The Obama campaign has bumped representatives from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain for president over Obama off of its campaign plane for the final days of the race.

The Dallas Morning News, Washington Times, and New York Post “have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs — and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET,” according to Drudge.

The Times confirmed the move in a report filed today, which said in part:

The Obama campaign informed the newspaper Thursday evening of its decision, which came two days after The Times editorial page endorsed Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama. The Times editorial page runs completely independent of the news department.

“This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars covering Senator Obama’s campaign, traveling on his plane, and taking our turn in the reporter’s pool, only to have our seat given away to someone else in the last days of the campaign,” said Washington Times Executive Editor John Solomon.

“I hope the candidate that promises to unite America isn’t using a litmus test to determine who gets to cover his campaign.”

Emphasis added. More below the fold.

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Origninally mentioned here.

Dear Friends,

After decades of fighting for this country and our troops, I am up against the right-wing attack machine again.

Because of my work to end the Iraq war, they have thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars behind my opponent, who lives in Virginia with his family, not in my district in Pennsylvania. Now, I am suddenly being outspent 3 to 1.

They are up to the same old tricks, “swiftboating” me again as they did two years ago. So I am asking people who have stood with me on Iraq to stand with me again to stop them in their tracks.

This is a real emergency—with just 6 days left.

People like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are calling me a traitor and worse.

Initially, I brushed it off, because calling for a responsible end to the war was the right thing to do. Now, finally the Bush administration has started negotiating a timeline to bring our troops home, something I supported for almost three years.

This year I’ve spent most of my time campaigning and raising money for other Democrats, including Barack Obama, instead of myself. It worked in 2006 and we threw the Bush Republicans out. But now my own race is tight so I am asking supporters for help. Can you chip in?

When I ask for help, it is because I really need it. It is urgent. I will not back down from this fight, but I need you with me to repel the right-wing smear machine once again.

Thank you, God protect our troops and bless America.

–John P. Murtha

October 29, 2008

I don’t know that you’re up against that big of an emergency, Rep. Murtha; rather, I’d say you’re just being “slowly bled” to electoral death as a result of your inability to do the right thing or keep your mouth shut.

What say you?

Embattled Democrat porker (and current defendant in a pair of slander lawsuits stemming from his repeated shouting from rooftops that U.S. Marines are “cold-blooded killers”) John Murtha (PA-12) sent a message to MoveOn.org’s email list asking members to remember his “chip in” to his surprisingly difficult reelection bid.

Further, a Murtha fundraiser sent an urgent request this afternoon to “defense industry lobbyists” which read:

Cong. Murtha is in a brutal re-election campaign. The “Swift Boaters” have put up a candidate from Virginia and have raised millions of dollars against Cong. Murtha. In addition, other 527s and the NRCC have spent millions to smear Cong. Murtha on TV, radio, and in newspapers. We need to raise another $1 million to compete. If you have contributed, thank you. We are asking all to MAX their campaign contributions: $5,000 PACs and $2,300 individual. We need money immediately.

“We need to raise another $1 million to compete.”

“We need to raise another $1 million to compete.”

Now those are words I’ll wager the 17-term Democrat representative never expected to have said about one of his campaigns, especially five days out from an election — and its tone sounds pretty distantly removed from Murtha’s bravado-filled declaration of two days ago that there is “no gddmned way” a “Virginia carpetbagger” will “represent my district.”

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In 2006, the Los Angeles Times decided an audio tape it had obtained of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an apologetic Republican, in which he said of latina Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (R-80), “She seems to me like Cuban … She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban. I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it,” was front-page news.

“The governor is heard on a six-minute recording, obtained by The Times, of a meeting with some members of his inner circle last spring,” wrote Robert Salladay in the page A-1 story on the recording. “At the time, Schwarzenegger was struggling to persuade Republican lawmakers to embrace his plan to place billions of dollars in borrowing on the November ballot.”

Now, I know commenting on heritage is, to our P.C.-police media, a far worse crime than palling around with terrorists (or even than committing terrorist acts, to judge by recent events like the LAT’s call for a full pardon of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh).

However, its history of baring all when it comes to tapes - both audio and video - that it obtains once again begs the question asked repeatedly here on RedState: Why won’t the Times allow the public to see its video of Barack Obama, along with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, toasting former Palestinian Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi at a 2003 event honoring the Arafat disciple and his wife?

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Two weeks ago, John Murtha (D-PA), the Vietnam veteran who is currently being sued by two former Marines for slandering them on national television as “cold-blooded killers,” let his “tolerant man of the people” mask slip and told his constituents outright what he thought of them: that they’re pathetic, dirty, unrepentant and unvarnished racists (video below).

Now, Congressional Democrat leaders are fighting to save his seat, dropping $84,000 on a Pittsburgh ad buy designed to smear Murtha’s Iraq war veteran Republican opponent worse than Murtha has already smeared himself.

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“It has become crystal clear throughout this race that Jeanne Shaheen’s entire campaign is scripted from Washington,” wrote the New Hampshire Union Leader of the Granite state’s Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate earlier this week. “If the national Democratic Party leadership doesn’t have a talking point on it, then she doesn’t have a position on it. In short, Jeanne Shaheen is an empty pantsuit.”

Clearly Shaheen didn’t have Harry Reid whispering in her ear at a debate with incumbent opponent John Sununu (R) last week, when she struggled mightily to avoid a panelist’s request that she “give one issue that [she] believe[s] in [her] gut to be absolutely true but that the polls suggest to be politically unpopular.”

According to Politicker.com, whose national managing editor asked the question,

After seven seconds of pause Shaheen said, “Well certainly I think the one we just talked about, global warming is something that polls talk about the concern about costs and is something we’ve got to addressed because it’s critical to our future.”

She added, “People and polls are concerned about the cost of doing business and government and fiscal responsibility.”

Moderator Laura Knoy pointed out to Shaheen that “fiscal responsibility” and “global warming” are, in reality, incredibly popular - a fact which begs the question whether Shaheen meant, with the latter part of her answer, that she “believed in her gut” that fiscal irresponsibility was the way to go, despite its current unpopularity.

Shaheen’s response to the request for clarification was a lame, “You know I don’t pay a lot of attention to polls.”

And I’m sure she’s got some great ocean-front real estate in downtown Concord she’s selling, as well.

Video is below the fold.

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NBC News and Election Protection, identified by NBC as “the nation’s largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law,” announced yesterday that they “will be joining forces to help voters ensure that their vote will count” this election.

That “nonpartisan voter protection coalition” counts as its partners over 100 centrist, law-abiding, non-fringe organizations like ACORN, Democraciá USA, the Georgia Coalition of the Peoples’[sic] Agenda, the AFL-CIO, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the national NAACP and nine local branches, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, U.S. PIRG, the National Council of La Raza, the People for the American Way Foundation, the ACLU, YouTube, and Progressive Future.

Quite the all-star cast there. Take NBC-Universal’s sham “objective news outlet” status out of the partner lists, and it’s pretty much 100% far-left advocacy groups. Non-partisan voter rights advocacy FTW!

h/t Amanda Carpenter.

Both candidates looked flat to me, though I was clearly being harder on Sen. McCain than several of my colleagues, whose instant messages and emails seem to overwhelmingly support McCain as the sound winner of this go-round.

My thoughts, added as the debate went on, below the fold.

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Have you ever heard of Oleg Lyubner? No? I hadn’t either until recently.

For background information, Lyubner is a publicist for Workman Publishing, the publishing house responsible for popular books like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and slightly less mainstream works like The Bathroom Humor Page-a-Day Calendar and Bad President, a “humor” book about George W. Bush.

So, why does Lyubner matter — and if he does, why haven’t you heard of him before?

Here’s why. On September 15, over three weeks ago, Ben Smith wrote on his Politico blog about a letter written from a Workman Publishing spokesman to Mike Soohoo, deputy director of John McCain’s E-Campaign.

The author of this letter recommended the Workman book “Is This Thing On?” A Computer Handbook for Late Bloomers, Technophobes, and the Kicking & Screaming by Abby Stokes as a solution, “in a format that would be very familiar and accessible to the Senator,” to McCain’s supposed out-of-touchness that results from the fact that he (gasp!) doesn’t actually send email. The letter-writer even went so far as to offer Ms. Stokes’ services for “a special one-on-one-training session” on how to get modern already and start using computers.

This, of course, echoes the Obama campaign’s official position — as articulated in an ad that said, “[McCain] admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, [and] can’t send an email…after one President who was out of touch, we just can’t afford more of the same” — that John McCain is grossly out of touch with mainstream America because he doesn’t personally use computers.

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h/t Jon Henke

Here’s a nugget from Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA 27), in a floor speech made yesterday just after 7pm CDT:

Transcript:

Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill, on Monday, the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points in the first day, another couple thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted “No.”

That’s what I call fear-mongering. Unjustified. Proven wrong. We’ve got a week, we’ve got two weeks, to write a good bill.

The only way to write - to pass - a bad bill: Keep the panic pressure on.

Well, the bill defeated Monday was thirty-four times longer than the original Paulson plan, and the one voted on today was 450% longer than that. I still don’t see any martial law; however, I do see a constantly-growing piece of legislation that, despite Mr. Sherman’s claims, would not likely have gotten “better” over the course of “a week” or “two weeks.”

Good to know the “fear-mongering” about Bush and martial law is still taking place among Democrats, though. Maybe one of these days, when he’s been out of office for a few years or more, America’s lefties will finally concede that George Bush isn’t hiding under their beds or in their closets, carefully crafting strategeries to steal or cancel elections and to impose martial law.

Maybe.

Update-10/1@1500CDT: A Senate contact just emailed to correct my use of the term “tax earmarks” to describe the tax extenders in the Senate legislation.

Brian Johnson of Americans for Tax Reform has a good post below explaining why that term is a misnomer, saying in part:

Calling tax cuts “earmarks” is very unhelpful and completely wrong from a fiscal conservative perspective.

There is no such thing as a “tax earmark.” Earmarks are spending. There are appropriations earmarks. There are authorization earmarks. There are no “tax earmarks.”

To claim that there are puts tax deductions and credits (which is what we’re talking about here) on the same par as bridges to nowhere. Was the creation of HSAs a “tax earmark?” How about the home mortgage interest deduction?

One might call for lowering the rates and broadening the base, but we should not fall into the trap of equating tax cuts and spending increases. That’s how some Senate Republicans got in such massive trouble over health care last year and energy this year vis-à-vis taxes.

I’ve corrected the headers below to reflect the status of these tax breaks as such. Further, though the bill did grow by 250% between inception and the Senate producing a final version, the majority of that bulk comes from its being the combination of the Senate-approved tax extender bill mentioned below and the Wellstone mental health bill passed by the House in March.

The Senate version of the bailout legislation can be seen here. Warning: it’s a 451-page pdf file, so it might take a minute to load.

That’s right: 451 pages. The original Paulson plan was just over a page and a half. The House version was just over 100 pages.

Now, the Senate has loaded the bill up with so many sweeteners for representatives on both sides of the aisle that this “emergency economic rescue” legislation is now two hundred times its original length, weighs in at almost five pounds, and contains earmarks that seem, to be generous, not the most germane to the economic crisis it is purportedly being pushed to immediately address.

A few examples of those earmarks:

New tax breaks earmarks in Bailout bill

• Film and Television Productions (Up to $15,000,000.00; Sec. 502)
• Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)
• 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)

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