McCain / Palin’s trainwreck express keeps flailing through stations across America this week. Where can one even start?

Oh yeah, McCain begins acting a little schizophrenic, flailing around about suspending his campaign for president as he has to take care of the economy in congress, by helping pass a federal bailout of private banks which he hadn’t even read as of Tuesday, though wholeheartedly supported. Which gave us a downright scary look at what a McCain presidency would be like.

Then McCain calls up Letterman to cancel an appearance, stating “..the economy is cratering”, immediately running to Katie Couric for an interview. Resulting in Letterman destroying McCain on-air for the entirety of his show along with fill-in Keith Olbermann, which was honestly one of the best Letterman’s in as long as I can remember.

Add up Palin’s increasingly awkward press appearances (or lack of), from her staged photo ops with foreign leaders which the McCain campaign pitches as showing off her foreign policy experience, which also barred press from attending, to her most recent (non)interview on CBS where she was stumped by well, just about every question fielded her way, to the release that most of McCain’s cabinet is full of lobbyists and you’ve got a pretty good perfect storm building behind this increasingly bizarre campaign.

One of the largest unofficial and unscientific polls to come out of late regarding the 2008 presidential election was recently published and Obama appears to be ahead 43% to 31% among participants of the Microsoft / Rock the Vote poll. Nearly 100,000 owners of the Xbox 360 gaming console were able to cast their vote as of Friday from the comfort of their home using just their controllers.

There are quite a number of undecided voters as well as “others” who we’ll toss up into the undecided column for now.

Obama \ Biden: 43%
McCain \ Palin: 31%
Undecided: 13%
Other: 13%

Perhaps just as interesting as the poll is the registration drive which is attached, where users can register to vote via the service. According to Microsoft, 55,000 registration forms have been downloaded since the poll began August 25th.

However, the LA Times put it into perspective nicely

So although Xbox Live users represent a chunk of the youth demographic, which could swing key states such as Nevada, a big question remains: Will online gamers rip themselves away from the likes of Guitar Hero and Madden NFL 09 to go to the polls Nov. 4?

Another in a long line of images making the rounds today, showing us a peek into the garages of the McCain’s and the Obama’s. We can really see how Obama can be confused as being an elitist :/

Newsweek is running a great piece looking into the tax records of the candidates, indicating that John and Cindy McCain own 13 private automobiles, versus Barack and Michelle Obama’s one (which a Ford Escape hybrid no less). 13. Now, I’m all for those of extreme wealth to have the kit to go along with the status, but, how on Earth is the McCain campaign trying to still paint this family as ‘one of us’?

With much of America struggling to even afford the gasoline and loan payments for 1 car, how can we expect someone who owns a fleet of 13 to even be able to identify with those types of problems, much less attempt to solve them? Let’s give McCain credit for marrying into the right family and for making some shrewd business decisions, but, if the McCain family even gas up their own cars, do you think they feel the effects of a 0.10 cents per gallon price hike? I’d wager not.

HuffPo has a long conversation in their discussions touching on a few interesting topics, such as comparing McCain to John Kerry, which actually is quite an interesting read when looking into the comparisons.

Whoa. All I can say is impressive. While you’d be hard-pressed to find an adult who can actually name all of the states in the union, much less place them on the map, Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken is taped here (1)drawing the United States, (2)state by state, (3)freehand, (4)by memory, (5)while standing, (6)with someone else holding the paper, all while (7)entertaining the attendees at a campaign rally back in April. Again, impressive campaigning and great public relations on Franken’s part, who just seems like the type of guy you want to invite over for dinner with Mom and Dad.

Naturally that doesn’t qualify him outright to lead the great state of Minnesota, but it does score a pretty high rating on our impressive candidate abilities list!

Franken and Republican nominee (Big Oil tool) Norm Coleman are currently neck and neck in what’s turning out to be an exciting battleground state.

It’s almost hard to not like Ron Paul, if it weren’t for a few small things, for example, his ardent belief all Americans should be free from government influence (social security? education? public services?), his support for the closure of the Department of Education and his confusing addiction to big government earmarks for his constituents in the hundreds of millions of dollars, I’d actually quite like to have him play a larger role in presidential politics. Seems I’m not the only one, as witnessed recently in this recent MSNBC interview, where when pressed on Phil Gramm’s recent call asking him to endorse McCain, Paul fires back with one of my favorite lines so far this election season.

I mean, I could never support somebody who thinks that it’s funny to say “bomb bomb bomb Iran”, that..that to me is not..uh, somebody that I could endorse, ever.

It’s amazing how a well-presented visual graph can cut right through campaign stop rhetoric. Here we’ve got a very clear graph from the Washington Post showing the differences between Obama and McCain’s tax plan. As you can see, without the rhetoric and out-right lies being thrown out from the McCain camp, Obama’s tax plan actually cuts taxes on all but the richest of citizens (147,000 families make up the top 0.1% of the tax bracket), most importantly, showing the amount cut higher starting from the bottom up. Whereas, McCain’s proposal highly favors the rich, allowing them to keep more of their expendable income, you know, for their 8 or 9th house. The graph was constructed using a recent study by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.