Stephen Hayes holds out hope for John McCain with an analogy to 1976: Gerald Ford closed thirty points in the polls in a few months by arguing that Jimmy Carter was a risky, unknown quantity. But keep in mind: Ford still lost.

The sad thing is that this SNL skit has more accurate information on the subprime mortgage crisis than you would get from either presidential campaign and most MSM reports.

This new McCain campaign ad “Dangerous” doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

Via Drudge another instance in which Barack Obama and Bill Ayers “crossed paths.”

Brit Hume says it all: “And the behavior of the congressional leadership was not inspiring. The behavior of the House Republicans was, quite frankly, appalling, or at least some of them, and yet — and the behavior of the media in distributing misinformation — to cite one conspicuous example, the treatment of the tax extenders that were added to the package — a package, by the way, that had already passed the Senate by a vote of 93-2; had yet to clear the house — as pork was particularly atrocious. But in spite of the wall of information that everybody had to climb, the thing passed in the end, and it passed by large bipartisan majorities. And I think that’s something to take heart from and, in fact, be proud of.”

An informative CNN story from earlier in the year details Barack Obama’s old-style “dirty” political tactics. If this got a few minutes when few were paying attention, don’t Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko deserve an hour or two now?

A military analyst takes issue with Obama’s assertion that Al Qaeda is stronger than ever, concluding: “It is clear that Obama wants to make it look like the Bush administration has lost to al Qaeda and the only one who can beat al Qaeda is Obama. I find it dispiriting that the Democratic Party’s candidate is so willing to twist the truth and run down the accomplishments of our soldiers just to score a cheap political shot. Really, he could surely win the presidency without making up this nonsense.” As for the last point, Obama isn’t taking any chances.

As dumb lists of “most important” people in the race go — this is one of the dumber ones. Please, at least two of them wouldn’t make the top hundred. This sort of thing just perpetuates the image of irritating know-it-all-ism ( and lack of real insight) which characterizes much of MSM punditry.

While combing through all the gaffes and untruths in Joe Biden’s debate performance, we also assume that the guy who lives in a $3M house and hasn’t lived in Scranton in decades probably doesn’t frequent Home Depot very much. In a normal election we tolerate such abject phoniness but with the Palins around, the pretense of “averageness” seem particularly glaring.

The RNC complaint against the Obama fundraising antics gets some press. I’m sure the FEC investigation will reach a prompt resolution by the end of the year — that year would be 2010.