She may not be able to get the coveted PETA vote.

LOL Lee. That was not what I expected. That was a riot. I bet she got a good laugh out of it.

Burt PETA? People for Eating Tasty Animals?

Rumor has it that Bullwinkle is planning to stage a protest at every Palin campaign stop.

Lucky for him he looks to goofy to put on a wall. Decent rack though. Maybe as just the skull and rack.

It'll turn around in Obama's favor in 7-10 days.

And it's 50% - 46% - link - not 54%-44% - it's 4 points not 10.

Republican John McCain heads into the final stretch of the U.S. presidential campaign with a 4-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama, a USA Today/Gallup poll released on Sunday showed.

The lead was McCain's biggest since January and a turnaround from a USA Today poll taken just before last week's Republican Party convention opened, when the veteran Arizona senator trailed Obama by 7 percentage points.

The new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, showed McCain leading Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, by 50 percent to 46 percent among registered voters with less than two months before the November 4 election.

Lee

You have to go all the way down to close to the bottom of the story on USA Today to find:

"In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote. The survey of 1,022 adults, including 959 registered voters, has a margin of error of +/-- 3 points for both samples."

My personal opinion, as stated on the day McCain announced Palin's pick, is that there would be hasty attempts to tar and feather her and that effort would have the opposite effect from what was intended. The best thing you guys could have done would have been to ignore her or damn her with faint praise. I say "You guys" and I don't necessarily mean you Lee, but I do mean Paul. And I do mean the nutcases over on dailykos who tried to prove that Trig was the daughter's baby, as an example.

Publically, Obama tried to stop the attacks on family. I dunno what he did privately. He did so for three reasons; honor (He is an honorable man), blacklash (He is a very good, oops, no, He is a great politician), and finally, he doesn't want too many people looking at what Michelle did for the Hospital she worked for and why she was paid $317K a year for so doing.

Many of the accusations against Palin either didn't hold water or were "So what" deals. The potentially more serious stuff got lost in the crap. And the media piled on in a feeding frenzy that had more hype than substance. It is interesting that Olberman over on MSNBC just got demoted. So did Matthews.

Obama's cause was not served by the hysteria.

It wasn't hurt either, it my view. The GOP post-convention bounce might have been better/higher had there not been the "furious vetting" that occurred when Palin was announced.

And now Palin will actually have to face the press and answer questions. The more we know about her, the better it'll be Dems.

And the DailyKos stuff is 'inside baseball' - zero effect on the national stage - it's just a bloggers blip.

And I'm amazed at the number of personal acquaintances of mine that are up in arms over Palin. I think it's energized the left, and while that won't be reflected in the polls, it will be reflected in the turnout -- which continues to favor Democrats regardless of the polling.

You're right Lee, Dems always do a bit better than the polls. I like to call it the ACORN effect. *grin*

As for the vetting, I smelled a trap the day she was announced and said so. Both of the bases are gonna be energized and since McCain's base was lethargic and Obama's group was already pretty energetic, this is a small plus for McCain. Palin's personality and sheer likeable factor for the undecideds is very high. It is the folks in the middle who will determine who wins and who goes back to the Senate in this election.

Obama tried to play safe and move to the center after he had the nomination sewed up. This was never more evident with his pick of Joe Biden to shore up his foreign policy weakness. The pundits thought this was a great pick. So did I at the time. McCain then did a Hail Mary and it worked, or so it seems now.

I dunno how much McCain had Palin vetted. The guy who did it is not one prone to mistakes. I did a search on her when I had this tickle in the back of my brain. I found most of the stuff that has made headlines and got beaten to death on the blogs except for her daughter's pregnancy and the affair allegation. And I didn't think any of it was a deal killer.

Let me ask you this Lee, is it time for Biden to have health problems and make way for Hillary? I have often said that Obama can't live with her and he can't win without her. I can't stand her. She is one of the few politicians I truly dislike and when Obama didn't pick her, he almost got my vote. But from a practical pov, does he need her to win
the true battleground states?

Finally Lee, if you want something that shows how Palin does in a debate and what she knows about oil and energy, watch:

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=193920-1

And if you want some real possible dirt on Palin as opposed to "Who cares" stuff, try MotherJones:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/09/9620_sarah_palin_secret_email.html

Larry

Democrats doing better than the polls has nothing to do with the "Acorn effect" - it's simply that polls don't measure turnout, and the Demo turnout will be huge.