Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations
The way things look at this point, the political weather forecast is a 95% chance of an Obama victory, followed by a major depression accompanied by accusations of campaign finance violations and voter fraud. Hard to see past that, due to heavy cloud cover over Obama's intentions, but the winds blowing from Congress are coming from the extreme left.

For what it's worth, here is my take on the election. The Republican Party as a whole has lost this election on the economy. It isn't Bush, McCain, or the voters alone--it is all of them. The party in the electorate (the voters), the party in government (the Bush administration), and the party's nominee and his campaign are collectively the reason they are losing the election for lack of apparent concern about the economy.

The voters nominated somebody who confesses he knows nothing about economics and thinks that is funny rather than shocking, and he has proved it. McCain ran mainly on foreign policy, and he won the nomination because the conservative base split between the religious conservatives who wanted Huckabee and the economic conservatives who wanted Romney. So the result was a choice who didn't inspire either group, and who had to gin up his disappointed base. McCain tried to shore up the religious right by taking Palin over Romney, who he dislikes and who would have alienated religious bigots. So that was two chances the party had to show some concern for the economy by putting Romney on the ticket. But both the top and bottom of the ticket went elsewhere: to all these voters who think morality and religion issues are paramount (Palin), and to those who are big on McCain's hawkish foreign policy. So, the voters said, the economy be damned.

Bush failed to anticipate the economic meltdown or prepare the nation for it. Maybe he thought it would happen after the election. Instead of handling this problem responsibly and with an eye to the future, he went on TV and freaked out a month before the election. He scared the living crap out of the country so he could get his $700 billion bailout passed on an emergency basis, without careful examination of the consequences. Sound familiar? That seems to be the only way he can do anything.

The election was probably lost for the Republicans on that day. But the final straw was when McCain first said the fundamentals of the economy were sound, and then almost immediately switched to saying the world is ending. He then proceeded with the debacle of suspending his campaign, canceling the debate, letting the Democrats make a fool of him in Washington, going to the debate, and then rebranding his candidacy as the Anti-Obama Campaign. How can anybody feel confident in McCain as the president to get us through this economic crisis after that performance?

At this point the electorate is focused on the economy like a laser beam and they are not happy. They are scared and angry. They want to vote for a better economy, and that means doing something different. Their choices are:

1. Obama, who has been hammering the economy as a main campaign theme for a year and a half, versus

2. McCain, who brings a hard-line foreign policy, a VP who is dearly loved by the religious right, and a campaign that is heavily focused on his opponent's past associations with leftists. His campaign lacks any consistent, high-profile, positive, economic policy theme--at least, one that distinguishes him from "the failed policies of the Bush Administration."

Add to that the fact that the major media folks are working overtime to protect Obama from McCain's criticisms and you have the makings of a Republican debacle on Tuesday.

But make no mistake: the Republicans should not blame the media or fraud for what looks like an impending electoral catastrophe. The Republican party, in all its aspects, has only itself to blame.