Nothing about the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing about, "I can see Russia from my house." Nothing about her vehement opposition to abortion and stem cell research. Nothing about her demand that "Intelligent Design" be taught alongside evolution in high school biology classes. Nothing about firing the director of the Alaska State Police because he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, then involved in a bitter child custody dispute with her sister. Nothing but softball questions.

Ifill, a former New York Times reporter who now works for PBS, appears to have been thoroughly cowed by the rightwing attacks on her credibility that preceded the debate. Her "sin" in their eyes was to have a book coming out in January that included Sen. Barack Obama as one of four "breakthrough" black politicians. Which, win or lose, he is.

Ifill failed to keep Palin on topic, admittedly a tough task. Palin simply didn't answer questions she didn't like or couldn't answer, and at one point boasted that she wasn't going to be bound by the questions asked but would instead "tell my story to the American people." Palin showed that when she is coached for several weeks she can sound competent on stage. Why can't she do the same in an interview with Katie Couric?

Biden generally did well, better than I hoped. He smiled too much, though, and should have denounced Palin for accusing Obama of "waving the white flag of surrender" by wanting to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. That was despicable. I think she knew Biden was going easy on her and decided to chance taking a few cheap shots to please her handlers. It was gratifying to see that CBS's audience of undecideds showed (via their Nielsen meters) a sharp negative reaction to Palin's slur.

And Palin's voice. The "Fargo" voice. The dropped 'g's and the "betcha's." My younger daughter, age 11, finally announced that Palin's voice was quite annoying. She stuck out the entire debate, though, and I'm proud of her for that.

But Biden is prone to what I'll call "honest gaffes" in which the vocal cords get out ahead of the brain synapses. A recent example of this was when he commented that President Frankin D. Roosevelt spoke "on television" to the American people about the Great Depression. Of course, he meant FDR's famous "Fireside Chats" on radio. He knew that. He just misspoke himself. The danger is that this sort of a gaffe can prove a distraction to his and Barack Obama's overall message.

Not that I think it's going to matter. Obama is surging in the polls, taking a significant lead over McCain overall and in important swing states like Pennsyvania, Ohio, and Florida. I was driving through Hampden Twp. in West Shore suburban Harrisburg yesterday and was pleased at the number of Obama yard signs I saw in this Republican stronghold. If Obama can keep up the good work, our eight-year national nightmare that began with the stolen election in 2000 may soon be over.

Accidents like this are why I keep pushing for a ban on medevac helicopter overflights of my Shipoke neighborhood along the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pa. Shipoke is on the most convenient approach path, but NOT the only approach path, to Pinnacle Hospital's rooftop helipad a few blocks to the north. The STAT-Medevac helicopters and others who bring patients (never highway accident victims) to Pinnacle must be required to approach the hospital over the river.

I'd like to stress again that unless Pinnacle lied on its original application to the FAA for the helicopter service, which occurred with no notice to my neighborhood, these aren't traffic accident victims coming in. They are mainly coming to Pinnacle from small rural hospitals around the state for specialized medical care, includinging poison victims. There is no reason the helicopters couldn't land at Capital City Airport and be met by ambulances.

Whenever I write on this subject, I get angry comments from people I suspect are Pinnacle or STAT-Medevac employees telling me that they hope I or my family are left on the highway by a medevac helicopter if we're involved in an accident (see above), or that I am selfish for complaining about helicopter noise (do you see a noise complaint anywhere in this post?), or how I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND that the helicopters have to fly over Shipoke (they don't). The helicopters are a profit and prestige issue for Pinnacle, so I don't expect the overflights will cease unless enough of us complain to the FAA and maybe not even then.

He stood up to McCain's repeated taunts and delivered cogent arguments in support of the foreign policies he would embrace as President. Whether you agree or disagree with his positions, he argued them well and didn't ever flounder. Unlike McCain, Obama didn't mangle the names of foreign heads of state or veer off on weird tangents, such as when McCain tried to make "watch Ukraine" the new national watchwords. The CBS audience meter showed a decided spike for Obama when he drove home the point that McCain had supported the Iraq War from the start and helped spread Bush's nonsense about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

My only disappointment in Obama's performance was his embrace of the "Russia all bad, Georgia all good" argument that McCain and his neo-conservative supporters have been advancing since Russia moved troops into South Ossetia to defend the population there against Georgian aggression. I wish he would have thrown more caveats into his support for Georgia. McCain again voiced support for bringing Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, which should increase the risk of a needless and bloody war with Russia by quite a bit.

The debate was nearly as much about economics as it was about foreign policy. I credit Obama with keeping the economic focus on the middle class and how they are struggling. McCain probably solidified his support with the "cut taxes and cut government programs" crowd who don't care if America doesn't solve its problems as long as they're not inconvenienced. But I doubt if he won much support among average Americans struggling with layoffs and no health insurance.

No knockout punches were landed by either candidate, but Obama won on points by sounding smart and informed and not like a babe in the woods on the important foreign policy issues of the day. That's supposed to be McCain's strong point, at least if you ignore a lot of things.

Topping the list is the allegation that 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. occupation of their country. Bringing up the rear is the claim that former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer was brought down by the Bush Administration (with help from his dalliance with a prostitute) because of his war against the sub-prime mortgage mess now making headlines and giving John McCain an excuse to maybe duck tonight's debate with Barack Obama.

Project Censored picks their "censored" stories from a leftist perspective, but whether you agree or disagree with their choices, they do make you think.

And when would the first debate be held? Why, it would be on Oct. 2 in place of the vice presidential debate. When would the vice presidential debate be held? Uh, they're working on that. At a later date. Sometime. Maybe during Game 7 of the World Series.

Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania pointed out to the New York Times that it was highly unlikely Congress would be in session on Friday at 9 p.m., when the first debate is scheduled. Obama, who has wisely rejected McCain's call to suspend his own campaign and postpone the first debate, said being President is nothing if not about multi-tasking several crises at once. He said the American people deserve to hear how he or McCain would handle the Wall Street crisis when one of them takes office in January.

This is a transparent political ploy by McCain to draw attention away from his slumping poll numbers and, even more importantly, to stop the vice presidential debate between his ball-and-chain, er, running mate, Sarah Palin and Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden. Judging by her halting performance in her interview with Katie Couric of CBS News broadcast tonight, McCain has real cause for concern.

Don't get over-confident...

You have to understand that most polticians allow reporters to attend and ask questions at photo ops. Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania is famous for it. But Palin is obviously deemed by her handlers to be so vulnerable to saying something stupid about a whole range of things that they can't risk letting her "inform" the public except through carefully scripted statements she reads off a teleprompter.

This is no laughing matter. What if McCain drops dead or is incapacitated in his first month in office? Do you want Palin running the country and controlling our destinies? In truth, she would be a figurehead president controlled by lobbyists. Much like McCain already is.

But it's looking better for Obama. He's doing well in key polls.

Now they have come for the flood forecasting system that protects river towns along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
The Patriot-News reports today that the satellite link which enables river forecasters to provide real time forecasts on flooding threats will go dark on Oct. 1 unless Congress acts.

Residents of my neighborhood along the Susquehanna, Shipoke, depend on the flood forecasting system to know whether a rise in the river is just a temporary blip--as it is, 95 percent of the time--or a threat to our homes that requires us to move our furniture and possessions to upper floors or onto sawhorses--hours and hours of backbreaking work.

Turning off this vital satellite link to save money is about as stupid as it would be to shut off the NORAD radar that scans the skies looking for incoming nuclear missiles. Whichever officials of the Army Corps of Engineers made this reckless decision should be fired. One has to wonder if the "decider" was some Bush religious zealot who believes floods are God's will and people must accept them.

And where were our river Congressmen, Todd Platts, Tim Holden, and Paul Kanjorski when this was being decided? Or our senators, Arlen Specter and Bob Casey? The satellite doesn't go dark until Oct. 1. They have about a week to undo the damage.

That will change this Friday, of course, when the first of the Presidential Debates is held. But for now, Wall Street has our attention. No one has jumped out of a building, other than figuratively, but the collapse and the $700 billion no-strings bail-out proposed by the Bush Administration has changed, perhaps permanently, the tenor of the campaign. The only real questions being asked anymore are whether the candidates support the bail-out or support it with modifications.

Just as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wiped out the obsessions of the summer of 2001, most notably the Chandra Levy case, Wall Street's woes have terminated our current obsessions over Sarah Palin's qualifications, or lack thereof, and the pressing question of whether Obama is really a radical Muslim anti-Christ. Yes, the anti-Christ. Toss that around while you're passing the rattlesnakes. I hope Palin, a rightwing religious zealot, is asked directly at the Vice Presidential Debate whether she believes this garbage.

And there I go, obsessing about Palin when George W. Bush wants to hand $700 billion to Wall Street to repair the woes the Republicans created with their "government bad, deregulation good" schemes over the past eight or so years.

But first, tanning beds are those sarcophogus-shaped machines in which one lies down to get an off-season tan. I used one myself a couple of times when I was heading down to Latin America and wanted to get a base tan to reduce my chances of getting a bad burn. NarcoNews quotes a Fairbanks tanning salon operator as saying a tanning bed costs upwards of $35,000 and the electric work is extra. Interestingly, the mansion has had a lot of electric work lately, but an official spokesman insists it was merely to bring the house up to code. No doubt.

Palin's spokesman says she paid for the tanning bed herself, which is what you'd better say if your the reform queen and don't want to go to reform school. Well, I guess adults can't do that. Using taxpayer funds would turn your reform credentials into something looking like a bad application of Tanfastic, if they still market that stuff. Accepting it as a gift would mean disclosing it on her financial disclosure form, since its value is higher than $150. That's Alaska law. NarcoNews says there's no mention of it on her form.

So we are left with the possibility that she dropped $35,000 on an impulse purchase, which is nice if you can manage it on a salary of about $115,000 a year. But none of her kids appear likely to incur any college expenses, so maybe Palin was feeling flush. Of course, there's that shotgun wedding to pay for, but how much is a box of shells?

All kidding aside, the steady drip, drip, drip of embarrassing revelations about Palin can't be helping her standing among voters. Or at least I hope.

Now that isn't exactly what he said, but it's the clear implication of his follow-up comments. To wit: “My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals of America are strong…. Our workers have always been the strength of our economy, and they remain the strength of our economy today.”

Given that for the last five years any criticism of the Iraq War meant you were "against" the troops fighting the war--a ludicrous argument, but one hammered home by Republicans--it only stands to reason that the next falsehood from McCain would be an accusation that if Obama criticizes the state of the Bush economy, he must have contempt for American workers.

Don't think it's possible? Too stupid for words? Let's see what you think in a few weeks. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect I'm not.

To refresh your memory, the Dover school board was taken over by religious fundamentalists in the early part of the decade. By the fall of 2003, their control was complete. A year later, they took steps to introduce their conservative religious beliefs into the teaching of high school biology at Dover. Specifically, students were required to listen to a statement read by school officials (science teachers refused, at great risk to their jobs) designed to cast doubt on Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

A group of parents sued, and the ACLU and the Pepper Hamilton law firm in Philadelphia took their case on a pro bono basis. When members of the school board were deposed under oath on Jan. 3, 2005, they spun a web of lies about their deeds and motivations, denying, for example, that they ever talked about creationism at public meetings, in the face of a host of witnesses who said they did. They continued spinning fantasies when the case went to trial in the fall of 2005. They lost utterly, were thrown out of office by Dover citizens (who were stuck with a million dollars in legal fees), and were denounced for their false testimony by Judge John Jones III in his ruling in the case in late 2005.

This was, I think, a case of misguided faith that they did nothing wrong triumphing over clear and easily available facts. The Dover school board members involved in the case confused faith in God with faith in themselves and their own godliness, and they went down to destruction--although the Bush Administration Justice Department has so far not lifted a finger to prosecute them for perjury.

I don't think Palin is stupid enough to believe she never supported the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she really went to Iraq like she said (the latest controversy), or that she didn't try to get her brother-in-law fired as a state trooper because a bitter child custody suit with her sister. I suspect she and McCain have cynically calculated that the voters from the religious right who worship Palin will take her denials on faith. They need these voters to have any chance to win.

McCain's spokesman told Politico today that they turned to the dark side because the press wasn't covering their "nice" campaign earlier in the summer. McCain has decided to win at any cost.

I know the Clinton haters will come crawling out from under their logs to say that he did it first. Yes, he lied about private, consensual sex. He didn't tell personally damaging lies about George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, his electoral opponents in 1992 and 1996. That's such a big difference it's ludicrous to even spend any time discussing it. I have to laugh when I think about how newspapers ran stories during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 about how to talk to your children about what Clinton did.

Perhaps it's time for a new round of stories about how to explain to your kids that even if McCain and Palin tell blatant lies, it's not okay for them to do it