Quoted: On “Meet the Press,” Colin L. Powell called Barack Obama a “transformational figure” and said that John McCain’s campaign had gone “too far” in its attacks.

It's beyond desperation at this point.

Quoted: Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Quoted: "Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

I think the Obama camp would have been happy with a split here, but looks like the opening section on the economy tipped it. I wonder if McCain's original goal with the campaign suspension was to delay the foreign policy debate enough that the economic section would be omitted.

Quoted: The CBS poll of undecideds has more confirmatory detail. Obama went from a +18 on "understanding your needs and problems" before the debate to a +56 (!) afterward. And he went from a -9 on "prepared to be president" to a +21.

He was against the debate before he was for it.

Quoted: Senator John McCain reversed his earlier call to postpone the debate so he could participate in the Congressional talks over the $700 billion bailout plan for financial firms.

Quoted: Given the current inefficiencies in our system, the impact of the Obama plan will be profound. Besides the $2,500 savings in medical costs for the typical family, according to our research annual business-sector costs will fall by about $140 billion. Our figures suggest that decreasing employer costs by this amount will result in the expansion of employer-provided health insurance to 10 million previously uninsured people.

click to play

Quoted: Hypocrisy (or being a hypocrite) is the act of pretending to oppose a belief or behaviour while holding the same beliefs or behaviours at the same time.

Quoted: She can make game-changing agitation plays that rouse her home team and provoke the other side into counterattacks that – 100% of the time – end up punishing the team who hits back. Democrats would be smart to understand her as such, and I see a lot of reaction that doesn't seem to grasp what Palin is doing and the value she's providing. I see a lot of Democrats taking a lot of bait.

Quoted: Therefore, what we should carefully watch for tonight is the tenor of McCain's speech. He's got to reach for independents, and to do that he's got to sound like he's full of practical solutions.

Quoted: The Sarah Palin pick allows John McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness.