Biden to Supporters: “Gird Your Loins”, For the Next President “It's Like Cleaning Augean Stables”  —  ABC News' Matthew Jaffe Reports: Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months …

Safety in Numbers?  Poll-Driven Press Goes Out on a Limb  —  The network maps are bathed in blue, the pundits contemplating a landslide, the conservative columnists preparing for the indignities of an Obama administration.  —  With the numbers breaking Barack Obama's way …

Evidence of Obama-Ayers Tie Sent Down the Memory Hole . . . Almost!  —  The best evidence that Barack Obama launched his political career from Bill Ayers's living room has disappeared . . . down the memory hole.  —  Well, not quite.  The Wayback Machine and I have both saved copies.

FIRST THOUGHTS: TWO WEEKS OUT  —  From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Carrie Dann  —  *** Two weeks out: There are no significant changes to this week's NBC electoral map.  Obama continues to hold a 264-163 lead over McCain, which is unchanged from last week.

EXCLUSIVE: .22 Gunshot, paint balls fired at McCain / Palin Straight Talk Express  —  (Sunday, October 19 - Filed by Mark Williams in Raton, New Mexico with the Stop Obama Tour) We learned at this morning's Stop Obama Rally here that the McCain/Palin Straight Talk Express came through town yesterday.

Palin Signals Support for Federal Marriage Amendment  —  In a one-on-one interview with The Brody File, Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin signaled her support for a federal marriage amendment.  Up to this point, she hadn't really said one way or the other whether she officially supports one.

CNN Poll: Race may be tightening  —  Latest CNN/ORC Poll of likely voters:  —  Barack Obama: 51 percent  —  John McCain: 46 percent  —  WASHINGTON (CNN) — With two weeks and one day until election day, a new national poll of likely voters suggests the race for the White House may be tightening up.

John McCain and an Army of Joes  —  Woodbridge, Va. — Tito Munoz was ready to rock when John McCain showed here up at the Connaughton Community Plaza in Woodbridge, Virginia Saturday afternoon.  Dressed in a yellow hard hat covered with McCain-Palin stickers, wearing an orange high-visibility vest …

More Challenges for McCain, From Ayers to the Palin Pick  —  Obama leads on optimism and temperment in final weeks.  —  More challenges for John McCain: Likely voters overwhelmingly reject his effort to make an issue of Barack Obama's association with 1960s radical William Ayers.

The Excrescence Of Right-Wing GOP Hate  —  The racist and xenophobic bile that has flowed from the right-wing Republican base and spokesmouths like Rush Limbaugh has been unprecedented in this campaign season, and it was easy to predict that the moment Colin Powell endorsed Barack …

McCain camp hits up Russian envoy  —  On a day on which McCain campaign manager Rick Davis hinted that Obama was taking foreign money, the Russian Mission to the United Nations has released a standard-issue fundraising letter gone a bit astray: It was addressed to the Russian envoy to the U.N. …

Here the People Rule  —  According to the silver-penned Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, “In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.”  —  Leave aside Noonan's negative judgment on Sarah Palin's candidacy, a judgment I don't share.

Tires slashed during Obama rally  —  Someone slashed the tires of at least 30 vehicles parked outside the Crown Coliseum on Sunday during a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, authorities said.  —  Sheriff's deputies are investigating.

Is Capitalism Dead?  —  IS THIS the end of American capitalism?  As financial panic spread across the globe and governments scrambled to contain the damage, reality seemed to announce the doom of U.S.-style free markets and President Bush's ideology.  But this is wrong in two ways.

Obama's Carbon Ultimatum  —  The coming offer you won't be able to refuse.  —  Liberals pretend that only President Bush is preventing the U.S. from adopting some global warming “solution.”  But occasionally their mask slips.  As Barack Obama's energy adviser has now made clear …

Chess, Not Checkers  —  I've hesitated to do this post, partly because I think excessive conservative attention gets paid to short-term political horse race issues.  But here's something practical and urgent that I think everybody on the Right — from rabid Sarah Palin fans to Andrew Sullivan …

Palin Becomes Increasingly Accessible To The National Media  —  From CBS News' Scott Conroy:  —  (COLORADO SPRINGS) It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane …

Gallup Daily: Obama's Lead Edges Higher  —  Has double-digit lead among registered voters  —  PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Friday through Sunday gives Barack Obama an 11 percentage point lead over John McCain in the presidential vote preferences of all registered voters, 52% to 41%.

How to Read the Constitution  —  The following is an excerpt from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute last Thursday:  —  When John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country …

Mark Salter on the Press and John McCain  —  There was an astonishing quotation in a recent New York Times story about John McCain from Robert Timberg, a biographer and admirer of McCain's.  Timberg told the Times reporter David Kirkpatrick that, “Political campaigns have a way of distorting reality …