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Keith Olbermann asks those who voted for California's Proposition 8 how in the world it should affect them whether gay couples wish to legalize their relationship.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not... understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want -- a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them -- no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights -- even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

On a related note, California Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed his disappointment in the passage of Proposition 8, and cheered protesters up and down the state by telling them the "fight isn't over" and said he hoped to that the California Supreme Court overturn Prop. 8.

Transcripts below the fold

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Although this segment of The Rachel Maddow Show aired before the election, it does bring up an important point about one aspect of the McCain campaign tactics we haven't discussed yet: as polls showed McCain dropping further and further out of contention, McCain--effectively, the head of the Republican Party--did nothing to help down ticket races, some of which were very, very tight (at the time of writing the Coleman/Franken race in Minnesota was heading to a recount).

Did McCain's refusal to campaign in any of these locations help or hurt the Republican brand? Tim Pawlenty tries to deflect the question by saying that Obama didn't come to Minnesota to stump for Franken, but I don't know that the comparison is apt. While Obama never did any appearances with Franken, the Obama campaign's ground forces did do an amazing job of canvassing and registering more Democratic voters, which would only help Franken.

From MSNBC's election coverage after PA being projected for Obama.

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What's that old saying? When you point a finger at someone, you have four fingers pointing back at yourself. Well, just like every other smear that the McCain campaign has desperately flung at the Obama campaign, the reality of this new "palling around with anti-Israel types like Rashid Khalidi" looks bad...bad for McCain.

Senator, Senator, Senator...Morals aside, this is the classic problem of guilt by association:

Obama and Ayers gave Khalidi's organizations 80-thousand dollars. McCain gave Khalidi's organizations 448 thousand dollars.

Obama and Ayers. Obama and Ayers. Obama and Ayers... and McCain.

Obama and Ayers and McCain. Ayers and McCain.

Ayers and McCain!

So now, not only is Rashid Khalidi your problem, not Obama's. But now you're connected to Bill Ayers. The only difference is who gave this nebulously nefarious guy with the Arabic name more money, you or Ayers?

Golly, Senator, that'd be you... by a figure of at least 5-1.

Which is also the ratio of your campaign's sleaze bombs that blow up in your own face.

Full transcripts below the fold

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Of all the cable news heads out there, this was the interview that I thought would be the most intelligent and informative. I'm so grateful to have Rachel Maddow on the airwaves this election season.

In this first segment, Maddow talks about Obama's avoidance of partisan or ideological attacks (much to our on the left's consternation) as well as shoring up our infrastructure.

MADDOW: And so, you have the opportunity to say John McCain, George Bush, you're wrong. You also have the opportunity to say, conservatism has been bad for America. But, you haven't gone there either.

OBAMA: I tell you what though, Rachel. You notice, I think we're winning right now so... (LAUGHTER) Maybe I'm doing something right. I know you've been cruising for a bruising for a while here, looking for a fight out there. But, I just think people are tired of that kind of back and forth, tit for tat, ideological approach to the problems.

Now, there is no doubt that there is a set of premises in the reigning Republican ideology that I just think are wrong. This whole notion, and then it's been captured by this back and forth about whether I'm a redistributor, I think is a great example. The notion that the progressive income tax, which was instituted by Teddy Roosevelt, supposedly John McCain's hero, is somehow un-American, I think is an example of how people have gone way off track.

Part two and transcripts below the fold:

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Tucker Bounds adds another item to the list of things that "real Americans" don't do...read The Politico. Apparently they're not too happy with this headline there: A GOP Blame game?

It's absolutely uncanny. Absolutely every accusation or smear that the McCain campaign hurls at Barack Obama comes back worse for McCain. I'm halfway seriously expecting a registration card for McCain from the '50s to turn up with "Communist" marked as party affiliation.

And after solemnly announcing that we were possibly on the brink of 'destroying the fabric of democracy' due to ACORN and their ties to Obama at the final debate, it turns out that McCain has his own little acorns...or at least, nuts, perpetrating REAL fraud that has stolen votes from REAL Americans, by registering voters as Republicans without their consent or knowledge and tearing up Democratic registrations in several states.

Transcripts below the fold:

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Making good on his assumption (or was that a threat?) that the waning days of the election may result in a Special Comment every day, this time Keith Olbermann reminds Sarah Palin that actually understanding the responsibility of the Office of the Vice President would not make you a liberal elitist.

I mean, I'd like my President and Vice President to have memorized the Constitution, and abide by it...

Or at least, I'd like them to know more about the Constitution than I do.[..]

Maybe I'm raising the bar too high...

But at least wait until you achieve office before trying to seize power extra-Constitutionally!

"The founders" were not George Bush and Dick Cheney!

Transcripts below the fold

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Liberals in general are no fans of Colin Powell, but watching the right wing ideologues slam Powell because of his endorsement of Obama, I can only assume that they fear this particular endorsement because it will have an impact on undecided and independent voters. Pat Buchanan follows the lead of Rush Limbaugh and George Will and says that his only motivation was the color of his skin. A Red State writer actually says this:

"Affirmative Action At The Highest Level Unqualified Applicants Get Jobs Due Solely To Their Race

Notice how Pat and his friends make this a racist issue? (Memeorandum has a whole lot more)

Buchanan: Alright, we gotta ask a question, look would Colin Powell be endorsing Obama if he were a white liberal democrat...

Walsh: Oh, Pat, I'm really sorry you went there.

Look, General Powell Started off by saying it would be electrifying an African American and it is naive Joan to suggest it had nothing to do with his decision.

Matthews: He said that if that were his driving motive he would have done it weeks ago because the guy looked African America weeks and months ago.
Walsh: And Obama's been courting him. He's been courting him for months.

Buchanan: This is why he threw in the whole kitchen sink. A lot fo things are silly and ridiculous. Economics and Supreme courts justices, it's...

Walsh; That's not silly...

Buchanan: All the motives except for the one everybody is wondering about.

Walsh: Which is what? Race, I mean Pat, you know Pat. this is beneath you.

Matthews: Why don't you go by what he said? Why do you have to attribute motives to people who don't say those things?

Walsh: And Sheila Jackson Lee stayed with Hillary and Stephanie stayed...

Joan Walsh tells Pat that his assessment was "beneath him" and Matthews calls him out on it also. Wow, can you image that Colin Powell might consider the Supreme Court and economic policies before he makes a decision on who to vote for? Why would black people care about those issues right, Pat? He, like John McCain makes no sense at all. I remember hearing so many conservative and liberal women being upset when they felt others thought they should have thrown their support to Hillary just because she was a woman. This talk will only pick up as the week unfolds.

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NY Times columnist Bob Herbert appeared on Countdown to put some perspective on McCain's rose-colored promises of a $5,000 per family tax break somehow being an adequate plan to insure more Americans.

OLBERMANN: The infamous article—the “contigencies” article—that John McCain wrote when he wrote an article for the actuarial magazine reader: “We need to do for health insurance what we’ve done for the banking industry.” We’ll just for a moment throw out the economic collapse that resulted from doing that, even taking him at his word that he only meant the interstate commerce part, of letting you shop for a better healthcare plan in Arizona if you live in Michigan, is there any way that won’t end in disaster?

HERBERT: No. That will be guaranteed to end in disaster because what he wants to do is essentially deregulate the healthcare insurance industry. So what happens is a health insurance company sets up in a state that has the least regulations, so what happens now is if you purchase private healthcare, you may have a plan that says you get breast examinations that are covered or covered if you have a pre-existing condition or you’re covered for an ordinary annual checkup. Well if the company is set up in a state that says you don’t have to provide that coverage, well, guess what? Do we think that they’re going to provide it? No, they’re not going to provide it. So you’re going to get healthcare that is of a much lesser value.

This is exactly what they want to do, though. I mean, this is an ideological thing. They want healthcare to go into the marketplace. They don’t want healthcare provided on the job and they don’t want government sponsored healthcare. They want everybody out there in the marketplace.

We need only look at the financial market now to see how dangerous this is. As Herbert wrote in the NY Times:

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  On Tuesday, McCain's Chief Economic Adviser Carly Fiorina told Andrea Mitchell that both Sarah Palin and John McCain were unqualified to run a major corporation. Later in the day on "Hardball," Paul Begala went to town on Fiorina, arguing that she is a massive incompetent who couldn't even run Hewlett-Packard herself.

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"The more Carly Fiorina speaks for McCain the better it is for Obama because she's an idiot. [...] Incompetent; Idiot is the wrong word."

McCain flack Tucker Bounds was getting grilled about the campaign's pathological lying on MSNBC today when the video feed suddenly died. It's of course impossible to know if there was any foul play involved, but the "technical difficulties" couldn't have come at a more convenient time.

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O'DONNELL: "Let me as you specifically about the comments on 'The View' because John McCain was asked about Sarah Palin and earmarks. He said, 'no, she's not taken any as Governor.' The Wall Street Journal today has a story that in fact Palin's project list totals $453 million dollars. Will we hear John McCain admit that he was wrong?

BOUNDS: "Well, the first part about that Wall Street Journal piece that you should understand is that they don't use the accumulated earmarks that Barack Obama lists on his own...

[FEED GOES DEAD]

I guess the whining from the McCain campaign has finally paid off.

New York Times:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

John Amato:

All MSNBC has to do is keep their lineup intact. Hardball, Countdown, The Rachell Maddow Show and then go to Gregory just before and after the event. I think Tom Brokaw might be a little less cranky and they still cover it without blocking out six hours of time.

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The AP is at it again.  The largest North American news service is continuing in their anti-Obama trajectory with an "analysis" that, like Ron Fournier's last week, seems more agenda-driven than actual analysis.   This time, it's Charles Babington, a little known writer from the Washington Post (and I've been assured it's not a nom de plume of Fournier) whose shots at Obama had MSNBC host Keith Olbermann wondering what speech Babington had been watching

I feel impelled to read something from the Associated Press, which is a service that is distributed to thousands of newspapers around the continent mostly, our continent. This is called ‘Convention Analysis'. I'm not familiar with the writer, he's identified as Charles Babington. But let me read part of this in full:

Barack Obama, whose campaign theme is "change we can believe in," promised Thursday to "spell out exactly what that change would mean."

But instead of dwelling on specifics, he laced the crowning speech of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer. The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula: tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are unhappy with the incumbent.

"Of course," he went on to write, "no candidate can outline every initiative in a 35-minute speech - especially one that also must inspire voters." Mr. Babington got the length of the speech wrong by at least seven minutes. And this is analysis that will be printed in many, many newspapers, hundreds of them around the country. It is analysis that strikes me as having done...as having borne no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and websites, is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

Charles Babington, find new work.

Either the altitude or the hours are getting to MSNBC's Chris Matthews.  Either way, Tweety needs a nap.  Yesterday, in his intro to Steny Hoyer, Keith Olbermann made an off-handed reference to the hosts "yapping" as a way to apparently apologize to Hoyer for the delayed appearance, to which Matthews took offense.