From The Washington Post
By Bart Barnes and Patricia Sullivan

Studs Terkel, 96, the preeminent oral historian of 20th century America who described the major events of his time through the experiences and observations of the ordinary men and women who lived them, died yesterday at his home in Chicago after a fall.

As a radio host and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Terkel used a folksy but probing interviewing style to draw out unfiltered answers from political leaders and common people alike. He illuminated America from the ground up, seeking out stories from bartenders, housewives, businessmen, artists, doctors, social workers, coal miners, farmworkers, bookmakers and convicts.

“Who built the pyramids?” he once asked in his inimitable sweet growl. “It wasn’t the goddamn pharaohs who build the pyramids. It was the anonymous slaves.”

Through his daily radio interview show, which was broadcast from 1952 to 1998 and nationally syndicated, Terkel’s voice — slow and mellifluous, with a working-class edge — became known to millions of people. He always ended his show with a line from an old union song: “Take it easy, but take it.”

His best-selling books usually were transcribed from tape-recorded interviews with hundreds of people. His prolific use of the recording device led Time magazine to write that “next to Richard Nixon the person whose life has been most dramatically affected by the tape recorder is Studs Terkel.”

Read more Spuds Terkel

From The Raw Story

At many polling spots around the country, early voting is for the studious: arrive whenever, brave a relatively small crowd, and cast a ballot well before the deadline.

But, not this time.

In Atlanta, GA., MSNBC’s Tamron Hall found not just long lines, but a day-long wait as well.

“These are folks standing in line, trying to get in before early voting ends in that state,” said Hall. “It ends today, by the way. And this line? Eight to 10 hours is the estimate for some poor soul who’s at the back of the line right now. Eight to 10 hours.

“These lines are everywhere in the state as voters are packing into the polling locations. They say across the state, lines at polling locations are several hours long, not just where we’re looking, at this strip mall. Officials estimate, according to what I’m reading here on one of the local news Web sites, about 12 percent of the state’s 5.6 million registered voters have already cast their vote.

“… They’re seeing a strong turnout among African-American voters in this state. Some of the more populated areas, like Atlanta with more African-Americans, are seeing a huge turnout. This appears to be the case from just looking at the video.”

Read more Lines

From The NY Observer
By Jason Horowitz

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.

A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an “obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.” She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.

Here’s a translation of Jong’s more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by Rocca.

“The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged.”

“My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves.”

“My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium.”

“After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…”

Read more Civil War

From The Guardian UK
By Eric Alterman

It’s hard to believe, I know, but the McCain campaign seems intent on delving further and further into the gutter in its desperate attempt to tar Barack Obama with something - anything - that will undermine the trust he’s earned from voters for the past two years. The most recent episode involves a full-court press in speeches and interviews by both candidates and their surrogates to inspire yet another McCarthyite panic, this one among Jews (especially those in Florida, no doubt).

To review, five years ago Barack Obama spoke at the same dinner as Rashid Khalidi, a noted scholar and current professor at Columbia University. There were some harsh things said by others at the dinner, but not by Khalidi or Obama. Obama “called for finding common ground” in his remarks and said that his commitment to Israel’s security is “nonnegotiable”, according to the Los Angeles Times, which wrote an extensive account of the dinner six months ago. The reporter, Peter Wallsten, based that story on a videotape of the dinner, which was provided to him by a source on the condition that it not be released.

Now right-wingers are demanding that the tape be released. “A major news organisation is intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi,” said McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb. “The election is one week away, and it’s unfortunate that the press so obviously favours Barack Obama that this campaign must publicly request that the Los Angeles Times do its job - make information public.” Sarah Palin, on the stump in Ohio on Wednesday, said: “Among other things, Israel was described there as the perpetrator of terrorism rather than the victim. What we don’t know is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that he professes to support.” (Note: professes to support).

Read more Witch-Hunt

From Information Clearing House
By William Blum

The Republican presidential campaign has tried to make a big issue of Barack Obama at one time associating with Bill Ayers, a member of the 1960s Weathermen who engaged in political bombings. Governor Palin has accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, although Ayers’ association with the Weathermen during their period of carrying out anti-Vietnam War bombings in the United States took place when Obama was around 8-years-old. Contrast this with who President Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Republican candidates, associated with. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how they spent their time when they were not screaming “Death to America”. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material”.1 None of this prevented the Reagan administration from inviting the man to the White House to meet with Reagan, and showering him with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, palled around with characters almost as unsavory during his first campaign for the presidency in 1988. His campaign staff included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic types from Eastern and Central Europe. Several of these worthies were leaders of the Republican campaign’s ethnic outreach arm, the Coalition of American Nationalities, despite the fact that their checkered past was not a big secret. One of them, Laszlo Pasztor (or Pastor) had served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government’s embassy in Berlin during the Second World War. This had been revealed in a 1971 page-one story in the Washington Post.2 When this past was again brought up in September 1988, the Republicans were obliged to dump Pasztor and four others of his ilk from Bush’s campaign.3

And who has John McCain been palling around with? Who has been co-chair of McCain’s New York campaign and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself? None other than the illustrious unindicted war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who must be very careful when he travels to Europe for there are committed and serious people in several countries there who will again try to have him arrested for the crimes against humanity he’s responsible for … Chile … Angola … East Timor … Vietnam … Laos … Cambodia …

Read more Pals

From Informed Comment
By Juan Cole

The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know the Obamas at that time. Knowing someone and agreeing with him on everything are not the same thing.

Scott Horton has a fine, informed and intelligent discussion of the issue. Likewise Barnett Rubin (”My Friend the Neo-Nazi”) and Chapati Mystery suddenly alarmed about the Hyde Park crowd.

I know it may seem a novel idea to people like McCain and Palin, but it would be worthwhile actually reading Khalidi’s book on the Palestinian struggle for statehood. (I urge bloggers interested in this issue to link to his book, which the American reading public should know).

At the least, read a whole essay Khalidi has written.

Far from being a knee-jerk nationalist, Khalidi has been critical of the decisions of the Palestinian leadership at key junctures in modern history.

Read more Hypocrisy

From The Washington Post
Editorial

With the presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

Read more Idiot Wind

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Somehow, in Sarah Palin’s brain, it’s a threat to the First Amendment when newspapers criticize her negative attacks on Barack Obama. This is actually so dumb that it hurts:

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by “attacks” from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Read more Palin

From TruthDig
By G.W. Schulz

Despite its go-it-alone spirit, sparsely populated Alaska is one of the greatest per-capita beneficiaries of federal funding among the 50 states. A major portion of those U.S. taxpayer dollars in recent years has come from large infusions of homeland security grants and appropriations handed out to the state since the 9/11 attacks.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, where she was mayor from 1996 to 2002, has benefited immensely from the anti-terrorism bonanza. Wasilla, with a population of 7,028, has acquired a surveillance system for its water wells, a 150-foot-tall communications tower that altered the city’s landscape, a half-million-dollar mobile command vehicle with off-road capabilities and more.

According to an analysis of federal spending figures and additional records obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting from the state of Alaska through open-government laws:

• Between 2002 and 2006, Alaska received at least $66.6 million from the most common preparedness grants distributed by the Department of Homeland Security, putting the state behind only three others in per-capita spending: Vice President Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming, Vermont and North Dakota. The amount is about $100 per Alaskan, more than half the per-capita figure for the state of New York and $70 more than for each California resident.

• Between 2003 and 2007, Wasilla received at least $1.4 million in homeland security grants, including $987,550 from the assistance to firefighters grant program, for which fire departments apply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on their own. Alaska received $18.2 million from the assistance to firefighters program in 2002-2008 on top of what it had already won in other homeland security grants.

Read more Dividends

From The Nation
By John Nichols

This writer has never taken particularly seriously the suggestion of Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his surrealist running-mate Sarah Palin that Democrat Barack Obama seeks to roll a political Trojan Horse full of socialist ideas and radical friends into the Oval Office.

In fact, as someone who met Obama a dozen years ago and has interviewed the man and written about him with some frequency, I have failed to detect the tell-tale signs of the secret socialist.

But… you never know.

Maybe Obama has pulled one over on all of us — a Manchurian candidate move on the most monumental order.

What could settle the question?

What sign? What signal?

Gee, I don’t know, how about a “wholeheartedly” enthusiastic endorsement of the Democratic nominee for president by the journal of monied elites who prefer not to be lied to: The Economist.
Here’s what the magazine (London-based but U.S. circulation: 700,000) says today with regard to Tuesday’s election in an issue that features a cover photo of Obama and the words “It’s Time”:

Read more Economist Backing