A friend of mine said that with McCain's new lines of attacks, he's basically giving up on the economy.

I think that pretty much sums up the state of John McCain's campaign, so while I won't expect to see this headline in The Washington Post, I wouldn't disagree with it...

Here's the two key things you need to know about the Palin-McCain campaign's cynical new line of attack:

1. Barack Obama is way ahead of John McCain in this campaign. In fact, he's at or above 50% in three of the four national tracking polls, and leading in...

There's been so much going on with the campaign lately, that I hadn't paid much attention to Bob Woodward's newest book, The War Within.

Tonight he was on Real Time with Bill Maher (video below) and he relayed a couple of interesting items.

First, he said that during White...

The good news is that Sarah Palin can complete a sentence...the bad news is that the rest of us have to listen to it, according to Bill Maher in his opening monologue on Friday night.

Maher also had mocking words for Rich Lowry, who thought Palin was 'man straightening.'

Obama is now at or above 50% in three of the four tracking polls.

Hotline/Diageo has it at 48-42. Gallup has it as 50-42. Rasmussen has it as 51-45. And Daily Kos/R2000 shows the biggest lead of all: 52-40.

But with good news comes bad. Unless...

Friday night on the Late Show, it was a meeting of the two most prominent media personalities spurned by the McCain campaign -- Brian Williams and David Letterman.

Neither man is terribly happy about being rejected by McCain-land, but they both manage to maintain their sense of humor. Here's video:

Just take a look at their home page, which blares "Governor Palin proved beyond any doubt that she is ready to lead as Vice President."

Consider:

1. They couldn't bring themselves to declare victory, instead settling for a highly defensive proclamation that she is ready to be VPOTUS; and

2....

A follow-up to "Winkers In Chief":

Update: Also see "Who is the biggest winker of them all?"

Keith O. played a funny video comparing the rhetoric Sarah Palin 2008 and George W. Bush 2000, ending with a video of both them winking.

So I did a tiny bit of googling and found a couple of...

• She really did have a script: Sarah Palin actually read several of her debate responses from her notes.
• I think Palin's regrets about Michigan were damage control, not an example of being out of the loop. The question is: was she doing damage control for herself, or...

John McCain has got himself some really crazy laughter, and those grunts are starting to sound a little bit insane too.

I guess one thing is for sure: La Barracuda really tickles his funny bone.

The Obama campaign continues hammering McCain on his bogus line of argument about taxes, this time with a new web video that illustrates that by the very same standard that McCain applies to Obama, McCain has voted for 477 tax increases -- far more than the 94 he accuses...

So we know that Sarah Palin couldn't -- or wouldn't -- tell Katie Couric what newspapers and magazines she reads to form her world view.

The obvious implication is that she is a ditzy airhead, just like George W. Bush.

But what if -- also just like George W....

Now that the bailout, er, rescue, bill has pased, what next? The immediate credit crisis has been addressed, but now what?

John McCain probably thinks that now we can get back to talking about the threat of radical Islamic extremism, or something like that. (As we all know, he hates...

The Obama campaign is up with their second ad of the day targeting John McCain's plan to tax individual health benefits.

While the first ad focused on Sarah Palin's inability to explain McCain's health tax plan, this ad goes straight at the core issue: that John McCain is proposing...

The Obama campaign comes quickly out of the gate with the first post-debate ad, focusing on Sarah Palin's inability to explain John McCain's plan to tax health care benefits for the first time:

The thing I like most...

John Harris and Mike Allen deliver a brutal assessment of Palin's debate performance. It's a definite must-read.

After last night's debate, Progressive Accountability compiled a video of the similarities between Bush in 2000 and Palin in 2008. It's pretty incredible. She really is Bush in a skirt.

I thought this exchange on global warming was one of the most important of the evening, not just for what each candidate said about the issue at hand, but also for what their general approach to the issue said about how they would govern.

Sarah Palin explicitly said she didn't...

According to a Nielsen focus group of undecided voters in Las Vegas, one of Joe Biden's best moments of the debate -- when he talked about ending the war in Iraq -- was also one of Sarah Palin's worst, when she accused Biden of waving "the white flag of surrender"...