. The forces of history appear to invite
boldness and the Post-Gazette believes they should be heeded by voting for the only authentic, fresh agent of change in this race, Barack Obama....

Despite the recent nastiness of his campaign. Sen. McCain is essentially a
good man, but he is yesterday's man. His campaign takes its core text from
the "Wizard of Oz": Don't mind the man behind the curtain. That man is
George Bush, the failed magician who cannot be spoken of lest the American people be reminded of what he has wrought and what party he belongs to.

To make their trick work, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Palin, trade
heavily on being mavericks -- too heavily to be believed.

It is true that Mr. McCain has a capricious streak that has made him a thorn
in the side of his own party on various issues. Yet while he has not joined
the know-nothing brigade in climate change denial, he has picked a running
mate who is a diva in the drill, baby, drill chorus of fossil-fuel adulation. Mr. Obama, while he has recognized the need for more drilling, has put more emphasis on new sources of alternative energy, the only real hope for the future.

On Iraq, Mr. McCain did needle the Bush administration to put in more troops and he makes much of the fact that he backed the surge. That the surge was a success to the point that it reduced bloodshed does not vindicate the wrong decision in the first place to invade a country that was not behind the 9/11 attacks and did not have weapons of mass destruction; Iraq has been a huge diversion from Afghanistan.

All of this Mr. McCain, despite his vaunted experience, got wrong at the
start when Barack Obama recognized the folly. That fundamental error is
still costing the nation $10 billion a month, funds desperately needed at
home, yet Mr. McCain sees the surge as more reason to stay than to plan now to leave and put the war in the hands of the only people who can ultimately win it: the Iraqis. That is what Mr. Obama wants to do in stages and what Mr. McCain only hopes for over the rainbow.

On health care, Mr. McCain's insurance plan is straight from the George Bush playbook, with its heavy reliance on private competition to give Americans
coverage. His $5,000 tax credit for families is a pittance that won't solve
America's national shame, the millions in the ranks of the uninsured. Mr.
Obama's health-care plan will address that directly -- and, no, it won't be
socialism. Americans will still have their choices.

On the economic meltdown, Mr. McCain famously said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" shortly before it collapsed. Although he has admitted that economics is not his strong suit, he foolishly suspended his campaign briefly to interject himself into a situation that he did not understand and where he was not wanted.

Mr. Obama doesn't have all the answers either, but he does acknowledge what former champion of deregulation John McCain can't: While there's blame to go around both parties, the economic crisis is the final verdict on the failure of the Bush administration.

In this and much else, Mr. McCain is not the steady hand he purports to be,
and nothing proves it more than his reckless selection of Sarah Palin, whose lack of knowledge to take over as president has becoming increasingly
obvious and embarrassing. If Mr. McCain had chosen one of the many
accomplished women in the Republican Party, his candidacy would have the
stamp of seriousness. Instead, it bears the superficial imprint of pandering
populism.

But this election is not just about the shortcomings of Mr. McCain and Ms.
Palin and the failed legacy of a philosophy that they seek to perpetuate
under the hastily erected banner of maverick.

It is about the strengths of Barack Obama, whose rise to prominence is not a fluke or national infatuation but the consequence of his remarkable skills --a keen intellect, noble intentions and the wit and grace to express them in
ways that have inspired millions across the country. He has a rare gift
exactly suited to the fearful times -- he knows the language of reassurance
and hope.

If his were just empty words, this would be just another cheap political
gift. But what he says is carefully considered. In the debates and on the
hustings, Mr. Obama has been the voice of moderation, combining common sense and compassion on issue after issue. When the subject turns to foreign policy, supposedly Mr. McCain's strong suit, Mr. Obama gives no indication that he will have to learn on the job.

That the argument about issues has been essentially won by Sen. Obama is plain from the scurrilous attacks now being launched against his character --
increasingly by Ms. Palin -- alleging guilt by association, unpatriotic
behavior and worse.

This closing blizzard of slime is another attempt to spread the wizard's
curtain further: Don't look at how the economy has impoverished you while a Republican has been in the White House, look at Mr. Obama's passing
acquaintance with an old radical who did bad deeds almost 40 years ago,
because that is more important.

Yes, they apparently do think the American people are that stupid.

On Nov. 4, we believe Americans will heed the better angels of their nature
and recognize that the election of the eloquent Barack Obama -- whose story is a quintessentially American one of impossible odds overcome -- will best answer the pressing call of history.

_______________________

Obama’s ‘Diplomacy’ Wins a Republican Endorsement
By Adam Graham-Silverman, Congressional Quarterly Staff
The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee parted ways with his party’s presidential nominee Wednesday by endorsing Democrat Barack Obama ’s approach to diplomacy.

In a lengthy speech at the National Defense University, Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar weighed the benefits of talking to foreign leaders, including U.S.
enemies, against other actions, such as military force. The issue marks one
of the sharpest divides between Obama and John McCain , who has called the Democratic nominee naive for suggesting that he would sit down with leaders such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Lugar, however, praised Obama, noting that isolation often does not resolve contentious issues.

“He correctly cautions against the implication that hostile nations must be
dealt with almost exclusively through isolation or military force,” Lugar
said in a prepared remarks released before his speech. “In some cases,
refusing to talk can even be dangerous.”

Lugar, however, said McCain is right to warn that “there are times when
diplomatic approaches to rogue regimes have little efficacy.” But he cited
North Korea, which was just removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of
terror, as a diplomatic success story and urged more contact with Syria and
Iran.

This is not the first time Lugar and Obama have seen eye-to-eye on foreign
policy issues. Lugar noted back in July that he was “pleased” to have worked with Obama on nuclear proliferation issues after an Obama ad ran mentioning Lugar by name.

Lugar also used his speech to underscore his concern that U.S. foreign
policy has become too reactive.

“If most U.S. foreign policy attention is devoted to crises fomented by
hostile regimes, we are ceding the initiative to our enemies and reducing
our capacity to lead the world in ways that are more likely to affect our
future,” Lugar said.

___________________________________________

EDITORIAL: Obama for President: We believe the senator from Illinois is the
right man to lead our country in a new direction

The Lufkin Daily News, PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NEWSPAPER IN TEXAS

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Today through Sunday, we're making our endorsements for the 2008 election. Our endorsements are not partisan — we supported George Bush in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Our choices reflect whose policies and strengths we think, after careful consideration, will mean a better, stronger economy and way of life for Angelina County, Texas and the United States.

To that end, the choice for this year's president is clear: Barack Obama,
senator from Illinois.

His strength has been to appeal to a broad range of people, including the
vital youth who are tomorrow's leaders. After watching an inflexible
president go overboard in a $700 billion bailout on loyalty for his nominee,
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, we think it's time for a changing
of the guard.

The East Texas economy is fundamentally doing well, and we're not hitting
highs and lows like other areas, some local leaders have said. But it
remains a fact that while the rich battle it out over billions, poverty is
barking louder than ever at our rural doors. As a litmus test, consider the
Christian Information Service Center, our largest area food bank. It has had
more people than ever through its doors — including more elderly and middle class than ever before.

Hundreds of local families have been impacted as fuel and utility costs
skyrocket, and job losses mount as major employers have circled the drain or gone down altogether. It's hard to remember the fundamentals when you're deciding between buying your medication or keeping the lights on.

Those people who think what's happening nationally has had little effect on
East Texas haven't checked their 401(k)s, or more likely aren't among the
many whose worry is about surviving until the end of the month, let alone
retirement.

It's the working class that are the backbone of this country, and we need
someone to help us share the wealth while still encouraging a free market
economy. We believe Obama has shown more interest in helping the middle class, and has proposed plans to make that happen.

Another consideration is that we should elect a president whose vice
president would be ready to lead if, heaven forbid, the president were to
die in office. We think Joe Biden's experience overwhelms Sarah Palin's
limited appeal as a candidate who would instill confidence during a national
crisis.

At the end of the day, it's about how you and your family will fare — while
still caring how your neighbor and the needy guy down the block is doing.

We're making our voice heard. We hope you'll go to the polls Nov. 4 and do
the same.
____________________________________

HUNTINGTON WEST VIRGINIA:
The Herald-Dispatch editorial board met today. We spent a lot of time
discussing the presidential endorsement, which comes out Sunday.

First, a bit of history. As best I remember, The Herald-Dispatch has
endorsed every Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Before then, I have no memory. So going by those elections, the HD is 3-5 in agreeing with the American voter.

I can't say here who gets our endorsement, but I can say that the discussion was calm at times and less sedate at others. The thing was that no one was really excited about either candidate.

But we were all over 50, and we have seen too much to be too excited about candidates. None of us sees anyone running as a Messiah who will lead us to the promised land.

________________________________
UNATTRIBUTED, BUT KEEN INSIGHTS:

My own prediction: Obama will win, and Democrats will control both houses of Congress. In 2010, Republicans will regain control of one house, and the
Republicans will win back the White House in 2012. Whether they regain
control of both houses of Congress I cannot say, but I seriously doubt it.

This assumes the Republican Party acts with more intelligence and foresight
than it has shown since 2004.

This year, the Democratic Party had two strong candidates in the primary.
The GOP really had none. For a party that is supposed to be conservative,
the GOP had no strong conservative with wide appeal in the primaries. McCain won almost by default, and if he surprises a lot of us and wins the election this year, it will be more a vote against Obama than a vote for McCain. I have talked with several Republicans, and very few are voting for him. They are either voting for Palin or against Obama. Or they are voting for the Republican candidate, whoever it may be. I know of no one who is voting for McCain because he is John McCain.

You can't do well in the long run if that's your base. But it's what the GOP
did to itself.

____________________________________

Fidel Castro Endorses Obama -- Again
By Humberto Fontova
The American Thinker

Barack Obama's Kenyan cousin Raila Obinga did well in naming his son Fidel Castro Odinga. From Havana this week, Obama's nephew's namesake issued his 2nd Barack Obama endorsement.

"The only thing that abounds in McCain are years" wrote the Stalinist Cuban dictator in his regime's official paper. "His (electoral) adversary far surpasses McCain in intelligence and serenity. And his health is not guaranteed."

So a major concern for Castro is,

"that the lady with the rifles, the inexperienced ex-governor of Alaska, could became U.S. President. We observe that she knows absolutely nothing about anything."

Castro's favoritism towards Democrats is nothing new. "We'd better hope Kennedy wins this election," Fidel Castro confided to a subaltern in 1960. "If Nixon wins our revolution won't last." the Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis betrayals (of free Cubans) vindicated Castro's foresight a thousand times over.

I admit to imprecision when labeling Fidel Castro a "Stalinist dictator." For the record: the Castro-Che incarceration of political prisoners actually surpassed Stalin's. In her authoritative book, Gulag, Anne Applebaum documents that, all-told, 18 million people passed through Stalin's prison-camps. At any one time 2 million were incarcerated. That was out of a Soviet population of 220 million. Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro and Che's prison camps. At one point in 1961, 350,000 Cubans crammed Castro's Gulag. Do the math.

"A profound racism exists in the U.S.," continues Fidel Castro in his Obama-endorsement. "It's a miracle that the Democratic candidate has not suffered the fate of other Americans who dreamed of equality and justice like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King."

For the record: Fidel Castro, forcibly overthrew a black Cuban head of state (Fulgencio Batista) and replaced his government with one where only nine percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black and where the prison population is 80- 90 percent black. He jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro's dungeon's than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's.) He sentenced other blacks (Dr Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20 year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a public square.

"(Obama) has a habit of looking at his adversary with serenity and laughing at the verbal gaffes of an opponent who looks blankly into space," continues Castro's chucklesome article, where he proceeds to denounce McCain as "a habitual liar, who lacks an ethical code and is an instrument of the "Miami Mafia" (overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans.)

Castro laments the "brutal measures" the U.S. is adopting during "this capitalist crisis," because these "will provoke more inflation, more devaluation and more loss of markets." Thus a McCain victory would be economically disastrous, because, "he was one of the worst students ever at West Point and knew nothing about mathematics, and knows nothing about economic complications."

For the record: Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (again, into a nation of 6.4 million) -an economic feat that defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics.

Actually, Castroites have been associates of Obama's associates for decades. "I have been affiliated with the Cuba Council of Churches since the 1980s," boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006. "I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project's trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades."

"Non-partisan," Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba's ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba's DGI, Cuba's secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP's long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's "friends."

Rodriguez' meteoric rise through Cuba's Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim's skull with a coup d' grace from his .45.
____________________________________________________

About 100 Napa County-based Barack Obama supporters showed up Monday afternoon on the front steps of the Napa Valley Register building in downtown Napa to protest the newspaper's Sunday endorsement of John McCain for President.

____________________________________
SAN DIEGO CITY BEAT:

Seems kind of pointless to run through a litany of policy areas in which Barack Obama is a far superior choice over John McCain, what with California already signed, sealed and delivered for the Democrat, but we’d like to run up the score and make it a landslide, so we’ll say, briefly, that Obama has shown himself to be the more thoughtful and, dare we say it, more presidential candidate. He’s the guy in whom we’d have far greater trust on the economy, energy, healthcare and foreign policy.

As for McCain, we can go into his past and detail his fondness for industry lobbyists. We can go into his neoconservative, imperialist views on foreign policy that would absolutely be a continuation of the past eight years. We can cite our concerns about how he was once rightly against the Bush tax cuts before he was wrongly for them.

But we’ll simply point to a couple of recent decisions his campaign made. The first was his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. It was a cynical move to shore up the conservative Republican base, and it showed no regard for real-world possibilities—such as, What if McCain were to die or be incapacitated while in office? The second was the desperate, disgusting decision to portray Obama as a terrorist sympathizer, which is the kind of thing you do when you have nowhere else to turn, when you know you can’t capture votes on serious policy issues facing Americans.
McCain would likely win this election four years ago—before the public realized how wrong the invasion of Iraq was, before the Republican Party imploded amid scandal after scandal (Cunningham, Foley, Abramoff, DeLay, Craig, Stevens, et al.), before the current president became radioactive and before the economy descended into unimaginable crisis.

So, it’s the right time for you moderate Republicans and you independents to give our guy a chance. McCain’s thinking is no different than Bush’s in the key areas—costly military interventionism, trickle-down economics and free access for lobbyists—and if you really think about it, you’ll realize that it’s unsustainable. Please vote for Barack Obama.

________________________________________

NEBRASKA REPUBLICAN SENATOR'S WIFE ENDORSES OBAMA

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The wife of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel plans to endorse Democrat Barack Obama.

Lilibet Hagel has scheduled a 10 a.m. news conference in Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday with Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of Republican President Eisenhower. Susan Eisenhower also is an Obama supporter.

Hagel, R-Neb., has made no endorsement. Lilibet Hagel said in an Associated Press interview that her decision was independent of her husband. She said she didn't know whether he would make an endorsement or whom he would support.

"You'd have to ask him," Lilibet Hagel said.

She said it will be her first endorsement of a Democrat and that perilous world conditions were a factor.

"The fact is we're in two wars, two of the longest we've ever been in. We've run up a third of our nation's debt in just the past eight years. We're in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression," she said.

The Hagels know John and Cindy McCain, and she said her endorsement was not meant to slam them.

"This isn't anti-McCain. This is pro-Obama. I'm just convinced he's the right person," she said.

The Hagels vote in Nebraska, but they have lived in Washington's Virginia suburbs since Hagel won his first Senate term in 1996.

A moderate Republican and veteran wounded in combat in the Vietnam War, Hagel has been a fierce and credible critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. During the summer, he accompanied Obama and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was briefly the object of speculation as a possible surprise Obama running mate selection.

The first compendium of the best endorsement editorials from many states, & the top 3 papers in Tennessee! & one by Fidel Castro & the Republicans Lugar and Hagel endorsements

RACE IN THE 2008 ELECTION, By Sally Liuzzo-Prado, Youngest Daughter of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, A Civil Rights Worker Murdered in 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:07:20 EDT

[Please take the time to comment on this important article which should be sent to every racist nook-and-cranny in the 9 Battleground States, and please also post your insights at the OpEdNews site below, where they will become part of a larger dialogue]

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-2008-Election-by-Sally-Liuzzo-Prado-081011-815.html

October 12, 2008

The racial hatred being promoted by Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign deserves comment. I have experienced this type of hatred on a very personal level. I am the youngest daughter of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who was murdered by the KKK AND a paid FBI informant on March 25th, 1965 while participating in the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march.

I find it appalling that someone who wants to lead our country would lower themselves to incite racial violence in an attempt to win a political campaign. Racism has been an ugly and shameful part of our country's history. We need to work together to heal the wounds racism has caused--not bring us backwards in our fight.

I also find it appalling that people in the McCain campaign are spreading rumors insinuating Barack Obama is of Arab decent, as if that in itself is a crime. Being from Detroit Michigan, I grew up in an area with a huge Arabic population. The Arab Americans that I have had contact with are decent people who love this country. They were devastated by the events of 09-11-2001 as proud Arab Americans. It is not right to condemn an entire group of people due to the actions of a few.

I saw Barack for the first time two or three years ago while he was promoting his book. This was long before his campaign for the presidency was announced. I remember thinking, "Who is this man? He is amazing!" There are not enough words to express how I feel about both Barack and Michelle Obama. If anyone can help heal race relations in this country, they can.

This campaign has been an emotional roller coaster for me. It has validated for me everything that my mother taught me. Although it has been 43 years since her death, the pain is still there. I still struggle with trying to keep my emotions under control. My mother's murder has never gotten much easier for me to talk about. As much as I miss her, I would not change a thing. I am so proud of her and the sacrifice she made for her fellow man. She taught me more in the six short years we were together, than many parents teach their children in a lifetime. She taught me to choose my friends by their character, not by their appearance or status. I have three children, my 19 year old twin daughters were born the same day my mother was killed, March 25th, twenty-four years later. She left a legacy that my family is passing on to our children. Hopefully in some small way, we can make this planet a better place for all of us.

Let us promote positive race relations instead of hate speech, especially in a presidential campaign.

Sally Liuzzo-Prado

Authors Bio: My name is Sally Liuzzo-Prado. I am the youngest daughter of Viola Gregg Liuzzo who was a civil rights worker murdered by the KKK and a paid FBI informant in 1965. My mother was participating in the historic Selma to Montgomery voting rights march and was ambushed by the Klan and shot in the head. I am single and live on the west coast. I am the mother of three wonderful adult children.

The Food Issue, for Farmer-in-Chief, an outstanding article from tomorrow's New York Times Magazine on the Failures of our Food Systems, with Recommended Remedies for the President-Elect

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:42:33 EDT

October 12, 2008

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration -- the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact -- so easy to overlook these past few years -- that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on -- but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy -- 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do -- as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis -- a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount -- from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases "food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little -- a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited -- designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so -- are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- organic, local, pasture-based, humane -- are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that "this is a conservative cause if ever there was one."

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done -- fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be -- and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage -- indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system -- characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table -- is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare -- black -- from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer -- ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer -- and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence row" and to "get big or get out."

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year -- a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant -- factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope -- thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy -- for trucking food as well as pumping water -- is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient."

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I've adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration's food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals -- if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops" -- farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops -- including animals -- as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason -- save current policy and custom -- that American farmers couldn't grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today's sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green -- that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don't farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields -- a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in "conservation" or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to "perennialize" commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses -- without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today's agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm -- as in Wendell Berry's elegant "solution." Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season's grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste -- all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these -- the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it -- has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will -- as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry's greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world's livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don't know, because we haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields. Today's organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world -- with a population expected to peak at 10 billion -- survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today's organic levels could increase the world's food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn't everything -- and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we're growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world's grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world's corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone -- however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels -- performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals -- is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely "driving and spraying," which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food -- millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don't. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production -- as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn't expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for "better" jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America -- not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day's drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do "food-system impact statements" before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do "open space") in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new "green jobs," which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy -- one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers' markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers' Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won't ever have food-safety problems -- it will -- only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department's perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda -- as well as the food security of billions of people around the world -- will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases -- whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons -- go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of "Food." It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a "junk food." We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them "junk food" -- and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you'll recall President Reagan's ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only "food" is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers' markets -- all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers'-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers' markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America's Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal -- not just federal policy and public education but the president's bully pulpit and the example of the first family's own dinner table -- to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to "edible education" -- in Alice Waters's phrase -- by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children's food culture, we'll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day -- the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible -- the other sense in which "sunlight" should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they're eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals' diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what's needed is a change of culture in America's thinking about food, then how America's first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn't be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you're in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence -- at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans' TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week -- a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory" over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system -- something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: "rocket.") But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry -- the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat -- meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value," after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced -- it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment -- that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto."

at OPEDNEWS! Barack on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Influence on his Ideas and Actions (Satyagraha, Brahacharya,Ahimsa, and Hartal)

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:05:01 EDT

BARACK OBAMA ON M.K. GANDHI, today at OpedNews!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/BARACK-OBAMA-On-Gandhi-s-B-by-Stephen-Fox-081010-196.html

Having studied Gandhi since 1974 with a reverence some reserve for the Bible and for the Koran, I am really happy to see Obama was strongly influenced by the life and teachings of Gandhi, as well.

Gandhi is ultimately the most practical and useful of all theologians, politicians, lawyers, strategists, and near-saints.

Notable that Obama mentions Gandhi's connection to Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. Your comments and insights are great, so please share them by also posting them after the OpEdNews posting of this article.

Thank you,

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor, New Mexico Sun News

Esquire supports Barack Obama, its first endorsement in magazine's 75-year history: something important to print out and distribute in Battleground States; great quote on Bushism!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:19:53 EDT

Associated Press October 8, 2008 WASHINGTON

Esquire is backing Democrat Barack Obama for president — its first endorsement in the magazine's 75-year history.

The Illinois senator is "the only possible choice to lead the country," editors wrote in the November issue, on newsstands Oct. 14.

They also encouraged people to vote for Obama because the next president will influence the direction of the Supreme Court.

"The best argument for the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States is written quite clearly in the peaks and squiggles of John Paul Stevens' EKG," they wrote of the 88-year-old justice.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain has run a "cheap and dishonorable campaign," they said.

And his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is "stunningly unqualified."

The editors wrote that McCain has not offered evidence of how things for Americans would change if he were to succeed President Bush.

"Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility," the editors said. ___

On the Net: http://www.esquire.com/

Bush 2004 States Are Tipping to Obama: John Nichols in The Nation

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:10:26 EDT

>>>>>>>>>10/08/2008>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The national polls are instructive early in the fall presidential campaign season. They tell us whether a candidate has strength, momentum, a chance.

But as the campaign enters its final stage -- with election day less than a month away -- the numbers from the states start to matter. That's where the electoral votes start to pile up. So what of the battleground states? Forget about states, competitive or otherwise, that backed Democrat John Kerry in 2004.

The latest polls from all of them favor Democrat Barack Obama this year. (Indeed, the analysts at Real Clear Politics have in recent days moved four 2004 states Kerry states that were supposed to be battlegrounds this year -- Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania -- from "Leans Obama" status to "Solid Obama.")

What of the states that backed Republican George Bush in 2004? Where are they trending. Here's something to ponder:

In 2004, Bush secured the presidency with the electoral votes of: Colorado Florida Iowa Missouri Nevada New Mexico North Carolina Ohio Florida

As of today, the Real Clear Politics poll of polls for each state -- which averages all the recent surveys of voters -- has Obama winning every one of these battlegrounds. If the election were held today, and if the polls proved correct, Obama would win the Electoral College by a margin of 364 votes to 174 -- a split roughly parallel to that in the 1996 race between Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" - Benito Mussolini

Barack on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Influence on his Ideas and Actions (Satyagraha, Bramacharya, Ahimsa, and Hartal)

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:40:38 EDT

October 2, 2008 Gandhi Service Day

Dear Friends,

It's a pleasure for me to join today in commemorating Mahatma Gandhi's day of birth, celebrated across America and around the world by service to our neighbors and other good works. Gandhi's commitment to creating positive change by bringing people together peacefully to demand it resonate as strongly today as they did during his lifetime.

Through the power of his example and his own unshakeable spirit, he inspired a people to resist oppression, sparking a revolution that freed a nation from colonial rule.

In formulating his strategy to achieve freedom, Gandhi had a choice, and he chose courage over fear. America faces many choices as we work to address the challenges of our time.

We must act from a place of strength and conviction to reclaim the high road and position of moral leadership that has defined the United States at its best. Gandhi's significance is universal. Countless people around the world have been touched by his spirit and example - his victory in turn inspired a generation of young Americans to peacefully wipe out a system of overt oppression that had endured for a century, and more recently led to velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and extinguished apartheid in South Africa.

Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of their great debt to Gandhi. His portrait hangs in my office to remind me that real change will not come from Washington - it will come when the people, united, bring it to Washington.

This is a pivotal election. This is our time for change. For far too long, we've watched as ordinary Americans work harder and harder for less and less.

We've watched our standing in the world erode as we continue to lose American lives in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged. I need you to stand up and work for change.

Let us all rededicate ourselves, every day from now until November 4th, and beyond, to living Gandhi's call to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Sincerely, Barack Obama

President Obama Must Appoint a Consumer Protectionist as FDA Commissioner, not another Big Pharma & Big Junk Food Corporate Hack, Please!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:05:28 EDT

Right now there is a huge battle going on in New Zealand regarding whether the nation should ban Aspartame, the Neurotoxic Carcinogenic Artificial Sweetener found in 7000 or so foods and medicines, including children's vitamins, even though it is metabolized as, among things, methanol, formaldehyde, and a proven brain tumor agent called DIKETOPIPERAZINE.

Having tried twice in the New Mexico Legislature and once in the Hawaii Legislature to ban the poison by statute, and all 3 times, watching the bill get eviscerated then strangled in committee, largely the result of corporate lobbyists, my highest faith now is considering what kind of FDA Commissioner it will be who President Obama appoints.

It won't continue to be Andrew Von Eschenbach, the Bush appointee. Unless it is a true consumer protectionist, and my personal favorite candidate is one of the few I completely trust, Dr. Howard Dean, aspartame will stay on the market. I mean for God's Sake: even Richard Nixon had the brains to give a Presidential Order to rescind FDA approval for Cyclamates, after evidence of its cancer causing neurotoxicity was presented to him by physicians and Washinton Attorney and former Nader Raider James Turner, co-author with Nader of The Chemical Feast, one of the first books on this I ever read, back in the early 70's.

The early 80's saw Donald Rumsfeld as CEO of G.D. Searle force the FDA to approve aspartame with his crony Arthur Hull Hayes as Commissioner. The entire grim nasty truth and sordid history is in an article RUMSFELD'S BIOWEAPON LEGACY, and elsewhere in purely legislative language in Hawaii Senate Concurrent Resolution 191 from 2008 which I wrote with Dr. Betty Martini. To read it, click here:

http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2008/Bills/SCR191_.htm

My reason for writing this has more to do with illuminating you as to what is going on in New Zealand. It started when an actress, Abby Cormack, realized that what was causing several chronic and undiagnosable or misdiagnosed neurologicail ailments was her consumption of sugarless gum and diet sodas. Meet Abby Cormack:

Ten months ago in OpEdNews, I published this article, Aspartame Research Needed, Not Coca-Cola Soft Sell This was basically a press release put out by consumer activists in New Zealand.

click here to read it:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/life_a_stephen__071127_aspartame_research_n.htm

Betty Martini, Honorary Doctorate of Humanities, a few days later published this at OpEdNews, Aspartame and New Zealand:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dr__bett_071129_aspartame__26_new_zeal.htm

This has heated up and about ten days ago, a Coca Cola Toxicologist and Abby had a debate on New Zealand National Television in an almost 9 minute broadcast, longer of course than would be possible in the American media in the post-Rumsfeld era, and of greater interest to New Zealanders that it would be to most Americans, who get that battered guinea pig look of boredom, if you speak of such things as neurotoxic food additives in almost all Junk Food. Is it genocide? Well, perhaps, but that is another discussion beyond the scope of this article.

Here it is the news coverage from Channel 3 New Zealand introducing the video of the "debate" between Abby Cormack and the Coke lobbyist (or what ever else you want to put after Coke), reporting , which by American Standards, might seem a bit objective:

"Aspartame is the artificial sweetener commonly found in products such as diet soft drink, lite yoghurt and sugar free gum to name just a few.

But recent reports linking it to a range of diseases including cancer and brain lesions have seen sales of aspartame-containing products plummet as New Zealanders returned to consuming their high-sugar alternatives.

Is there any foundation to the claims? Dr Bernadene Magnuson is a toxicologist who is in New Zealand, sponsored to present a series of seminars by Cocacola. Both she and Abby Cormack, who believes she is a victim of aspartame poisoning, spoke to Sunrise.

This is the video of the newscast/debate:

http://www.3news.co.nz/Video/Lifestyle/tabid/372/articleID/73529/cat/58/Default.aspx#video

This is my own personal response: First, the Coke Toxicologist's "study" was totally funded by industry.

"I commend Channel 3 for covering this more than would be possible in the SA, where people seem bored with neurutoxicity discussions and where Coca Cola and Big Junk food control the media, preventing such "radical" talk in toto.

The rent-a-toxicologist championing industry-paid-for "studies" is works for Coca Cola! She could never explain why Coca Cola and Ajinomoto of Japan (world's largest manufacturer of Aspartame as well as another neurotoxic additive, MSG) workers unloading Aspartame tankers must wear Hazardous Materials Suits.

Aspartame was forced on the market by now-disgraced Donald Rumsfeld and his crony Arthur Hull Hayes in 1981; google RUMSFELD'S BIOWEAPON LEGACY, plus medical texts by HJ Roberts and Russell Blaylock.

Formaldehyde: half life of 90 seconds, yet used to pickle organ specimens for hundred of years?) Why would diabetics knowingly consume chemicals metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde, which lodge in the mitochondria, reaking havoc on the chromosomes and the neurological functioning of the body?

The ghastly truth is totally obscene, no matter what disgusting baldfaced lies Coca Cola and Ajinomoto perpetrate, they WILL be brought to court to pay for harm to hundreds of millions of people, like the USA's 1990's tobacco suits.

The 2008 Hawaii Senate Concurrent Resolution 191 could be copied for NZ legislative action; ask your MP to cosponsor! Here is URL to read that Resolution, which I wrote with Dr. Betty Martini, Founder, Mission Possible International:
http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2008/Bills/SCR191_.htm

New Zealand's Prime Minister, the usually Honorable Helen Elizabeth Clark and (former) Food Safety and Police Minister, Annette King were duped into regurgitating lizabeth Clark and (these same corporate lies replying to my letters about aspartame 4 years ago about aspartame; still, NZ is closer to banning aspartame than any nation in the world; NZ's plummeting aspartame sales prove it! Abby's point about 92 aspartame attributed symptoms from FDA's own record was interrupted by Coca Cola's hired gun. Please write Obama and his new FDA Commissioner asking them to ban it straightaway in 2009!

Watch the video and when the Coke Toxicologist states:
"She does just not know the science," it reminded me of John McCain in the second "Debate," saying "My friends....."

Consumer Protection is a vital function of the FDA, not serving Big Pharma and Big Junk Food, even if you rightly consider it to be a totally broken down agency, in need of a total top to bottom overhaul. The FDA Commissioner regulates a full 25% of the American Economy

SO HOW ABOUT IT, PRESIDENT OBAMA? Will you get that poison off the market? If so, please start talking about it soon!

What I Learned At The Sarah Palin Rally Before They Threw Me Out! By Linda Milazzo [powerful and indispensable in Battleground States when printed out and given out widely!]

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:06:12 EDT

[This is an amazing story by a very courageous woman and what happened when she went to a Palin rally (the one where she started the BS about Obama and Ayers) and shouted in a stadium: "LIAR"! It reveals so much about her shallowness and her veiled racism that when distributed widely in borderline states, I think it could help us win all 13 of them! Please take some time and make sure everyone you know gets a copy of this and prints it out for 5 neighbors! 26 days left! from Stephen Fox]

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-I-Learned-At-The-Sara-by-Linda-Milazzo-081007-243.html

October 7, 2008

On Saturday I went to Carson, California, to attend a rally for Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. For those who aren't familiar with the city of Carson, it's approximately 19 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. In the 2004 Presidential election, Carson, which had a population of just under 90,000, donated three times as much money to George W. Bush than to John Kerry. This year, for the 2008 elections, residents of Carson have given slightly more to Republican candidates than to Democrats by a slim margin of $3,000. Thus the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Carson has narrowed.

The Palin rally, which you may have seen on youtube and TV, was held at the Home Depot ADT Tennis Stadium. Because of the surprising popularity of Mrs. Palin and easy access to free tickets, all 20,000 stadium seats, plus an overflow area were filled. I got a handful of tickets, recruited my friend Rebecca Tobias, Program Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics, and trekked on out to Carson. We scored ground level seats in the stadium from which I watched, listened and steadily bristled. When I could no longer stomach Palin's lies and distortions, I jumped up, and at the top of my lungs, repeatedly called Palin a L-I-A-R!

I was shouted down in Palinese by her 20,000 admirers, then escorted out by security. I took extra time as I climbed the steps from the ground up to the top just to keep her admirers shouting. The few minute reprieve from Palin's lies was to me a righteous diversion.

When I neared the top of the steps I turned back to Mrs. Palin and continued to call her a L-I-A-R, until I was ushered out the door. Thankfully my escorts showed me the utmost respect for they privately shared my feelings. They're working folk. They see through Mrs. Palin. But that's just the start of this story...

You see, I'd gone to this event for a reason. Not to see Sarah Palin. I already knew who she was. I went to see the Palinettes - the supporters of this unspectacular woman who had so readily been won over. I wanted to meet them and speak with them and understand their attachment to this lowest common denominator politician - a woman so unqualified for Vice President that her appointer running mate should be imprisoned for treason. As a patriot and voter, I disagree categorically with the choice of Sarah Palin. I seek knowledge, experience, maturity, integrity, charity, clarity, humanity, intellectual curiosity, and wisdom from the leaders I select. Since Palin, in my opinion, exhibits none of these traits, I wanted to assess her supporters' rationale (or rational-ity).

What I witnessed was thoroughly alarming!!

Among this raptured crowd of 20,000 was a frightening mix of Christian zealots, anti-abortion fanatics, and mostly white suburban women and men reconnecting with their high school mentality. Bright colored pom-poms were everywhere - as if Sarah Palin were head cheerleader, the women were on her squad, and the men were the football heroes. Sarah Palin, the quintessential 4ever-school-girl had revitalized their youth and saved them from adulthood. Check out the red pom-pom "hair" on the man behind Palin. If that isn't high school, what is??

Photo by Linda Milazzo

Want further proof of pom-pom Palin? Try this as an experiment. Put on an audio of a Sarah Palin speech. Close your eyes and listen. What you'll hear is the high pitched voice of a teenage girl, speaking in circular reasoning, incomplete sentences, and juvenile idioms. No sophistication. No leadership. No wisdom. Just the sound of a snarky school girl. Sarah Palin is America's greatest nightmare. Sarah Palin is George W. Bush in a dress!

Of course there are those who might say that my own outburst toward Sarah Palin was juvenile - to which I'd respond with a resounding NO! It's never juvenile to speak truth to ignorance. To say nothing would be derelict. Certainly, I'd be naive to think that calling Palin a L-I-A-R would make her adorers believe me. But to sit quietly while Palin accused Obama of being:

"someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists [Bill Ayers] who would target their own country"

would make me complicit in the group-think that promotes a lie to a truth. I'd rather be thrown out for the truth than group-hugged for a lie.

While Palin's peevishness is appalling, it pales in comparison to the dangerous ideology that she and her followers share. By unleashing Sarah Palin, John McCain has reinvigorated the anti-choice/anti-woman/anti-reproductive rights fanatics, who not long ago were at the forefront of domestic terror. Interesting that Palin insinuates Obama when referring to:

"terrorists who would target their own country"

when it's those who share her ideology who have committed heinous domestic crimes. Let us not forget the health-care workers who were murdered by anti-choice radicals who share Palin's no exceptions for abortion beliefs. Let us not forget the women and family clinics that were bombed. Let us not forget Eric Rudolph - the anti-abortion terrorist who killed two people and injured 100 others during the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. The same Eric Rudolph who bombed abortion clinics that killed even more people. The same Eric Rudolph who sadistically attacked a gay bar. Let us not forget that the Sarah Palin wing of anti-choice fanaticism victimized America for years, committing crime after heinous crime. What John McCain has unleashed on America with his choice of Sarah Palin is an outright invitation to these cults to wreak havoc all over again.

On Saturday I got a taste of this anti-choice fanaticism as Palin's zealots shouted "baby killers" at the pro-Obama activists outside. I saw it first hand with the anti-choice tirades looped again and again by one Palin follower after another. This is their mission - their single issue cause - and Sarah Palin has given it life. With the economy spiraling downward, the world at war, the planet over-heating, and continents dying from famine and disease, Sarah Palin's followers are driven by one issue only - the total end of abortion.

Yes, the silly Palin chatter of "she's one of us 'cause she talks like us and is a regular person" was also spun at Saturday's event. As was propaganda about Obama "getting paid undercover by some other country" and "doubt that Obama was really born in Hawaii because his birth certificate can't be found". Sadly this level of ignorance exists - even in Southern California. In fact, it was so illogically mind-boggling that I audio-taped it as proof.

The perilous stupidity that I witnessed on Saturday made me believe more than ever that under NO CIRCUMSTANCE can John McCain and Sarah Palin be elected. In fact, their election LOSS must be so severe that Sarah Palin can NEVER be resurrected for a future campaign. Furthermore, John McCain's blatant disregard for the safety and stability of this nation by choosing Sarah Palin should cost him his Arizona Senate seat and force him from office forever. He has dishonored his nation to such an extent that any reference to his heroism as a prisoner of war has been rendered permanently irrelevant.

Authors Bio: Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. Since 1974, she has divided her time between the entertainment industry, government organizations & community development projects and educational programs. Linda began her writing career over 30 years ago, starting out in advertising and promotions. From 1976 to 1989, she operated an independent public relations service providing specialty writing for individual and corporate clients. For the past six years, Linda has focused on political writing. Her essays, letters and commentaries have appeared in domestic and international journals, newspapers, magazines and on dozens of respected news and opinion websites. She's an educator and creator of a writers' program she's taught privately and in public schools. She currently facilitates an advocacy writing workshop and is developing an advocacy writing program to be implemented in public and private educational institutions and in community based organizations. A political and social activist since the Vietnam War, Linda attributes her revitalized-fully-engaged-intense-head-on-non-stop-political activism to the UNFORTUNATE EXISTENCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH and her disgust with greed-ridden American imperialism, environmental atrocities, egregious war, nuclear proliferation, lying leaders, and global tyranny!

Please comment on UNM Lobo article on McCain's Visit today! McCain's mission: Presidential candidate visits UNM to discuss economic crisis, criticize Obama

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:59:08 EDT

By: Hunter Riley
Posted: 10/7/08
Close to 1,000 people came to see Republican presidential candidate John McCain on campus Monday.

Meanwhile, outside the SUB, about 250 students and community members rallied in protest of McCain, chanting, carrying signs and marching on campus.

McCain discussed the economic crisis and criticized his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama.

"There are essential things we don't know about Sen. Obama or the record that he brings," McCain said. "All people want to know is what this man has actually accomplished and done."

McCain said Obama does not have the experience to run a country and that he is unsure of the fate of America in Obama's hands. He said the only way to know which way Obama will take the country is to look at the direction he's taken in the past.

But Obama has called McCain a liar every time he questions his policies or his record, McCain said.

"I don't need lessons about telling the truth, and were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn't seek advice from a Chicago politician," McCain said.

The audience was vocal in their support of McCain.

"Who is the real Obama?" McCain said.

"A terrorist! A liar!" some audience members shouted.

McCain said that if he becomes president, he will freeze spending on everything that is not a valuable function of the government.

"I'll balance the federal budget by the end of my term in office," he said.

McCain said the state of the economy will have an effect on students and that he will help students struggling to pay for college.

McCain said Obama is personally acquainted with the people who created the economic crisis we are facing today. Obama has received more money from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae than any other senator in history, McCain said.

McCain said Obama is not being direct with how he will spend federal money and that Americans should pay careful attention to that.

"According to third-party estimates, he will increase government spending by over $860 billion, but he denied it," McCain said. "He has refused to tell you how much he does plan to spend."

While McCain directed attacks at his opponent, protesters assembled outside the rally to show their support for Obama.

Sophomore Zoe Kolon said McCain's criticism of Obama wasn't strong enough to overcome the flaws in the Republican platform.

"I would say Obama offers a lot for the economy. With the state the economy is in right now, I think Obama is more likely to pull it out than McCain would," Kolon said. "I am against McCain's stance on the war and his tax break, giving money to the upper class."

Gabbi Campos / Daily Lobo
Students outside the SUB protest Sen. John McCain's visit on Monday.

Protesters outside the SUB ballroom where McCain was speaking were loud enough to be heard inside.

Emily Zamballo, who attended the rally outside the SUB, said it was inspiring to see so many young people caring about politics.

"It's just a nice thing to see traditions carried on when people like me are getting very depressed about what has been happening and we are very sorry about the state of our country," she said. "We feel responsible for it a lot."
© Copyright 2008 Daily Lobo

From Albuquerque today: ABC POLITICAL NEWS: Ayers, Keating...Kitchen Sink McCain/Palin Step Up Attacks Obama leads in OH--[Respond on editorial pages!]

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:30:55 EDT

From Albuquerque today: ABC POLITICAL NEWS: Ayers, Keating...Kitchen Sink McCain/Palin Step Up Attacks Obama leads in OH--[Respond on editorial pages!]

By KAREN TRAVERS and RIGEL ANDERSON, October 6, 2008

[NEW MEXICO and battleground states & Obama Supporters: Time to fight back on the editorial pages of America to tear apart McCain's Albuquerque diatribe, item by item!----many political battles and whole wars can actually be fought and won on the Editorial page! Letters, 200 words; OpEds, 600: send it out to many editors, the same folks who are about to write the endorsements!-from Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor, New Mexico Sun News]

Today in Albuquerque, NM, John McCain unleashed perhaps his strongest attack of the entire campaign on Barack Obama. The Republican nominee called his opponent out on his fundraising, his (in)action on the financial crisis and even questioned his honesty and openness.

Stepping up his rhetoric against the Democratic nominee, McCain accused him of not being forthright about his record.

"Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asked, per ABC News' Bret Hovell. "Even at this late hour in the campaign there are things we don't know about Senator Obama or the record that he brings to this campaign."

Couple this with running mate Sarah Palin in Florida hammering Obama on his "associating" with Bill Ayers and bringing up the fear card for the first time.

"I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America -- as the greatest source for good in this world," Palin said of Obama to 2,000 supporters at a rally in Clearwater, Florida this morning, per ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala. "I'm afraid this someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."

"This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change that anyone can believe in, not my kids, not for your kids," Palin added.

The Obama campaign fired back with its own "association" attack, releasing a 13-minute documentary about McCain's connection to the Keating Five scandal.

The two-front attack comes the day before the second of three presidential debates and as another battleground state poll shows McCain/Palin trailing Obama/Biden in a key state that President Bush won in 2004.

Obama leads McCain 51-45 among likely voters in an ABC News/Washington Post poll released tonight. The economy is far and away the most important issue to Ohio voters and Obama is "riding economic discontent to an advantage" there, per ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer. Obama is "bolstered in part by financially stressed voters in the state's hard-hit industrial belt and following it up with a more extensive ground campaign in this key contest."

Digging deeper into the numbers finds some interesting statistics that will have the folks on Michigan Avenue smiling tonight. Not surprisingly, Obama leads by a wide margin (71-26) in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic Cleveland area. But Obama also has a 17-point lead in the northeastern region, which includes the Rust Belt industrial cities of Akron, Canton and Youngstown. John Kerry eked out a 52-47 win in that region in 2004 over President Bush. In the center and southeastern corner of the state, a region that is more rural and more solidly Republican, Obama has a 51-45 lead. Bush won this same region by 8 points in 2004.

Since wrapping up the Democratic nomination in June, Obama has had 23 events in Ohio, per an analysis of ABC News' records more than any other battleground state. McCain has had 30 events in Ohio since wrapping up his nomination in early March, second only to Florida where he has had 34 events.

Obama hits the ground with a two-day bus tour on Oct 9-10 through southern and central Ohio with stops in Dayton, Cincinnati, Portsmouth and other TBA cities. This is Obama's first visit to the Buckeye State since Sept 9. McCain was last there on Sept. 29.

Tuesday's town hall style debate gives Obama a chance to keep the focus on issues and gives McCain the opportunity to regain lost ground in a format where he is most comfortable.

ROLLING STONE Article: Make-Believe Maverick A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:20:44 EDT

Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
TIM DICKINSON

Posted Oct 16, 2008 7:00 PM

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• VIDEO: Five Myths About John McCain
• The Double-Talk Express
• Mad Dog Palin: The Full Story

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam -- call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

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This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In Mc- Cain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put "country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer" and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."

It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."

We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics." After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left -- breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.

In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."

The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron -- the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed." (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)

Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.

"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.

"On all three -- sadly, sadly, sadly -- McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."

THE NAVY BRAT

John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney "Slew" McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. "Junior" McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America's forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.

The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. "At the smallest provocation," he would hold his breath until he passed out: "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn't play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: "My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me."

McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father -- himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex -- had secured a political post as the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker."

McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.

McCain's admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend's parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman's uniform.

His grandfather's name and his father's forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea -- to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt -- the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain's classmates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.

Back on campus, McCain's short fuse was legend. "We'd hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate -- doors slamming -- and one of them would go running down the hall," recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. "It was a regular occurrence."

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant -- even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

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"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather -- they couldn't exactly get rid of him."

McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom -- 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

BOTTOM GUN

In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.

In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.

Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the "addictive" game of craps. McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout.

That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark "a small international incident" like McCain had? Any other pilot would have "found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry," says Butler.

"But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO -- you know?"

McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn't to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his "distant, inscrutable patriarch." He needed to secure a command post in the Navy -- and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.

As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field -- an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather -- to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.

With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.

In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.

That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.

By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable -- and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"

TRIAL BY FIRE

Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.

It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. Perched in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.

Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father's expectations, to finally be known as something other than the fuck-up grandson of one of the Navy's greatest admirals. That morning, preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot's dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach.

Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.

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McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs "cooked off," blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren't serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny "came through without a scratch."

The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.

These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then "gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television -- bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."

VIOLATING THE CODE

Ensconced in Apple's villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot's career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain's media "base," an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for "straight talk."

Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. "Now that I've seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship," he told Apple, "I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.

But McCain's misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire -- following a holiday on the French Riviera -- McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.

McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.

The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force -- there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force's top honors.

It was a dangerous mission -- taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam's fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day's kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that "can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."

But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs -- just as the SAM blew his wing off.

To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson's account of John McCain's internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we're to understand, steeled the man -- transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.

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There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain's broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain's mistreatment -- and the transformation it is alleged to have produced -- are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they "give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades." Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number -- and to make no "statements disloyal to my country."

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic -- "he wasn't exceptional one way or the other" -- has a corrosive effect on military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?" Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs -- or he'd be dead."

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the "crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report -- picked up by The New York Times -- in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

THE CONFESSION

In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

"He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished," says Dramesi. "A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case." In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain's experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968, when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed "Cat" got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was holding, splattering ink across the room.

"They taught you too well, Mac Kane," Cat snarled, kicking over a chair. "They taught you too well."

The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate." "

"John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals," says Butler. "John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW."

McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain's torture, "For five and a half years this went on." In fact, McCain's torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. "They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate," Butler recalls.

By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.

Even those in the military who celebrate McCain's patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. "It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on," says Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. "It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don't think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I'm not sure that's the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I'm not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn't do something to you. Doesn't do something to you psychologically, doesn't do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament."

"A BELLICOSE HAWK"

The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter's ambition was now on overdrive. He wanted to study at the National War College -- but military brass turned him down as underqualified. So McCain appealed the decision to the top: John Warner, the Secretary of the Navy and a friend of his father. Warner, who now serves in the Senate alongside McCain, overruled the brass and gave the POW a slot. McCain also got his wings back, even though his injuries prevented him from raising his hands above shoulder height to comb his own hair.

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McCain was eager to make up for lost time -- and the times were favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon administration's illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News & World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic defense of Nixon's discredited foreign policy. "I admire President Nixon's courage," he wrote. "It is difficult for me to understand . . . why people are still criticizing his foreign policy -- for example, the bombing in Cambodia."

In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the "goddamn gooks" and pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally gung-ho. "John has always been a very bellicose hawk," says John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War College. "When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we had the national will."

It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual "prayer breakfast" in Sacramento.

Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer of the largest air squadron in the Navy -- the Replacement Air Group based in Jacksonville, Florida -- training carrier pilots. It was a post for which McCain flatly admits, "I was not qualified." By now, however, he was unembarrassed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking on with pride, McCain wept openly.

BOOZE AND PORK

If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband's equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his "long tall Sally" was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.

By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights -- even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy's liaison to the Senate -- the same politically connected post once occupied by his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower, the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor. Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.

As the Navy's top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration's decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier -- at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today's dollars -- was pork-barrel politics.

Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. "He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy," one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn't give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter -- his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison -- signed the bill.

In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they "cohabitated as husband and wife" for the first nine months of the affair.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain's second marriage -- rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman -- was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

McCain's friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans -- with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year's holidays -- never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution" two years later, he and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last March when she endorsed his candidacy. "Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed," she said. "Well, obviously, this is the nominee of the party."

THE CARPETBAGGER

As his marriage unraveled, McCain's naval career was also stalling out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.

So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside edge to good use. Within minutes of the incumbent's official retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to the way he now markets himself, McCain's campaign ads billed him as an insider -- a man "who knows how Washington works." Though the Reagans no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling with them.

"Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience," McCain writes, "I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell." And sell it he did. "Listen, pal," he told an opponent who challenged him during a candidate forum. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."

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To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.

Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today's subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.

McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating's "great respect for military people" and the duo's "political and personal affinity." But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf, Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so."

THE KEATING FIVE

In congress, Rep. John McCain quickly positioned himself as a GOP hard-liner. He voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday in 1983 -- a stance he held through 1989. He backed Reagan on tax cuts for the wealthy, abortion and support for the Nicaraguan contras. He sought to slash federal spending on social programs, and he voted twice against campaign-finance reform. He cites as his "biggest" legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.

McCain voted to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a group that sponsored an anti-gay-rights ballot initiative in Oregon. His anti-government fervor was renewed in the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when he called for abolishing the departments of Education and Energy. The following year, he championed a sweeping measure that would have imposed a blanket moratorium on any increase of government oversight.

In this context, McCain's recent record -- opposing the new GI Bill, voting to repeal the federal minimum wage, seeking to deprive 3.8 million kids of government health care -- looks entirely consistent. "When jackasses like Rush Limbaugh say he's not conservative, that's just total nonsense," says former Sen. Gary Hart, who still counts McCain as a friend.

Although a hawkish Cold Warrior, McCain did show an independent streak when it came to the use of American military power. Because of his experience in Vietnam, he said, he didn't favor the deployment of U.S. forces unless there was a clear and attainable military objective. In 1983, McCain broke with Reagan to vote against the deployment of Marine peacekeepers to Lebanon. The unorthodox stance caught the attention of the media -- including this very magazine, which praised McCain's "enormous courage." It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. McCain recognized early on how the game was played: The Washington press corps "tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected quarters," he later noted. "Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention and eager for more."

When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor, Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse. Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.

In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.

"Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution," says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. "And it hasn't happened since."

Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure -- until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out.

"McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators," recalls Black. "He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing."

McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised "poor judgment." The committee never investigated Cindy's investment with Keating.

The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity -- which provided medical care to patients in developing countries -- to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.

Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. "I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs," he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors dropped the investigation in 1994 -- but not before publishing a report that included details of Cindy's drug use.

Notified that the report was being released, Sen. McCain leapt into action. He dispatched his top political consultant to round up a group of friendly reporters, for whom Cindy staged a seemingly selfless, Oprah-style confession of her past addiction. Her drug use became part of the couple's narrative of straight talk and bravery in the face of adversity. "If what I say can help just one person to face the problem," Cindy declared, "it's worthwhile."

FAVORS FOR DONORS

In the aftermath of the Keating Five, McCain realized that his career was in a "hell of a mess." He had made George H.W. Bush's shortlist for vice president in 1988, but the Keating scandal made him a political untouchable. McCain needed a high horse -- so his long-standing opposition to campaign-finance reform went out the window. Working with Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, McCain authored a measure to ban unlimited "soft money" donations from politics.

The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on reporters who questioned his wife's financial ties to Keating -- calling them "liars" and "idiots." Predictably, the press coverage was merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. "I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied," he later wrote. "It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day." Mr. Straight Talk was born.

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Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn't affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. "He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs," says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in -- with McCain's fervent support -- a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street's catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," relies on Gramm to guide him.

McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as "fat cats." The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.

The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give "serious consideration" to the company's request to become a long-distance carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier EchoStar cleared McCain's committee, the company's founder celebrated by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain's presidential bid.

Whatever McCain's romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly $85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC's delay of his proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in campaign donations.

"You're the head of the commerce committee," Paxson told McCain, according to The Washington Post. "The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter."

Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several weeks later -- the day after McCain used Paxson's jet to fly to Florida for a fundraiser -- McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator's meddling "highly unusual." Nonetheless, within a week of McCain's second letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson's deal.

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit -- a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute -- founded to bolster McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money -- itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 -- just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: "Appearance of corruption, anyone?"

"HE IS HOTHEADED"

Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. "If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print," says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an "immature and unprofessional reaction to slights" that is "little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy."

McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an "incompetent little shit." Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

In the Senate -- where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has "very few friends" -- his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a "pompous self-serving son of a bitch" who "possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain." In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that "only an asshole would put together a budget like this."

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room." The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."

McCain's frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton's teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked. "Because her father is Janet Reno!"

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More recently, McCain's jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The senator once cautioned that "the world's only superpower . . . should never make idle threats" -- but that didn't stop him from rewriting the lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain responded by singing, "bomb bomb bomb" Iran. The loose talk was meant to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran, whose foreign minister condemned McCain's "jokes about genocide" as a testament to his "disturbed state of mind" and "warmongering approach to foreign policy."

"NEXT UP, BAGHDAD!"

The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations -- from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer -- that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.

"He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun."

McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton's involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.

But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann -- a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi -- came aboard as McCain's top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against "trading American blood for Iraqi blood" had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals -- a belief he describes as a "sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity." By 1999, McCain was championing what he called "rogue state rollback." First on the hit list: Iraq.

Privately, McCain brags that he was the "original neocon." And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. "There's other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States," he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. "It isn't just Afghanistan. We're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others." A few days later, he told Jay Leno's audience that "some other countries" -- possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria -- had aided bin Laden.

A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that "we'll do fine" in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, "The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may -- and I emphasize may -- have come from Iraq."

Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick Cheney's favorite lie: "The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear. . . . So we will have to act." On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that "there is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road."

That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. "In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power," they insisted, claiming that there was "no doubt" that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction "aga

Palin has either lost her mind and/or this is Karl Rove at work! Palin says Obama 'palling around' with terrorists

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:39:10 EDT

By JIM KUHNHENN,
Associated Press Writer
13 minutes ago

CARSON, Calif., - Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin
on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with
terrorists" because of an association with a former '60s radical,
stepping up an effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American
voters.

Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings,
including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol,
during the Vietnam War era. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, has denounced Ayers' radical views and activities.

In 1970, the group was blamed for a pipe bomb in San Francisco that
killed a police officer and injured another. Three members of the
group were killed in 1970 in an accidental explosion of a bomb in
their Greenwich Village basement.

While it is known that Obama and Ayers live in the same Chicago
neighborhood, served on a charity board together and had a fleeting
political connection, no one has provided evidence to say the pair
ever palled around. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were
associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts.

Nonetheless, Palin made the comments at two appearances in separate
states.

"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal
around with terrorists who targeted their own country," Palin told a
rally of about 10,000 gathered at a tennis stadium in Carson, a
suburb of Los Angeles.

That echoed comments she made earlier in the day to donors at a
private airport in Englewood, Colo.: "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own
country."

Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make
attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race. Coming late in the campaign, Palin's remark could be particularly incendiary, however, and could knock Obama off his focus on the troubled economy.

The campaign was clearly prepared to raise the Ayers' connection to
Obama. In addition to Palin's comments at her appearances Saturday,
the McCain campaign distributed Palin's comments to reporters.

"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,"
Palin said. "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see
an America of exceptionalism."

The Obama campaign called Palin's remarks offensive but not
surprising in light of news stories detailing the campaign's come-
from-behind offensive.

"What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend
their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build
up our economy," Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan said in a
statement.

Palin's remarks come as e-mails circulate on the Internet with
suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical,
foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. Obama is a native
of Hawaii who lived in Indonesia as boy. He is a Christian.

Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had
encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide
then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go
get to them."

The escalated effort to attack Obama's character dovetails with TV
ads by outside groups questioning Obama's ties to Ayers, convicted
former Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Obama's former
pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.

Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a
school-reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a
meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran
for office in the mid-1990s.

In an interview with CBS News earlier in the week, Palin didn't name
any newspapers or magazines that shaped her view of the world. On
Saturday, she cited a New York Times story that detailed Obama's
relationship with Ayers.

Summing up its findings, the Times wrote: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.'"

Earlier Saturday, Palin spent 35 minutes at a diner in Greenwood
Village where she met with Blue Star Moms, a support group of
families whose sons or daughters are serving in the armed forces.
Reporters were allowed in the diner for less than five minutes before being ushered out by the campaign.

Palin, whose 19-year-old son, Track, deployed last month as a private with an Army combat team, was overheard at one point commiserating with one of the mothers: "Any time I ask my son how he's doing, he says, 'Mom, I'm in the Army now.'"

DICK CHENEY-ROLE MODEL Editorial, New York Times

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:23:14 EDT

October 4, 2008

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution.

And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution. Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough.

He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution. This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue.

In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend.

The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq. There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.

Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”

The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

Karl Rove in Newsweek>>>> What is your Response?

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:57:08 EDT

Palin, McCain and the Weeks Ahead

Palin's ties to 'everyday Americans' aren't an argument for her candidacy. But let's treat her ability to inspire the public for what it is: an asset, not a liability.

Karl RoveNEWSWEEKFrom the magazine issue dated Oct 13, 2008

With respect, Jon misses the principal arguments for Sarah Palin. She is the governor of a state with an $11 billion operating budget, a $1.7 billion capital budget and nearly 29,000 employees; she's got more executive experience than any candidate for president or vice president this year. In Alaska she took on the state political establishment, the incumbent Republican governor and the oil companies. She's a rising star who accentuates John McCain's maverick strengths and a "hockey mom" who has developed a powerful tie to ordinary voters.

That link isn't itself an argument for Palin. But being able to connect with, and inspire, the public is an asset —not a liability. As for Jon's argument against "everyday Americans" as political leaders, many great presidents have been more average than elitist. Ronald Reagan, from Eureka College, was a far better leader than Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton. Wilson would have given you 100 Supreme Court opinions he disagreed with, whether you wanted to listen or not.

Barack Obama has also introduced Joe Biden as a Joe Six-Pack, saying, "His family didn't have much money … sometimes moving in with the in-laws or working weekends to make ends meet." Biden himself rarely misses a chance to say, "I was an Irish Catholic kid from Scranton with a father who, like many of yours in tough economic times, fell on hard times." Both veep candidates are trying to portray themselves as ordinary folks.

On experience, I'm all for it. But judgment is at least as important. Biden has 35 years in the Senate, yet his record on national-security issues during that span has been atrocious. He might be able to name Germany's chancellor, but he was wrong in his fierce opposition to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and to the surge in 2007. Even Democrats don't see Biden as president. He got 0.9 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses. Forced out of the 1988 White House race for plagiarizing, he is that blend of longevity and long-windedness that Washington accepts as statesmanship.

McCain and Palin face an uphill struggle. Economic woes, war and the natural desire of Americans to give the other side a chance (after eight years with one party in the White House) should mean a big edge for Obama and Biden. But the race is tight, no candidate can get above 50 percent for more than a day or two, and it is likely to stay close right to the end.

The reason is, people have persistent doubts about whether Obama is qualified. NEWSWEEK's poll last month found that 47 percent felt Obama "has enough experience in politics and government to be a good president" but 46 percent said he didn't. In the recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 45 percent said Obama doesn't have "the needed experience," the same as last March. Even the late-September CBS News/New York Times poll found that while 46 percent feel "Obama has prepared himself well enough for the job of president," 45 percent do not. For good reason: Barack Obama has less than half a term in the Senate, where he's proposed little, accomplished less and spent virtually every day campaigning—as if being on the trail is a principal qualification for president.

McCain-Palin must deepen those doubts by pounding away on questions about Obama's character, judgment and values. Drawing on Obama's own record and statements, they need to paint him as a big spender, class warrior and cultural elitist; they need to say he's never worked across party lines or gotten his hands dirty solving big issues. But the duo must also give voters reasons to support them. They must crystallize a positive, forward-looking vision so people who see Obama as unqualified have something to hang on to. It can't be a laundry list of positions. McCain-Palin must offer a narrative about what they will do to help America see better days, especially on kitchen-table concerns.

McCain must launch these themes in the two remaining debates. Knockouts are welcome but unlikely and unnecessary. Introducing a theme and sticking to it day after day worked this past July, when McCain successfully depicted Obama as a celebrity taken with his own press notices. The GOP nominee did it right in the first debate when his assaults were formal and indirect ("Senator Obama has the most liberal voting record …") while Obama was personal and direct ("John, 10 days ago you said …").

McCain and Palin should also respond to key misstatements by Obama-Biden, but only to flip the discussion back to Obama's own deficits. They should not chase rabbits: that would only occupy time better devoted to who can fix the big stuff broken in Washington and reach across the aisle to work for the American people by putting country first.

The election still favors Obama. But Sarah Palin's debate performance, and the passage of the economic-rescue plan, may bookend a bad couple of weeks for McCain. He has a month to turn things around. It's doable; but it won't be easy.

Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President Bush, is a NEWSWEEK Contributor.

Tell Karl, John, Dick, and Sarah in a Letter to the Editor that this Ayers Tactic Just Won't Work! THEN, send it to editorial page editors in Battleground States, particl VA, NC,MISSISSIPPI, AND OHIO

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:15:40 EDT

The Republicans seem to be getting down to last-straw mean tactics, but we have to be ready for them! The New York Times today hit the nail on the head with this headline OBAMA AND '60s BOMBER: A LOOK AT CROSSED PATHS.

HERE IS A LINK TO THAT ARTICLE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

This is prescient anticipatory coverage, indeed, anticipating the R's next step, for anyone who is slightly paying attention now, to get ready for the next campaign barrages, which will probably go all month: Obama as Muslim, Obama as African-American,Obama as Radical, Obama as (I have even heard and rec'd such things from folks I normally consider as sane) Satanist.

Next comes "Obama the Friend of the Radical Weatherman Bomber, Bill Ayers."

This is what I have to say: back in the late 60's and early 70's, I
remember meeting Mark Rudd, who either blew up a building or tried to, I don't remember which; I met Angela Davis, and golly: very early one Sunday morning after one of the famous San Francisco Peace Marches to end the Vietnam War in 1967, I even saw, driving a yellow Porsche Convertible about 60 miles an hour through Haight Ashbury, JANIS JOPLIN!

I visited Patty Hearst at the San Mateo County Jail after she got arrested for Bank Robbery. So what? I gave her a book of microphotographs to help her while away the hours. Does that mean I was in the Symbionese Liberation Army? Naaah....If I were running for dog catcher in Talahatchi County, a Neocon strategist could and would use that against me...big deal!

Those were wild times, and sometimes I am quietly very proud of such weird and unusual stories...

Just because twenty years ago, you befriend anyone and talk intelligently with them, years ago: what does that mean, anyway? That you are learning. Does that mean you are sitting at the feet of 9/11 bombers? No. Of course not, but the Republicans will use this ludicrous and deranged line of reasoning to scare the elderly as they have already done in South Florida, the undecideds, the apathetics, the rural Americans who don't read the New York Times everyday, etc. And let's face it: SUCH TACTICS ALWAYS WORK ON THE
PURELY IGNORANT AND RACIST AMONG AMERICANS!

AP's Headline Reflects the Republican Urgency:

Onus on McCain to Turn Race Around

Direct quote from AP: "The onus is on Republican John McCain to turn the race around under exceptionally challenging circumstances -- and his options are limited." McCain's advisers say he will gear up major broadside attacks (that pray on the ignorance of many) by saying that Obama is "too liberal" and "too risky."

Obama's advisers retort that McCain is incabable of communicating any economic overview different from Bush's.

Associated Press interviews nationwide show:

Democrats are optimistic of victory if nervous over whether Obama can hold his advantage while Republicans are worried that the race may be moving out of reach though hopeful that McCain will beat the odds as he did in the GOP primary. Both sides note that plenty can change in one month -- and they're right.

South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson said that given McCain's
standing, ''I'd be concerned at this time, but I would never count this guy out. He's got the political hide of an alligator.''

McCain will not be able to win without keeping most of the states that Bush won, and he's tied or trailing in public polls in 10 of them -- Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

The GOP nominee also is only playing in five states that Democrat John Kerry won in 2004 -- Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and, now, Maine -- and he's running behind. McCain abandoned efforts Thursday in Michigan, as Obama reaches double-digit lead in that high-unemployment state.

Some Republicans close to McCain's campaign fret in private that Obama may be pulling away for good; others aren't so pessimistic.

''He needs to be able to speak to his strengths and remind people of why they like him,'' said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire delegate to the Republican National Convention. Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said McCain must clearly ''distinguish between the two approaches to governing.'' And Ted Welch, a veteran Republican fundraiser in Tennessee, said: ''He has to give voters enough reasons to vote for him. He hasn't yet.''

That doesn't appear to be the campaign's priority in the final weeks. GOP operatives say the goal is to undercut Obama, likely by raising questions about his associations with convict Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko, a former Obama top fundraiser, and Bill Ayers, a founder of a 1960s radical group.

''We're looking at a very aggressive last 30 days of turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans,'' senior adviser Greg Strimple told reporters Thursday.

Campaign Enters Ayers Stage: Onus on McCain to Turn Race Around (Associated Press article)

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:45:51 EDT

RE: NY TIMES ARTICLE TODAY ON AYERS:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1October 4, 2008
_____________________By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:27 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One month before Election Day, Barack Obama sits atop battleground polls in a shrinking playing field, the economic crisis is breaking his way and the Democrat has made progress toward winning the White House.

The onus is on Republican John McCain to turn the race around under exceptionally challenging circumstances -- and his options are limited.

McCain's advisers say the Arizona senator will ramp up his attacks in the coming days with a tougher, more focused message describing ''who Obama is,'' including questioning his character, ''liberal'' record and ''too risky'' proposals in advertising and appearances.

Obama's advisers, in turn, say he will argue that McCain is unable to articulate an economic vision that's different from President Bush's. In a new push, the Illinois senator is calling McCain's health care plan ''radical.''

Now that the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin is over, the contest returns to being entirely about Obama and McCain and likely will stay that way until Nov. 4. The rivals meet Tuesday in their second of three debates as the campaign enters its next unpredictable chapter.

Interviews with party insiders across the country Friday showed this: Democrats are optimistic of victory if nervous over whether Obama can hold his advantage while Republicans are worried that the race may be moving out of reach though hopeful that McCain will beat the odds as he did in the GOP primary.

Both sides note that plenty can change in one month -- and they're right.

''Very confident, yet not overly so,'' said Ohio Democratic Party chief Chris Redfern, who said the financial turmoil is dreadful for the country but ''politically it's advantageous'' for Obama.

South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson said that given McCain's standing, ''I'd be concerned at this time, but I would never count this guy out. He's got the political hide of an alligator.''

The Electoral College battle playing out over roughly a dozen states puts McCain's challenge to reach the necessary 270 votes in stark terms.

McCain can't prevail without holding onto most of the states that Bush won, and he's now virtually tied or trailing in public polls in at least 10 of them -- Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia -- as he tries to fend off Obama's well-funded advertising onslaught and grass-roots efforts.

The GOP nominee also is only playing in five states that Democrat John Kerry won in 2004 -- Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and, now, Maine -- and he's running behind. McCain abandoned efforts Thursday in one other, costly 17-vote Michigan, as Obama approaches a double-digit lead in the high-unemployment state and it became clear McCain couldn't shake Bush's drag.

Some Republicans close to McCain's campaign fret in private that Obama may be pulling away for good; others aren't so pessimistic. But there's unanimity in this; McCain has dwindling chances to regain momentum in the face of stiff headwinds, and the upcoming debates are critical.

''He needs to be able to speak to his strengths and remind people of why they like him,'' said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire delegate to the Republican National Convention. Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said McCain must clearly ''distinguish between the two approaches to governing.'' And Ted Welch, a veteran Republican fundraiser in Tennessee, said: ''He has to give voters enough reasons to vote for him. He hasn't yet.''

That doesn't appear to be the campaign's priority in the final weeks. GOP operatives say the goal is to undercut Obama, likely by raising questions about his associations with convict Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko, a former Obama top fundraiser, and Bill Ayers, a founder of a 1960s radical group.

''We're looking at a very aggressive last 30 days of turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans,'' senior adviser Greg Strimple told reporters Thursday.

McCain himself suggested a strategy shift during a Colorado event that day when a voter asked, ''When are you going to take the gloves off?'' He answered, ''How about Tuesday night?''

The campaign's latest advertisement asks, ''Who is Barack Obama?'' and asserts, ''He's not truthful on taxes.''

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton counters that McCain will try to distract voters from the economic crisis by launching character attacks.

Clearly, McCain's campaign believes that focusing on McCain's biography and record isn't enough and making Obama supremely unacceptable in voters' eyes may be the Republican's best -- if not only -- shot at winning the presidency.

The risk: Voters could be turned off if McCain goes too far.

>From his national headquarters to his campaign plane, McCain's staff has been discouraged by the difficult environment over the past two weeks in which the race dynamics were largely out of their control -- discouraged but no less determined to win.

Advisers contend that McCain is rebounding following Palin's strong debate performance Thursday that quieted GOP critics who questioned her qualifications after several TV interview missteps. Independent analysts say she improved her image and staunched the ticket's bleeding.

Congress approved the bailout plan one day later, and advisers hope the issue now will fade; McCain had struggled to strike the right chord amid the crisis. But there was no indication that other campaign topics would overtake the issue and more economic woes are possible; the nation lost 159,000 jobs in September and Americans will soon open their third-quarter 401(k) statements.

One bright spot: the Republican National Committee pulled in a hefty $66 million last month to help supplement McCain's advertising. Unlike Obama, he can spend only $84 million in taxpayer money.

Obama, meanwhile, was lifted in polls by voters who think he's better able to handle the economy and better suited to lead the nation through the financial crisis. Surveys also showed that skeptical voters having trouble envisioning him as president started to come around. He's a 47-year-old freshman senator from Chicago who would be the country's first black president.

The Democrat has been using his financial heft and freedom from fundraising limits to swamp McCain in TV advertising, spending roughly $13 million to $11 million for McCain and the RNC combined last week.

Obama, to be sure, still has work to do to lock down his lead. His advantage easily could disappear if he stumbles -- or if an adverse outside event, a so-called ''October surprise,'' occurs.

''He needs to give a little bit more of a window into Barack Obama as a human being ... reveal himself in a way that people who like Barack Obama say, 'I really want to embrace this guy,''' said Steve Grossman, a Massachusetts Democrat and former national party chairman.

Said Joe Erwin, the former Democratic Party chief in South Carolina: ''We've just got to swim our own race at this point, and not react to what the Republicans do because we know that we're doing is working.''

OpEdNews Publishes my Obama/200 Diplomat Endorsement Story Today; Posted Comments are Welcome and Carefully Read!

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:59:37 EDT

Posted today at OpEdNews! Albright, Clarke, 200 Diplomats Laud Obama's Willingness to Talk Directly to Adversaries Without Preconditions

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Albright-Clarke-others-c-by-press-release-from-081002-322.html

This came from a EURWEB Press Release; my commentary/additions should be clear, and if publicized and printed out, should go far in knocking down the arguments by Republicans that our candidate is somehow "inexperienced," and that he should not be talking with hostile or problematic heads of state, without preconditions.

I welcome your comments and insights. They are read very carefully, and passed on to Obama's staff.

Truly,

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art