It makes perfect sense. You can’t pull on $150,000 worth of new clothes and then go out without some lipstick and you certainly can’t go on television with your hair a mess. The McCain campaign’s highest paid staffer for the first two weeks of October was Gov. Palin’s makeup artist, an Emmy nominee who received more than $22,000.00; the fourth highest paid staffer was the Alaskan’s hair stylist at $12,000.00 (Cindy McCain helped by sending Sarah to her own salon). The New York Times story refrained from the snark I’ll indulge: Sarah’s just your average hockey mom.

Sarah will need them both today, I’m thinking, since this afternoon is her first under-oath deposition in the “Troopergate” matter, the Associated Press notes.

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You heard the story — it was all over the right-wing blogs. Some poor white girl, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of Texas, was mugged at an ATM, but when the mugger (a big black guy) saw her car with the McCain sticker, he beat her and carved a letter “B” in her face with a knife. Apparently it was a dyslexic mugger because the “B” was carved backward, but whatever — it proved that Obama’s supporters were violent and craaazy!

Ever the blowhards, Fox News piled on, and their Executive VP of “news” wrote this:

Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election.

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

Rank idiocy, of course. Could you expect anything less from Fox? But there was a caveat:

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

I guess McCain’s quest is over.

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter “B” in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker […]

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and “the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction.”

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

The story was instantly suspect, as the pictures of her supposed beating, her Twitter account, and her timelines all patently contradicted themselves. But the wingnutosphere, with the healthy assist from Fox News, piled on anyway, letting their ideological blinders get in the way of reality. As usual.

And now they look like idiots. As usual.

Per Daily Kos.

The conservative “wingnutosphere” has been rife with such balderdash this election, including stories about Obama not being an American and not releasing his birth certificate; that he’s a closet Muslim, an Indonesian citizen; that there’s something fishy about his years at Columbia University not yet disclosed; that William Ayers the “terrorist” is the ghost writer of Obama’s book; that Obama’s in league with a known pedopile; that Obama had gay sex and a nosefull of blow with a disabled criminal; and on and on and on. Here’s a hilarious roundup of rightwing conspiracy theories and such by a familiar name: Jon Swift.

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Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com has “The Number That Exlains It All”, a brief note of a single polled voter attitude that helps us understand why Obama’s winning.

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Some things are more important than blogging. More important than politics. One of those things is the World Series. The Rays evened up the series against the Phillies Thursday night. The only damn reason to play politics is so that we can keep watching baseball instead of cricket or rugby or some other bloody UK sport. But, John X provided me with a little video that’ll have to tide you over until later. It stars Oklahoma’s own Ron Howard.

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This is one of the oddest moments of campaign coverage I’ve ever seen on television. Chuck Todd is a pollster for NBC-TV. He’s just attended a joint interview of McCain and Palin by Brian Williams. Everyone, including the campaign staff, is caught off guard by Gov. Palin saying she’ll reverse her previous stand and reveal her medical records, among other news in the interview. However, Todd goes off on this “vibe” he felt between the two GOP standard-bearers and begins speculating about what’s going on in their heads and … well, watch for yourself and see if you don’t think it odd.

After spouting a bunch of McCarthyite B.S. on Chris Matthews’ Hardball show, Democrats across the nation have now donated $1.3 million to Minnesota GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachman’s opponent, El Tinklenberg, and the Democratic Party threw in another $1 million.

That’s not enough.

Not even for Republicans.

The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee has now withdrawn several hundred thousands of dollars it had previously pledged to the incumbent, according to Talking Points Memo.

Now, who’s Anti-American, Michelle?

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The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch.com reports the DowJones Industrials down 514.45 points, a 5.7% drop, to 8,519.2. This was the 7th largest point drop for one day on record. Oil, a vital price commodity for Oklahoma, is down to $66/barrel. The Standard & Poors 500 index fell 6.1% to its lowest point since April, 2003, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ index dropped 4.8%.

Oh, well. When you’ve been smoking 2 packs of cigarets a day for 40 years, you can’t really expect to retire.

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RealClearPolitics.com average of polls shows Obama leading by 7.0 points, 49.9% to McCain’s 42.9%.

Pollster.com has very similar results, a 7.0% spread at 50.1 for Obama and 43.1 for McCain:

Both Pollster and RCP show Obama with sure leads in 286 electoral votes. RCP has McCain with 160 and Pollster shows the Arizonan with 157 EVs, the difference being that Pollster shows Montana as a “tossup” with McCain leading by 3.7% and RCP shows Montana as McCain’s by 5.6%. The two sites show the following states as undecided:

State RCP Pollster
FL O+1.5 O+2.3

MO O+2.7 O+1.6

Pollster also shows North Dakota as a tossup at O+3.6, but doesn’t seem to have adjusted the EV ratings because the polling seems “sparse” and they give the state a lean McCain rating based on previous voting history.

You can see more electoral vote tallies at:
electoral-vote.com and at my personal favorite polling site, fivethirtyeight.com, which is a site that uses polling — a “snapshot” of voters at the time the poll is taken — to try to predict the outcome using demographic patters, historical voting patterns, voter registration patterns, etc. 538’s present statistical modeling predicts 344.3 electoral votes for Obama, 193.7 for McCain; Obama wins presidency, 93.5% to McCain 6.5% out of 10,000 simulations; and, Obama with 51.8% of the popular votes and McCain with 46.8%.

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