Zandar's Thought Of the Day

Should Obama win (I know, Dad, Nate Silver has a 96%+ chance of him winning but the GOP will cleat, lie, and steal this election down to the very end) the Village Idiot calls for him to abandon progressives, his entire platform, and the people who elected him and pull out his sextant and compass for some Clinton-style triangulation will come at near relativistic speeds.

They will immediately expect him to prove to them he is "sensible and moderate" and govern exactly like Bush, and will demand he give in at every turn to the GOP minority or else. In this case, "or else" consists of making what they did to Bill Clinton (culminating in his impeachment) look like a walk in the park. Obama will have to work every second of every day to prove he's not a Liberal.

In other words, What Digby Said(tm).

October Surprise!

A week and change before the election, and the US supposedly crosses into Syria with gunships.

Syria's state news agency SANA said four U.S. helicopters crossed the border and struck a farm about 8 kilometers (5 miles) inside Syria before returning to Iraqi airspace.

The raid occurred about 4:45 p.m. (1345 GMT). The helicopters hit a civilian building under construction on the farm, killing killing three men, the wife of a guard and four children, SANA said.

Military officials are investigating the claims, Sgt. Brooke Murphy, a U.S. military spokeswoman, told CNN.

"Unfortunately, we cannot confirm anything at the moment," she said.

Still think the GOP is playing to lose? Not me. Looks to me like Preznitman and the GOP is trying to take the news cycle off permanent "economic disaster" mode.

We'll see if anyone bites. I don't see how this can win it for them.

The Pennsylvania Polka

The GOP dirty tricks brigade in the Keystone State is bad enough to look like the Keystone Kops. First was the EPIC FAIL surrounding Ashley Todd's hoax, and now news that the PA GOP sent an email to 75,000 Jewish voters that warns Obama will cause another Holocaust.

The state GOP is now running away from that email as fast as it can. The AP leads with the state GOP's disavowal of the email, but it seems a bit more complicated than that. There doesn't seem to be any dispute that the state party or one of its committees sent the email. The party's defense seems to be that the consultant who the party hired wasn't authorized to send that particular email and was fired.

Except the AP got in touch with the consultant and that's not quite the story he tells:

Political consultant Bryan Rudnick was identified as the person responsible for it. Rudnick, reached Saturday night, confirmed that he no longer works for the party, which employed him a few weeks ago as a consultant to do outreach to Jewish voters.

"I had authorization from party officials" to send the e-mail, Rudnick said, but he declined to say who had signed off on it. "I'm not looking to drag anyone else through the mud, so I'm not naming names right now," he said.

That's a pretty good story in its own right: Another under-the-radar GOP sleaze tactic exposed and yet another low- to mid-level GOP operative scapegoated because he got caught on the wrong side of the McCain campaign's shifting line between what is just sleazy and what is too sleazy (a line that seems to get drawn immediately after the GOP gets busted).

But it gets better.

Like the state GOP, the McCain camp is running away from this email, and the spokesperson doing the distancing is none other than Peter Feldman. That's the same guy who on Thursday, the day the email went out, was pushing the mugging hoax to reporters as a politically motivated attack by a black Obama supporter, playing to the worst of white fears and racial prejudices.

Speaking of the email to Jewish voters and without any apparent hint of irony, Feldman told the AP Saturday night that McCain "rejects politics that degrade our civics."

Amazing.

No word on whether the AP asked Feldman about his role in pushing the mugging hoax.

McSame has no honor left. None. And yet the righty whackjobs out there are convinced this soulless piece of garbage is going to magically win, because Hillary supporters will defect en masse at the voting booth.

If McSame does end up President, we deserve the hell we cast ourselves into.