In this 20-month long campaign I have seldom seen Obama bring the full power of his oratory to the biggest possible crowd his campaign can build. That is, until this week. As the long campaign nears the end, the campaign has stopped shying away from such huge audiences, and the crowds have been stunning: 100,000 in St. Louis, 75,000 in Kansas City, 100,000 in Denver, 45,000 in Fort Collins, Colorado, 50,000 in Albuquerque. “We want to see and touch and talk to as many people as possible,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. “This is momentum time.” And for anyone who was disappointed by Obama’s wonky convention speech, his closing argument is all gravy — all the inspirational lines that get people on their feet and cheering their hearts out.

St. Petersburg Times:

About 30 minutes before John McCain is scheduled to lead a rally outside Raymond James Stadium, looks like there’s maybe 1,000 people here. What’s up with that? On the day before the election? Bush drew at least 15,000 people to a rally just across the street on the Sunday before the 2004 election.

“We are the quiet majority that goes out and gets things done. … I smell victory,” said state Rep. Kevin Ambler. Good thing he smells it, because it’s hard to see it with this crowd.

These two narratives worry me, not because the race is actually tightening (it isn’t), but because it seems that the Republican Party and its mouthpieces in the so-called liberal media are trying to create the expectation of an Obama landslide. That way, when Obama wins with a smaller margin than “expected”—perhaps by losing Florida, Ohio, North Carolina—then the right wing will be able to spin that into the idea that Obama does not have a “mandate” to govern. Forget the popular vote total; from the point of view of a “mandate” the popular vote means zip. The media will restart the “he couldn’t close the deal” narrative, just as they did during the Democratic primary, and spin it into the traditional “the country is deeply divided” nonsense, fostering a sense of doubt about Obama’s “mandate” to govern as president and undermining his authority in that office.

The media parroted the laughable claim that George W. Bush had won a “mandate” in the 2004 election, despite the fact that Bush won the narrowest victory in the popular vote of any wartime president in American history. Look for them to do the exact opposite if Obama wins by anything less than an absolute landslide.

• The Southern California Board of Rabbis, an interdenominational Jewish organization, opposes the anti-gay marriage initiative to be voted on in California this election.
• John Judis of the New Republic has a terrific sum-up of everything wrong with John McCain’s stunt of singlehandedly fixing the world before last weekend.
• In a similar vein, the Washington Post’s analysis of how McCain screwed it all up in Washington before Friday night’s debate.
• One of the best analyses of the debate and the larger question of “strategy versus tactics”—and who really understood the best way to win this debate.
• A biologist reviews an Intelligent Design textbook. (He is not impressed.)
• Tina Fey returns as Sarah Palin on SNL in an absolutely deadly spot-on “interview” with Amy Poehler as Katie Couric.
• Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is the latest journalist to express amazement at John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin in light of his assertion that he always puts country first.
• Crypto-Muslim (formerly Muslim Hedonist) on her experiences becoming white by removing the hijab. (This is mandatory reading.)
• Finally, will lolcats be able to keep making the moneys? Only time—and great lulz—will tell.

What’s eating up your laptop’s RAM today?

• The New York Times rightly supports laws that block enforcement of legal judgments relating to freedom of speech in countries where the freedom of speech is not as legally protected as it is in the United States.
• The LA Times’s Joel Stein on trying to convince your elderly Jewish relatives in Florida to vote for Obama.
• A Republican Party county chairman in New Mexico thinks some racist things about Hispanics, blacks, and Obama.
• Truthdig investigates who is behind the Obsession ‘radical Islam’ DVD.
• Margaret Cho says sexist things about Sarah Palin, gets called on it, posts one of the weirdest defences ever, and promptly gets called on it again.
• This year’s MacArthur Genius from the World of Contemporary Art™ is inexplicable as befits a member of that community.
• Campbell Brown, my new hero, tears the McCain camp a new one over their sexist treatment of Sarah Palin.
• Mike Huckabee thinks John McCain’s I-won’t-go-to-the-debate-because-they-need-me-in-Washington-even-more-oh-wait-no-they-really-didn’t gambit was an enormous error in judgment.
• Finally, Jewish settlers in the West Bank—remember them?—are committing terrorism against their fellow Israelis. Terrific.

What Firefox tabs are eating up your computer’s memory today?

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

I invite you to imagine if this had been said in the name of a Democrat, taking partial credit for an invention he helped facilitate through legislative action. Imagine the absolute evisceration he’d receive from the so-called liberal press. Now I invite you to imagine what the response from that same so-called liberal press is going to be about this story.

As in years past, the Democrats have let themselves get pulled into a no-win situation here. If they succeed at completely trouncing the Republicans in the debates, they (especially Biden) will be painted as bullies who didn’t have the decency to go easy on a woman and a doddering old guy. If they slip slightly below expectations—one small gaffe, or even a sigh, should do it—they will be proclaimed to have “lost” the debates. And this is not unfamiliar territory for Democrats. Simply think of the media’s extremely low bar for George W. Bush in 2000, or the way they set up the dichotomy between Kerry the polished debater and George W. Bush the bumbling idiot in 2004, or the absolute evisceration of John Edwards for mentioning Dick Cheney’s gay daughter in their vice-presidential debate in 2004, and you’ll get the idea. The Democrats are set against an impossibly high standard, while the Republicans get the major benefit of the doubt.

This year it’ll be Obama the Ivy League-educated ultra-articulate orator versus Uncle McCain the lovable old scoundrel, and Biden the 38-year tough-guy debate veteran versus Palin the newbie, fragile but feisty but go-easy-on-her-because-she’s-a-woman. Sure, Obama and Biden will shine during the debates in 2008, but there is no way for these candidates to emerge victorious. All McCain and Palin have to do is show up, and let the media’s expectations of Obama and Biden do the work.

John McCain’s bid to upstage the Democratic national convention on national TV backfired Monday night as he took his lumps from Jay Leno over the forgotten houses gaffe.

McCain was riffing on NBC’s “Tonight” show about the perks of being President and said “the house is nice.” Leno pounced: “You have enough of those.”

Later, Leno said, “For $1 million, how many houses do you have?”

Absolutely brilliant. Not only absolutely politically spot on, but comedy gold. The audience absolutely ate it up. McCain didn’t do himself any favours by continuing:

On the Leno show, McCain tried to recover by citing his heroic service in the Navy during Vietnam and his more than five years as a POW, mostly in the jail called the “Hanoi Hilton.”

“I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a kitchen table, I didn’t have a chair,” McCain said.

McCain also said his wife inherited the fortune from her father, Jim Hensley, a World War II B-17 bombardier who came home and “made a business, made the American Dream” with Arizona’s largest beer distributorship.

McCain listed some of the homes but said his wife was also “extremely generous, she goes around the world” on humanitarian causes and was on her way to war-torn Georgia.

Leno jumped in again: “That sounds like five houses.”

So to recap: McCain owns more houses than he can remember, repeats the gaffe on Leno, who turns it into pure gold for the comedy, and tries to make a big deal of the fact that he’s sending his wife to a dangerous war zone for some reason. And Obama is still polling near dead even with this douchebag?

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.

The man couldn’t (wouldn’t?) answer a question about how many houses he owns. His staff then lowballed the “correct answer”. John Aravosis is right on the money when he says that the Democrats absolutely must capitalize on this:

NOTE TO DEMOCRATS: This is manna from heaven. Run a freaking ad about this, non-stop. Unless of course you think it’s too mean and you just can’t touch it, then we can just have an independent group do it. Oh, that’s right - you killed the independent groups. Never mind. I hear the White House isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway.

I’m glad to see that the Democrats actually appear to be listening to this little bit of advice. They came out with an ad about this very quickly—a turnaround of one day, for a change!—and it’s pretty powerful:

About bloody time they did something like this in the time in which they did it. Next step: repeat this meme over and over again. The blogosphere has picked it up (and even started to question whether the number seven is, in fact, too low an “estimate”). The so-called liberal media, which you’d think would have always been more than eager to find indictments like this against the conservative candidate, has slowly started to pick this up. They’ve got to keep going with this. The precise number is less important than the idea: the meme that McCain owns many more houses than you (i.e. the average Joe Schmo) own has the potential to be extremely damaging to McCain—if the Democrats play it right. Use McCain’s own words against him. The audio is available via Politico. Hit McCain hard with it. (Aravosis thinks there ought to be a dance remix.) Hoist him by his own petard. String him up with his own idiocy. And for the love of Pete, don’t stop doing it until Obama gets elected.

So. When will Bush and McCain denounce Israel, just like Bush denounced Barack Obama—on the floor of the Knesset, no less—as an “appeaser” for declaring his intention to talk to America’s enemies? Israel is actually doing it. Where’s the condemnation?

Oh, right. Talking to and “appeasing” terrorists is okay when the American government or its allies does it, but when their political opponents even suggest it, they’re morally equivalent to Hitler.

That these outrageous comments and beliefs are still confined to a small corner of the online world and haven’t been getting the kind of press that Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright has been enjoying, I can only attribute to (a) the so-called liberal media’s ongoing love affair with McCain and (b) the incredible wealth and power of Hagee’s ministry and media empire.

Money quote: “How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, ‘My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.’ Today Israel is back in the land … They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.”

Full transcript and video (YouTube video of audio recording of sermon) after the jump.

Again he said unto me, “Prophesy unto these bones, and say unto them: O you dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” And he spoke to them and they stood and they became an exceeding great army—meaning they physically came to life.

Now how is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters.

The answer is given in Jeremiah 16, verse 15 and following. God says in Jeremiah 16: “Behold I will bring them (the Jewish people) again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers”—that would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—”Behold I will send for many fishers and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them”—that will be the Jews—”from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.”

If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust… you can’t see that.

So think about this—I will send fishers and I will send hunters. A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodore Herzl was? How many of you don’t have a clue who he was? Woo! Sweet God!

Theodore Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, “This land is our land, God wants us to live there.” So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, “I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.” So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.

And the Bible says—Jeremiah righty?—”They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks.” Meaning: there’s no place to hide.

And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, “My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.

Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God”?

Via Bruce Wilson at The Revealer

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.