It’s been only a few short days since Barack Obama accused the McCain campaign of taking his words out of context in order to use them against him.. It was an amusing claim from Barack Obama, since he has been guilty of such tactics for quite a while now.

But, one would think that in light of their criticism of John McCain, Obama’s campaign wouldn’t resort to the same tactics…

Wrong.

Today, the Obama campaign deliberately took the words of McCain advisor Carly Fiorina out of context in order to attack John McCain.

Barack Obama’s campaign was “deceitful” when it clipped part of an interview in which Republican Victory 2008 Chairwoman Carly Fiorina said John McCain was not qualified to be the head of a corporation, Fiorina said Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, appeared on MSNBC, where she said none of the candidates is qualified to run a major corporation, but that should not prevent them from running the country.

“I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could run a major corporation. But on the other hand a major corporation is not the same as being the president or vice president of the United States,” Fiorina said.

“It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. So of course to run a business you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Joe Biden or Barack Obama are doing,” she said.

But the Obama campaign, pointing to a version of Fiorina’s statement that was clipped after the first sentence, berated McCain for not winning the trust of even his own supporters.

“When John McCain’s top economic adviser doesn’t think that he’s qualified to run a corporation — how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis?” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement accompanying the shortened clip.

But, this isn’t the only recent example from the Obama campaign.

Karl Rove recently said that both the McCain campaign and the Obama have run ads that “don’t pass the 100% truth test,” but the Obama campaign latched onto the part where Rove had mentioned McCain first and distorted the criticism as solely against McCain.

So, really, I’m tired of Obama’s blatant lies and hypocrisy. That’s hardly change we can believe in.

After a bad week full of verbal gaffes, Obama has decided to bring his longtime friend and speech advisor back on campaign stops: Mr. Teleprompter.

It appears Barack Obama’s teleprompter is hitting the campaign trail.

The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn’t use one at standard campaign rallies and town hall events.

But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.

I’ve said before that Barack Obama is nothing without a teleprompter… After seeing various clips of him on the stump without one, and given his recent verbal gaffes, I’m suprised to see the teleprompter return.

Here are a few interesting blog posts I’ve been reading tonight:

Strangle the Democrats with Fannie, Freddie, and the Housing crisis
Lehman Brothers and an opportunity for John McCain
Who is Questioning Patriotism Now
Biden’s Anti-Terrorism Record
A State Of The Presidential Race Analysis
Obama Votes With Ted Kennedy 96% Of The Time

I’ll add more if anything catches my eye.

According to a new poll, McCain and Obama are in a statistical tie. This could be a very significant development. I have my thoughts on this here.

NewsBusters posts the uneditted transcript of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson, and notes what was cut out, and what those edits mean.

A transcript of the unedited interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson clearly shows that ABC News edited out crucial portions of the interview that showed Palin as knowledgeable or presented her answers out of context.

Do check it all out. It’s quite revealing. Even a comment made by Gibson where he admitted he agreed with Palin was editted out!

ED Note: This counts as “What Media Bias? Part 126”

…and it’s getting a lot brighter as Obama’s hopes for winning the battleground state are falling fast.

Barack Obama could be on the verge of falling out of contention in Florida.

Despite spending an estimated $8-million on campaign ads in America’s biggest battleground state and putting in place the largest Democratic campaign organization ever in Florida, Obama has lost ground over the summer. Florida has moved from a toss-up state to one that clearly leans toward John McCain, fueling speculation about how much longer the Democratic nominee will continue investing so heavily in the state.

Obama can still win Florida despite the polling gains McCain has made since naming Sarah Palin his running mate, and there is no sign Obama is pulling back in Florida yet. Far from it. Obama allies say he has about 350 paid staffers in the state and about 50 field offices, including in places not known as fertile ground for Democrats, such as Sun City Center, Lake City and Sebring.

But for all the attention to Florida from the Obama campaign, there’s little tangible evidence it’s paying off.

It seems like this is not a unique trend.McCain is increasing his lead or closing the gap in several battleground states. Recent gaffes by Barack Obama and his campaign surely aren’t helping him any either. Things have certainly changed in recent weeks. Earlier this year, Democrats have been confidently predicting significant gains in Congress as well. Polls had been showing easy pickups for the Democrats… until recently.

What does all that mean? It means the Democratic Party will have to put more resources into congressional races that they may not have previously considered necessary. As Obama appears to be on the verge of failing to meet fundraising goals, they may find themselves in a major bind in the final weeks of the campaign.

Yet another example of Obama talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

“Now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work,” Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Aug. 28 in his convention acceptance speech. He told the crowd in Denver: “I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.”

Obama’s campaign website is even more specific. Under the heading “Fighting for Pay Equity,” the women’s issues page laments that, “Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. A recent study estimates it will take another 47 years for women to close the wage gap with men at Fortune 500 corporate offices. Barack Obama believes the government needs to take steps to better enforce the Equal Pay Act…”

Obama’s commitment to federally mandated pay equity stretches from the Rockies to Wall Street and beyond. And yet it seems to have eluded his Senate office. Compensation figures for his legislative staff reveal that Obama pays women just 83 cents for every dollar his men make.

A watchdog group called LegiStorm posts online the salaries for Capitol Hill staffers. “We have no political affiliations and no political purpose except to make the workings of Congress as transparent as possible,” its website explains. Parsing LegiStorm’s official data, gleaned from the Secretary of the Senate, offers a fascinating glimpse at pay equity in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

The most recent statistics are for the half-year from Oct. 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008, excluding interns and focusing on full-time personnel. For someone who worked only until, say, last Feb. 29, extrapolating up to six months’ service simplifies this analysis. Doubling these half-year figures illustrates how a year’s worth of Senate employees’ paychecks should look.

Based on these calculations, Obama’s 28 male staffers divided among themselves total payroll expenditures of $1,523,120. Thus, Obama’s average male employee earned $54,397.

Obama’s 30 female employees split $1,354,580 among themselves, or $45,152, on average.

I wonder what Obama’s excuse for this blatent hypocrisy is.

UPDATE: It is worth noting how McCain measures up:

Obama’s criticism notwithstanding, McCain’s payment patterns are the stuff of feminist dreams.

McCain’s 17 male staffers split $916,914, thus averaging $53,936. His 25 female employees divided $1,396,958 and averaged $55,878.

On average, according to these data, women in John McCain’s office make $1.04 for every dollar a man makes. In fact, all other things being equal, a typical female staffer could earn 21 cents more per dollar paid to her male counterpart — while adding $10,726 to her annual income — by leaving Barack Obama’s office and going to work for John McCain.

Smack.

Here’s an interesting story point out that Barack Obama’s support from women is bleeding away.

Jessica Goral had pretty much made up her mind two weeks ago: she was going to vote for Barack Obama. Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

“She empowers a lot of women,” says Mrs Goral, a mother of two in Macomb County – a national bellwether in the battleground state of Michigan and an area rich in white, working class swing voters who will play a major role in deciding November’s election.

[…]

“Sarah Palin is a role model. She’s made me more likely to vote Republican.”

If Mr Obama should be in any doubt how gravely the Alaska governor’s vice-presidential nomination has imperiled his White House ambitions, then a day spent in Macomb County will make this clear: white women who voted for John Kerry in 2004 are suddenly deserting him on masse.

This is Mount Clemens, in the heart of Macomb County, where the pollster Stan Greenberg first identified the phenomenon of the “Reagan Democrats” – the working class, socially conservative, traditionally Democratic whites who deserted the party for Ronald Reagan in 1980. It is fair to say that this critical swing group now has a new name: Palin Democrats.

This is why John McCain is not only surging in national polls, but in battleground state polls as well. This is why Barack Obama, again, is “taking the gloves” off and blasting McCain for not being computer savvy, instead of focusing on the issues.

The RNC has put out a new radio ad:

Script follows below the fold. Continue reading →