I humbly dedicate this diary to the tireless Nancy K.  I pray that she continues to treat us to her delightfully droll tales of the fantastic brilliance of Sarah Palin, Genius Woman Politician.  For more on the extent of her spectacular genius may I direct you all to vcalzone video-clip treat of the day: http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/11/5/2123 54/732

Now for my little dose of consumer Palinology, I turn to Newsweek's "How He Did It, 2008," the latest installment in NEWSWEEK's Special Election Project, which was first published in 1984. As in the previous editions, "How He Did It, 2008" is an inside, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential election produced by a special team of reporters working for more than a year on an embargoed basis and detached from the weekly magazine and Newsweek.com. Everything the project team learns is kept confidential until the day after the polls close.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/11/5/2123 54/732  This diary is sticking just to the content on Sarah, Superstar of Republican base.

As you all know, stunning Sarah got spiffed up some for her swell gig as Vanna White to McCain's Bob Barker.  We've all heard how she was shocked, shocked! by the cost of the threads.  The poor gal really wanted to wear her own jeans and elk skins.  

Well, not so much as it turns out.  Join me after the jump for "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and Sarah in a towel!

This three-part view of Obama from Kenya comes from http://www.eastandard.net/?  Above the fold is the Kenyan/East African reaction.  Below the fold is a recollection of Barack's visit to his paternal grandmother in Kogelo.  Finally, there is a striking editorial citing our "imperfect elections" as an example for Kenya's future.

From The Standard, the view from Kenya.  

Barack Obama's story, quite simply, is the stuff of fairy tales.

And he announced his arrival on the America's national stage with a cautionary reminder: "Let's face it," he said in that thick baritone, hypnotising the US Democratic Convention in 2004 - and the world - ever since. "My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya."

Later tonight, Obama is poised to make history as the first African-American president, the only one since their country's independence in 1776.

There seemed to be no stopping for the Democratic candidate, who last evening was ahead of the Republican John McCain in six of eight key battleground states, according to a series of Reuters/Zogby polls.

And drums of victory were already sounding across Kenya and East Africa last night, with Ugandans arriving in droves in the lakeside town of Kisumu to join in the celebrations.

Coast hoteliers announced special Obama night to last till morning, where patrons are expected to eat and drink to their fill as they monitor the poll results.

The situation was no different in other major Kenyan cities and towns where entertainment spots are expecting booming business from revellers keeping wake to monitor the US election.

After one of the costliest campaigns in history, Obama or McCain will today be voted the 44th president of the USA.

Alaska is expected to be the last state to close polls at 9am tomorrow morning, by which time it shall be possible to deduce who shall have taken an early lead, and safely on the way to becoming the next American president.

If that happens to be Obama, then Kenya shall provide a footnote to this edifying story, where it all began.

After the jump, When Obama Slept on the Floor

That poor failing, flailing GOP, they're juggling a whack of fantastic Obama conspiracy theories but they can't actually lob any of 'em.  Here's a case where they very nearly put their money where their bile was.  From The Times (London)  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo rld/us_and_americas/us_elections/article 5063279.ece

The Republicans have made a last-minute attempt to prevent Barack Obama's ascent to the White House by trying to recruit an Oxford academic to "prove" that his autobiography was ghostwritten by a former terrorist.

- snip -

Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.

- snip -

He was contacted last weekend and offered $10,000 (£6,200) to assess alleged similarities between Obama's bestseller, Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers.

- snip -

The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama's book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer.

The unravelling, the "desperate attempt to save the republic", more crazy quotes and Palin vs McCain after the jump.

I feel like Nancy K, doubling up these diaries.  I'll leave that alone now & return to content...

John McCain's beloved hero, Ronald Reagan has cut an ad for Barack Obama.

Not just any ad, the definitive Reagan ad.  Not embeddable, go here & watch it first.  Then follow me after the jump for the details.  I promise you will not be disappointed.   http://www.betteroff08.com/

[editor's note, by January 20]The title of this diary has been changed from the crude "Ronald Reagan just gave me an orgasm!"

The shortest diary I've ever written.  (Or likely will write)  

Al & Tipper Gore head to Florida tomorrow for rallies in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.   If that doesn't bring this home I don't know what will.

It has been a VERY long eight years.

Aside from the obvious message, this is going to drive the news cycle for another full day. Check the Mark Salter story in the Post & feel for his poor overactive pager. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102904035.html?hpid=topnews Fresh event details after the bump

How far we've come in a single lifetime.

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year's presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children -- Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones -- helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.

Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones' 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election's significance to the matriarch.

"It's awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us," Baker said. "It's awesome to see what she's done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work" if Obama is elected, she said.

From http://www.statesman.com/news/content/ne ws/stories/local/10/27/1027jones.html

Unrelated (but excellent) video after the jump

I hate to sound like the choir, but the more I learn of Barack, the more I like him.  The Guardian has a wonderful set of interviews with friends, family members, and associates that knew Barry Soetoro / Barack Obama in Jakarta, Hawaii, LA, and Chicago.  

As the intro says:

Schoolfriends remember his love for comic books, basketball and teasing the girls. A former boss recalls him as a young man running a community project in Chicago. A fellow senator remembers being beaten by him at poker. Gifted student, quiet persuader, charismatic speaker, loyal friend... We speak to the people who knew Barack Obama best, revealing an intimate, often touching, portrait of a man on the brink of greatness

Obama as we knew him... man and boy

Participants:
Indonesia 1969: Rully Dasaad
After Barack's parents split up, he moved with his mother and Indonesian stepfather to Jakarta, aged seven, where he befriended classmate Dasaad - now a commercial photographer - at Basuki Primary School.

Hawaii 1975: Tony Peterson
Barack moved back to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1971, aged 10, and lived with his grandparents. At Punahou High School, he met Peterson, who now works for the United Methodist Church in Tennessee.

Los Angeles 1980: Margot Mifflin
University friend of Obama at Occidental College, LA. Now a journalism professor.

Chicago 1980s: Auma Obama
Obama's Kenyan half-sister, who first met Barack in the Eighties. Now works in children's services in Reading, UK.

Chicago 1985: Gerald Kellman
Employed Obama as a community organiser at the Calumet Community Religious Conference, Chicago, 1985-88.

Jakarta 1980s: Julia Surakusuma
Close friend of Obama's mother, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1981 to 1995 . Sociologist and feminist writer.

Harvard 1989: Larry Tribe
University professor of constitutional law, who taught Obama, and for whom Obama worked as a research assistant.

Illinois 1996: Senator Terry Link
A friend of Obama since they played poker and golf together at the Capitol, Springfield, Illinois in the 1990s.

London 2008: David Lammy
British MP and Minister of State for Higher Education; friend of Obama's since 2005.

Selected excerpts after the jump but you'll be happier going to the Guardian & reading the whole thing:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct /26/barackobama-uselections2008

drip, drip, drip...  

It seems the "Team of Mavericks" is having more than a little trouble back in the stables.  As reported by Ben Smith, with lots of juicy not-for-attribution quotes in today's Politico, mini-maverick Sarah Palin has "lost confidence in most of the people in the plane and has begin to go rogue"   This, it appears, is what you get when you do not vet.

Full text at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/100 8/14929.html  Here are a few lowlights:

Four Republicans close to Palin said she will disregard the advice of the former Bush aides who handle her

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image -- even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

- snip -

"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, whose sometimes painful content the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

More agony after the bump.