did you notice nobody mentions Tibet any more?

Candid behind-the-scenes photos from Obama campaign photographer David Katz.

A few minutes before the debate:

via

[Quote:]

The Casio F91W is a cheap, common digital watch which, as described by Casio themselves, has a “tried and true style great for casual wear”. It has a fairly unremarkable set of features: water resistance, a light, an alarm and a calendar. There is, however, one undocumented feature that makes this particular watch special – it can be used as evidence that you’re a terrorist

(only $12 at amazon)

[Quote:]

Has the American presidential campaign gone to the dogs?

One could be forgiven for thinking so after seeing the latest issue of Nature magazine.

The world’s leading scientific journal has featured a powerful image of John McCain and Barack Obama on its front cover. The pair radiate statesmanlike-authority, the image is suitably sombre for the weighty interview inside.

Then, however, you see the back cover.

[..]

“It just goes to show that editorial and advertising aren’t working in cahoots.”

[Quote:]

She’s unexpectedly plucked from obscurity by the McCain campaign and, after a couple of rough days of media vetting, she gives a speech at the GOP convention–the first speech she’s ever given with anything approaching this level of prominence–and is universally declared to have hit it out of the park. She is anointed a “political superstar” by every talking head who can get to a microphone.

Now, I don’t know Sarah Palin (obviously), but at this point I suspect she envisioned the next several weeks as a continuation of her coming-out-party/victory-tour. She’d do packed events before cheering members of the GOP base (something she has in fact done), but she’d be a superstar in all the other typical ways, too. She’d be ubiquitous on the tube, doing the “Tonight Show” and “Good Morning America,” and, who knows, maybe even the political shows. She’d be so forthright and funny and charming and genuine that the whole country would fall in love with her. She’d be followed by a media throng that hung on her every word.

Instead, she hasn’t been allowed to give them a word to hang on: no press conferences (until one yesterday that hardly merited the term), a couple of scripted, softbally interviews, and an ongoing effort by the McCain campaign to have her vice presidential debate postponed indefinitely. The obvious implicit message her preppers and coddlers and protectors in the campaign are giving her is: You’re not ready. We don’t trust you. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t ever open your mouth unless you’ve cleared it with us or you might destroy the whole campaign. These are not pleasant things to hear, and Palin has presumably been hearing them (again, by implication) every day for weeks now.

When I compare Palin’s performance with Gibson to her performance with Couric, the biggest difference I see is confidence. With Gibson, she obviously lacked the knowledge one expects at this level, but she seemed to have a glib faith that she could bluff her way through. She may not have answered many of his questions directly, but her evasions were, for the most part, perfectly articulate and comprehensible. In the Couric interviews, by contrast, she often seemed to be stringing along buzz words and sentence fragments that even she recognized to be gibberish. With Gibson, she was tap dancing; with Couric she was drowning.

[Quote:]

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

They’ll probably pick a date that had a VP debate scheduled, so she can skip that…

[Quote:]

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration reached a tentative deal early Sunday on a landmark bailout of imperiled financial markets whose collapse could plunge the nation into a deep recession.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the $700 billion accord just after midnight but said it still has to be put on paper.

[Quote:]

After declaring he’d return to Washington to help with the bailout negotiations immediately after last night’s debate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) never went to Capitol Hill today. In fact, McCain stayed largely holed up in his Arlington apartment, leaving only to go to his campaign headquarters just around the block, the New York Times reports:

Asked why Mr. McCain did not go to Capitol Hill after coming back to Washington to help with negotiations, [McCain adviser] Mr. Salter replied that “he can effectively do what he needs to do by phone.’’

[Quote:]

Here’s John McCain’s big plan for the budget: make a whole lot of noise about eliminating of the piece of the budget pie representing earmarks (and remember that most earmarks simply mandate where monies will be spent, they don’t create any new spending):

[Quote:]