Robert Arena at AMERICAblog says yes:

While some here think everything is going just fine, and that Obama has a secret plan lying in wait, I ask you to think back a year ago. Imagine if someone had told you that the most charismatic Democratic speaker in a decade would be in a dead-heat with a Republican has-been corrupt waffler — you would have laughed in their face. After eight years of George Bush? No way, people are fed up — that'll never happen.

Well, that's the reality today. This race is a dead heat and is up for grabs both in the national polls as well as in key states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri, etc. Face reality, folks — something isn't working.

Good point from conservative Andrew Sullivan:

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

Ezra Klein discusses McCain's answer to the "What's rich?" question at Saturday's Saddleback Church forum:

On Saturday night, at Saddleback Church, Barack Obama and John McCain were asked what income level made someone rich (give Rick Warren his due: This was one of the campaign's more useful forum queries). Obama said $150,000, which is somewhere around the 94th percentile. John McCain said $5 million, which is about $3.4 million more per year than you need to qualify for the top 0.1 percentile.

[...] If your wife has hundreds of millions of dollars and you spend your days in the United States Senate, your bar for riches changes a bit. Nothing he said, incidentally, is wrong. $5 million is indeed rich. It's just $4,800,000 more than you'd need to be making for most Americans to see you as rich. McCain's answer is just profoundly out-of-touch. But that has consequences. Asking the world's tallest man to set cabinet heights, or the world's strongest man to decide the tension of jar lids, is going to leave you with some pretty tall cabinets and some pretty tightly closed jars. Similarly, asking one of the world's richest men to set your tax policy will end up with a pretty skewed set of policies: Say, a tax plan that gives his wife $370,000 in breaks. Again, nothing weird or malign: Just the naturally skewed perspective of someone who lives on a particular extreme, in this case, the extreme edge of the wealth distribution.

Eight-year POW Phillip Butler gives some background on his and McCain's POW experiences and explains why he's not voting for McCain for president (military.com):

John was offered, and refused, "early release." Many of us were given this offer. It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to "admit" that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was "lenient and humane." So I, like numerous others, refused the offer. This was obviously something none of us could accept. Besides, we were bound by our service regulations, Geneva Conventions and loyalties to refuse early release until all the POWs were released, with the sick and wounded going first. [...]

John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation, a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein in The American Prospect:

[T]he Obama campaign's most aggressive effort to influence the down-ticket races that Democrats traditionally ignore is playing out in solidly Republican Texas. In June, Obama sent his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to Houston to deliver an important message to Texas Democratic funders. The Obama campaign had decided, Axelrod announced to a crowd of 250 at the downtown Wortham Center, to send 15 paid staffers to the state and organize thousands of volunteers to get out the vote, an unprecedented commitment of resources to the Lone Star State from a Democratic presidential campaign. The goal isn't for Obama to win Texas' 34 electoral votes. Rather, by registering Democrats, Obama hopes to help the Texas Democratic Party regain control of its state legislature, which would allow Democrats to redistrict the state's congressional delegation for 2010, potentially winning House seats in the process. That's not simply down-ballot organizing — it's way down-ballot organizing, reaching into state legislatures to influence coming congressional reapportionments in order to create large national majorities years down the line. Obama, looking ahead to governing with as large a congressional majority as possible, is determined to take advantage of a population boom in the Houston area, which is increasingly dominated by immigrants.

At times, the campaign's down-ticket energy takes on a life

Read the rest of this entry...

John McCain thinks that high growth areas (read Arizona, California) deserve more of Utah's share of Colorado River Water.

...the presumptive GOP candidate for president said the water sharing agreement reached in 1922 between seven Western states doesn't take into account increases in population and the changing water needs.

Whiskey is for drinking.

Fred Clark at slacktivist, your source for all things Left Behind, reports on McCain's clumsy attempt to woo Rapture-ready evangelicals:

The point of the ad — the entire and only point of the ad — is to suggest that Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president, may be the Antichrist warned against in the pages of Left Behind. Take that message away and you're left with nonsense. Without the Barack Obama = Nicolae Carpathia subtext, the ad would consist only of something like "he's a famous leader ... but is he ready to lead?" Hunh?

Sadly for McCain, the Left Behind authors aren't playing along:

"I've gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the Antichrist," says novelist Jenkins. "I tell everyone that I don't think the Antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics."

All McCain's left with is a broken dog whistle.

Has someone been reading Paul Waldman? Here's Obama's statement yesterday on the 73-year anniversary of Social Security (barackobama.com):

The Bush privatization plan that Senator McCain now embraces would tell millions of elderly Americans that they're on their own, putting them at risk of falling into poverty. That's not what this country is about.

It's time to reclaim the idea that in this country, we're all in it together. That is America's very promise — and Social Security's very guarantee. And it requires a President who will change the ways of Washington, protect the people's interests, and bring Americans together to meet the great challenges of our time. That is exactly the sort of leadership I intend to offer.

Good roundup from dday at Digby's place about the Obama campaign's plan to push back against this year's Swift Boat book. Unlike the Kerry campaign, Obama is hitting back immediately and demanding equal time:

Obama advisers say that whenever they hear that Corsi has been booked for an appearance on a network program, they are quickly contacting the program's producers to rebut the book's charges in phone conversations and giving them a whole run-down of past Corsi quotes that are controversial.

Obama aides also vow to insist that the producers allow them to have on a campaign surrogate to attack the charges, and are expecting to recruit more campaign surrogates, well plied with talking points, to push back against the book.

It really shouldn't be hard to discredit a conservaloon who claims that "President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada" (Human Events).

Why is McCain still pushing the tire-gauge attack, even though Obama's right that inflating our tires properly will prevent the need for offshore drilling? Paul Waldman has a theory:

Though there was no particular evidence that the tire-gauge attack was having an effect, the McCain campaign's glee was evident. Just days before, they had alleged that Obama's criticisms of their tactics constituted "fussiness and hysteria," and now here they were brandishing small, phallic objects bearing their opponent's name.

Meanwhile, McCain himself was sent out to pose in front of working oil rigs, to testify to his thirst for pulling more black gold from the earth. The message couldn't be plainer: See that itty-bitty, little tire gauge? If you vote for Obama, that's how big your penis is. If you vote for McCain, on the other hand, your penis is as big as this rig, thrusting its gigantic shaft in and out of the ground! [...]

At 72, John McCain is himself not exactly a simmering pot of heterosexual energy, causing women to swoon at the first whiff of his man-musk. [...] So something tells me this won't be the last time we'll see the McCain campaign calling Barack Obama "fussy," or sending their candidate out to stand in front of big, manly machines. After all this time, it would be far more surprising if they didn't.

We all know that conservation is for wimps — real men drill.