LIGHTNING ROUND: FRAUDS AND COWARDS.

• Barack Obama is taking himself off the campaign trail Thursday and Friday to be with his ill grandmother who raised him in Hawaii.
• I agree with Adam's assessment of Reps. Bachmann and Hayes -- they're cowards who, if they're sincere in their McCarthyist beliefs, should rather win an election than ferret out closet anti-Americans residing in the U.S. Congress. Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feeney is keeping it real, however, cutting an ad that ties his Democratic opponent to Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 attacks. John McCain too has taken this line of attack, sending out mailers that use threatening airplane imagery to underscore that Obama "thinks terrorists just need a good talking to."
• Vote fraud you can believe in: "A joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the RNC and the the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy in June for purposes of "registering voters." The managing partner of that firm is Nathan Sproul, a renowned GOP operative who has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket."
• Speaking of vote fraud, Think Progress celebrates the quadrennial festivities over at the Heritage Foundation.
• Republican reformer Sarah Palin can't help but lie about the number of days Barack Obama has spent in office as a U.S. Senator and tells an NBC affiliate in Colorado that the Vice President is "in charge" of the U.S. Senate. I confess, it never occurred to me that Palin's vast executive experience would actually make her more ignorant of how the legislative branch works.
• This overlooked article in The Washington Post on Sunday looks at how the financial crisis dramatically affected the reach of 527's this election cycle: "'After the [GOP] convention, things looked good,' said Phil Musser, a Republican fundraising consultant. 'Major donors interested in issue advocacy were tuned in, political juices were flowing, polling looked good, and then, blammo! Most donors lost 20 or 30 percent of their net worth in eight days. With few exceptions, that pretty well shut down the money discussion for a lot of folks.'"
• Taegan Goddard shares an Obama campaign memo that shows the McCain campaign message going in no less than 10 different directions yesterday, and not one of them addressing the economy.
• The jokes write themselves: The Washington Post's Michael Shear tells his tale of the McCain campaign ads he still receives week after week in the mail, all available online, and each recorded on a Betamax tape. (I know the format is still used in the broadcasting industry to some extent, but come on.)
• And finally, Kevin Drum comes up with five words he'd like to "hear a lot less of after November 4th." I've actually been working on such a list for a while now which, in addition to Drum's entries, include such vapidity as "wine-track/beer-track," "bubba vote," "ready to lead," "hockey moms," "Main St./Wall St.," "Patio Man," and of course, "change."

--Mori Dinauer