From the Associated Press:

Federal officials say that 20-year-old David Kernell of Knoxville, Tenn., was indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville for intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of Palin, Alaska’s governor.

Kernell has turned himself in to authorities and is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday before a magistrate.

Kernell faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release.

David is the son of Mike Kernell a Democratic Tennessee state Representative. Read more about him and his earlier admittal to the crime here.

I said the other day that both candidates needed to come to the debate with clear answers on the economic crisis and new policy ideas. Well, so much for that.

McCain did propose a new $300 Billion plan for the government to assist homeowners but did a terrible job of explaining or selling it and did not refer back to it often enough for most people to notice. Plus its kind of hard to sell yourself as a reformer who will cut spending when you keep proposing new spending. The same also applies for Obama. When people ask you what programs you will cut and you suggest programs you will spend more money on, then follow it up with “some existing programs may need tighter budgets EXCEPT… you aren’t actually suggesting any budget cuts.

My sense of the debate is that many tuned in, not many stayed the entire length.

Despite the sudden rush of polls, my sense is that we are actually somewhat tied 27 days out. Some of the national polls will tighten now that conservatives are moving back into attack mode and the right is revving up their base with thoughts of what will happen if an unchecked Democratic Party comes to power. Likewise the MSM, which adopted the Democratic theme that this was deregulation gone amok, have begun reporting on the lengthy involvement of Barney Frank and the Democrats in this crisis. As that happens and the reality that the US was failed on all sides sinks in, I wouldn’t be surprised if things tighten up. Not because of renewed interest in McCain but something else.

Read the rest of this entry »

Something tells me 1988 Sarah Palin probably would have been REALLY upset. 2008 Sarah Palin? Probably not so much!

Story from Entertainment Wise.

Says Obama is ready if McCain decides to “Take the gloves off.”

From the AP:

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state’s office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh says ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names.

The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada.

ACORN or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been linked to voter fraud before and received attention recently when Sen. Lindsay Graham noted during the bailout negotiations that the group was going to receive money as part of the bailout bill.

28 days are left until the election and with personal attacks aplenty, little is helping voters understand how we got into the current financial mess and how we are going to get out of it. Right now I am compiling as much information as possible for a section exploring the biggest issue facing this nation in 2008 and every day, for the next 28 days, I will leave you with a quote in the blog on the topic to help explain this mess.

“The biggest advantage of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s anomalous legal status arises because financial markets treat their obligations as if those obligations are backed by the federal government - even though the federal government explicitely does not do so… One critic, Richard Carnell (2004), a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, has suggested that the two companies’ growth is at least partially a consequence of a “double game” that they play: ”[They] tell Congress and the news media, ‘Don’t worry, the government is not on the hook’ - and then turn around and tell Wall Street, ‘Don’t worry, the government really is on the hook.’”

W. Scott Frame and Lawrence J. White The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 159-184 Published by: American Economic Association

In very frank terms…

Get an economic message together beyond waiting for the $700 Billion bailout to work and get it before tomorrow night. Tomorrow is a town hall meeting, which means average Americans will be answering questions that are vetted by the MSM. So ducking and weaving and ignoring the moderator won’t work. Number one on their agenda will no doubt be the economy and “I helped bail out a bunch of crooks and it could take months to work” just isn’t going to cut it.

For all the time these campaigns are spending sharpening their attacks, they should be spending five times that building some kind of serious economic agenda that reads “My administration Year One.” Without it, you can kiss a good deal of that much hyped electoral enthusiasm good-bye.

Excerpts from John McCain’s remarks as prepared for delivery today in Albuquerque, New Mexico:

My opponent has invited serious questioning by announcing a few weeks ago that he would quote — “take off the gloves.” Since then, whenever I have questioned his policies or his record, he has called me a liar.

Rather than answer his critics, Senator Obama will try to distract you from noticing that he never answers the serious and legitimate questions he has been asked. But let me reply in the plainest terms I know. I don’t need lessons about telling the truth to American people. And were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn’t seek advice from a Chicago politician.

My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned. For a guy who’s already authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. It’s as if somehow the usual rules don’t apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that. Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama. All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama? But ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults.

Our current economic crisis is a good case in point. What was his actual record in the years before the great economic crisis of our lifetimes?

This crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them. Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread. This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.

Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, “a good idea.” Well, Senator Obama, that “good idea” has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did. He was surely familiar with the people who were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign. He has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them. Did he ever talk to the executives at Fannie and Freddie about these reckless loans? Did he ever discuss with them the stronger oversight I proposed? If Senator Obama is such a champion of financial regulation, why didn’t he support these regulations that could have prevented this crisis in the first place? He won’t tell you, but you deserve an answer.

…

Who is the real Senator Obama? Is he the candidate who promises to cut middle class taxes, or the politician who voted to raise middle class taxes? Is he the candidate who talks about regulation or the politician who took money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and turned a blind eye as they ran our economy into a ditch?

Is he the candidate who promises change, or is he the politician who has bought into everything that is wrong with Washington? We can’t change the system with someone who’s never fought the system.

Washington is on the wrong track and I’m going to set it right. The American people know my record. They know I am going to change Washington, because I’ve done it before. They know I’m going to reform our broken institutions in Washington and on Wall Street because I’ve done it before. They know I’m going to deliver relief to the middle class, because that’s what I’ve done.

The other night after facing criticism from Sarah Palin over a perception of Washington as “out-of-touch” with the middle class, a group Palin claims to firmly represent, Joe Biden struck back by naming off his own middle class creds, one of which was an invitation to join him at hometown Katie’s restaurant where he assured us we would find hometown values. That may well have been true, back the in 1980’s when Katie’s restaurant closed.

Lucky for Joe though if we do ask the people in Katie’s restaurant “have you been better off in the last eight years” as Joe suggests, we probably will get the same answer. Only they may well have largely been talking about the Carter administration.

A new ad by the McCain camp shows a clip of Obama saying troops in Afghanistan are “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” and calls the Senator “dishonorable” and “too risky” while linking Obama to Congressional Democrats and warning of their takeover of power. The ad comes after a weekend of McCain & Palin bringing Obama’s connections to Robert Ayres to the forefront.

In the same vein Governor Palin also discussed Senator Obama’s connection to Rev. Wright during an interview with Bill Kristol saying:

“Those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Read Kristol’s full New York Times column