Politico

Tim Griffin, a former U.S. attorney and top Bush political aide, is urging John McCain to reverse his slide with another bold move: calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the mortgage mess.

McCain should use the third and final debate next week to pledge that he’ll find and punish some of the culprits responsible for what has become the dominant issue of the campaign, Griffin writes on his blog.

By tapping a career prosecutor to investigate such Republican bogeymen as Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank as well as probing the CEOs of some of the major financial firms that have collapsed, Griffin contends McCain could appeal to both the GOP base and swing voters — both of whom are taking major hits in the market right now:

If McCain were to make such a proposal, it would demonstrate that he is a man of action, not just words.
It would demonstrate that he understands someone must be held accountable for the mortgage meltdown if criminal laws were broken. (I understand that greed in and of itself is not criminal.)

It would demonstrate that we are a nation of laws, even for the wealthy and well connected.

It would send a signal to the markets that we are determined to find out precisely what happened, and we won’t let it happen again. The facts uncovered in a criminal investigation could certainly inform whatever regulatory or legislative fixes are required down the road. Confidence in the market needs to be restored and this couldn’t hurt.

It would send a signal to Americans who are scared, angry and hurt as a result of the stock market meltdown.

He should also remind the American people that any funds recovered as a result of a criminal probe would be returned to the U.S. Treasury, including any recovered from CEOs who are found to have committed crimes.

And ask Sen. Obama to join him in this proposal. He won’t.

The Special Prosecutor would report to the Deputy Attorney General as has been the case with other Special Prosecutors. The Independent Counsel statute is no more, so I am not suggesting a big spending, never ending IC.

A Special Prosecutor. For action. For accountability. For confidence.

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A good catch from Phil Elliott on McCain’s stump speech today in Iowa:

Just days ago, on the stump and in ads, the question was "Who is Barack Obama?" For the moment, that question was shelved.

"Which candidate’s experience in government and in life makes him a more reliable leader for our country and commander in chief for our troops?" McCain asked. "In short: Who’s ready to lead?"

McCain’s most serious criticism of Obama on Saturday was over health care, not character.

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Those smart kids at Stanford are always up to something: A co-ed dorm has been renamed Serra Palin.

From the Stanford Daily:

The theme was conceived by the Serra residential staff during a weeklong retreat in Santa Cruz, Calif., earlier this month, as Palin’s popularity peaked in the wake of the Republican National Convention.

Images of salmon and snowmobiles adorn Serra’s walls, and fishing nets hang from the ceilings. The official dorm t-shirts have “Serra Palin” in the form of the McCain-Palin logo with “‘08-?” beneath, as well as

“Coolest Dorm, Hottest Students” across the chest. “DRILL BABY DRILL” is emblazoned on the back. 

…

“We just don’t want anything to spin out of hand to the point where it is affecting our residents or they regret the choices we’ve made as staff,” said Leila Beach ‘09, Serra resident tutor.

“Serra has a reputation as maybe a kind of a quiet dorm, and we thought it would really be a fun way to get people kind of a little revved up,” she said. “I think we’ve been right.”

That made sense to Carl Kelm.

“Who’d want to live in a Joe Biden-themed dorm, right?”

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For all the passion and anger on display this week from Republicans at McCain events, the most vitriol demonstrated at his rallies and town halls over the past year has typically come from anti-war protestors, often affilliated with the group Code Pink.

And today at an event in Davenport, Iowa, it was again the liberals who attempted to steal the show, reports my colleague Amie Parnes:

A couple of protesters interrupted the event by telling McCain that he should end the war. One woman stood on a man’s shoulders and held up a sign that read, "War is over."

The crowd then began to chant "USA, USA, USA!" And then, "We want John! We want John!"

McCain stood at the podium in silence and watched the moment.

Then, after the protesters were removed, he said, smiling: "You know, my friends, there’s a perfect example of some people that just don’t get it." 

The event, though, wasn’t totally without some off-message Obama-bashing.

During the invocation, a local pastor said:  “There are plenty of people around the world who are praying to their god, be they Hindu, Buddah, or Allah, that (McCain’s) opponent wins. I pray that you step forward and honor your own name."

(Picture and invocation via Iowa Independent)

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Civil Rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis is accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of stoking hate, likening the atmosphere at Republican campaign events to those featuring George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate.

"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history," Lewis said in a statement issued today.  "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

Lewis didn’t accuse McCain of imitating Wallace, but suggested there were similarities.

"George Wallace never threw a bomb," Lewis noted.  "He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."

Lewis’s sharp words may be dismissed as those of a partisan Democrat in a campaign season.   But the former head of SNCC and hero of Selma is somebody who McCain has lavished praise upon over the years, including his admiration in a book on courage and bravery and repeatedly invoking Lewis’s name in public appearances.

Appearing with Barack Obama at a forum at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in August, McCain included Lewis as one of "three wise men" he would consult as president.    

"He can teach us all a lot about the meaning of courage and commitment to causes greater than our self-interest," McCain said of Lewis.

Now, Lewis is castigating McCain in the harshest of terms.

“As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all," Lewis said today.   "They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.”

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Sarah Palin goes today where John McCain rarely will, talking in depth and in personal terms about abortion while hammering Barack Obama on the same in an effort to appeal to some of those Reagan Democrats in Western Pennsylvania.

You close political observers will recall that the town where Palin is delivering her remarks, Johnstown, Pa., is where Obama said during the primary earlier this year that he wouldn’t want his two daughters to be "punished with a baby."  

Palin alluded to the quote twice.

From remarks excerpted and sent out by her campaign:

In both parties, Americans have many concerns to be weighed in the votes they cast on November fourth. In times like these, with wars and a financial crisis, it’s easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life. And it seems our opponent hopes that you will forget. Like so much else in his agenda, he hopes you won’t notice how radical his ideas and record are until it’s too late. 

But let there be no misunderstanding about the stakes. 

A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for activist courts that will continue to smother the open and democratic debate we need on this issue, at both the state and federal level. A vote for Barack Obama would give the ultimate power over the issue of life to a politician who has never once done anything to protect the unborn. As Senator Obama told Pastor Rick Warren, it’s above his pay grade. 

For a candidate who talks so often about “hope,” he offers no hope at all in meeting this great challenge to the conscience of America. There is a growing consensus in our country that we can overcome narrow partisanship on this issue, and bring all the resources of a generous country to the aid of both women in need and the child waiting to be born. We need more of the compassion and idealism that our opponent’s own party, at its best, once stood for. We need the clarity and conviction of leaders like the late Governor Bob Casey. 

He represented a humanity that speaks to all of us – no matter what our party, our background, our faith, or our gender. And no matter your position on this sensitive subject, I hope that spirit will guide you on Election Day. I ask you to vote for McCain-Palin on the November fourth, and help us to bring this country together in the rational discussion of compassion and life.”

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CBS’s Scott Conroy, traveling with Sarah Palin, has her seizing on one element of the Troopergate report (that she was within her right to fire Alaska’s public safety commissioner) but ignoring another part (that she violated the state ethics code and abused her office by having her husband push to get their former brother-in-law fired):

PITTSBURGH — As she boarded her campaign bus this morning, Sarah Palin denied the conclusion of a state ethics report, which found the Alaska governor abused her power when she pressured subordinates to get a state trooper fired.

Asked by a reporter if she abused her power, Palin shook her head and said, "“No.”

She added, “And if you read the report, you’ll see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member. You got to read the report, sir.”

While the investigation by the Alaska state legislature did find that Palin was within her rights to fire public safety commissioner Walt Monegan — state trooper Michael Wooten’s boss — the report found that she violated the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act by knowingly allowing her husband Todd to use state resources to try to get Wooten fired.

The ethics report found that Gov. Palin “permitted Todd Palin to use the governor’s office and the resources of the governor’s office, including access to state employees, to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired.”

The report also found that Palin “knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda.”

The conclusion of the panel’s report endangered the Republican ticket’s argument that Palin has the track record to facilitate ethics reform in Washington.

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My colleague Ken Vogel reports from the City of (not so much) Brotherly Love:

“I want to acknowledge that Sen. McCain tried to tone down the rhetoric in his town hall meeting yesterday,” Obama said at a morning rally in North Philadelphia, drawing loud boos from the mostly Black audience.

Obama pivoted into a mini riff on civil political discourse, concluding “We can disagree without being disagreeable.”

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A highly-charged Friday night in Minnesota, as John McCain’s town hall descends into a mix of yet more hard-edged attacks on Barack Obama and boos from the party faithful when the GOP nominee defends his rival:

Fearing the raw and at times angry emotions of his supporters may damage his campaign, John McCain on Friday urged them to tone down their increasingly personal denunciations of Barack Obama.

Each time he tried to cool the crowd, he was rewarded with a round of boos.

"I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States," McCain told a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who said he was “scared” of the prospect of an Obama presidency and of who the Democrat would appoint to the Supreme Court.

“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republicans crowd expressed their dismay at their nominee. Others yelled "liar," and "terrorist."

One woman, in the course of a question to McCain said of Obama: "He’s an arab."

McCain, who had shared his wireless microphone with her, yanked it out of her hand.

"No, ma’am," the Arizona senator assured. "He’s a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab]."

The public display of fear and unease over Obama comes at the end of a week in which other Republicans at McCain and Sarah Palin events expressed similar frustrations, a product of exasperation at the prospect of the Illinois senator becoming president and their own nominee not doing enough to prevent it. 
 

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The legislative committee in Alaska investigating Sarah Palin’s involvement in the firing of the state’s public safety commissioner found the governor "abused her authority" but that her termination of Walt Monegan was "proper and lawful."  

In a report released tonight, the bipartisan investigators determined that the refusal of Monegan to fire Palin’s former brother-in-law was a "contributing factor" to his termination.

Trooper Michael Wooten had been married to Palin’s sister, Molly, but the two divorced and Wooten threatened members of the Palin family.

The committee said that Palin’s action "was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and stauary authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads."

But, according to state law, the probe concluded that Palin abused her position by endeavoring with her husband Todd to get Wooten fired.

The statute cited: "The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of trust."

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