Check it out: http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/americanpromise

Sarah Palin is coming to Pittsburgh, PA on Friday afternoon, October 10th*. She's doing a private, invitation-only roundtable on sumthin' -- maybe how polar bears react to being shot at by Joe Six-Pack from a hundred feet in the air and the effect it has on Wasilla Main Street, doggone it. And don't call me dismissive of the Alaska governor -- I'm simply paraphrasing her many public pronouncements. If I botched my sentence structure, well, she did, too, when she spoke with Katie Couric. While Sarah Barracuda may not be willing to mix and mingle with regular folk while in Pittsburgh, the locals are more than happy to visit with her. A large protest is developing for Friday afternoon, with everyone from hockey and soccer moms to teenagers and advocacy groups taking part in the festivities.

Women of Steel, part of the United Steelworkers Union, is sending a sizable contingent to lead the cheers. Women of Steel is a leadership and activism program for sisters in the union. One of the group's many goals is to prime the pump, as it were, and prepare these women for positions both within the union and at the local level. Women make up only about 20% of the union's membership so they probably have to work harder to make their voices heard. Sadly, Sarah Palin has turned a deaf ear to their concerns: the sisters find the governor and her running mate to be against women, pro-trade and horrible on health care and family medical leave.

You'd think what with Gov. Palin's husband being a card-carrying member of the United Steelworkers Union, she'd find the time to meet with the Women of Steel and all the other women who'd like to bend her ear on an assortment of issues. Instead, she's closeting herself in a boardroom at the Westin Hotel. Looks like Sarah Barracuda is merely a guppy.

* Sarah Palin will be at the Westin Convention Center Hotel, 1000 Penn Avenue (near 10th Street) in downtown Pittsburgh at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 10th. Protesters are encouraged to line nearby streets beginning at 3:30 p.m. and MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD!

Last night's Presidential Debate was once again a contrast in both style and substance. Sen. Barack Obama offered specifics time and again on how he would repair our economy and reestablish America's role in the global community. Sen. John McCain offered one new plan (spend another $300 billion to buy bad mortgages -- did I HEAR that right?!) and assorted other generalities, telling us yet again that he knows exactly how to catch Osama bin-Laden but leaving me to wonder why he didn't do it LAST WEEK since he knows EXACTLY HOW to do it.

On the question of style, Sen. Obama again presented himself as a calming force while Sen. McCain's worst moment had to be the fit of pique that compelled him to point at Sen. Obama and snarl "THAT ONE!" In case you forgot, Sen. McCain, the senator from Illinois does have a name and it's good manners to use it when addressing him.

As I go door-to-door here in Pennsylvania on behalf of Sen. Obama's campaign, an increasing number voters are tellling me that they are tired of the personal attacks and sniping between campaigns. If John McCain is unwilling to discuss the issues with the specifics that the American people deserve, he may as well go back to the ranch in Sedona.

First this, from this morning's New York Observer:

"Again invoking Mr. Obama’s intermittent encounters with Mr. Ayers, Mr. McCain asked a crowd in Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 6, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” Someone in the crowd screamed in reply, “a terrorist!” Mr. McCain grimaced, but kept going."

It’s the third time this morning I’ve read someone telling the anecdote, particularly the part about the grimace. I wonder, thinking about McCain’s performance last night, if he’s worried about what frenzy his campaign--i.e., Sarah Palin--has stoked the voters into. He seemed muted to me last night; also like a guy who was rethinking the down and dirty attacks in the back of his mind while the less dirty attacks were coming out of his mouth. Like a guy returning to his senses a bit, perhaps. And not wanting to be someone who inflamed racists and zealots into violence against Obama.

A former campaign advisor for McCain, Mark McKinnon, quit McCain's campaign last February, because, as he told NPR, "I would simply be uncomfortable being in a campaign that would be inevitably attacking Barack Obama. I think it would be uncomfortable for me, and I think it would be bad for the McCain campaign."

So it seems to me that they Know What They Do in the McCain camp--and that there must be people within the campaign, those who love the old McCain (the one moderate Dems used to like) and who are worried about the race-baiting, given the caliber of some of the people in the Right Wing. I've been canvassing in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley these last two weekends and while most people were at least polite, a couple of encounters were disturbing. One guy slammed his door on us when it was clear who we were working for. And then he actually got in his car and drove out to find us. "I was in Korea," he began. "I love blacks. I fought with blacks. Blacks have slept in my house. But this guy [Obama], is a nigger." Another group of canvassers had their car rammed by someone. We were told by a local guy who was with us, a young Marine just back from four years' service in Guantanamo, that this area had at one time been a recruiting ground for the KKK.

Is anyone working on this story--the story behind the grimace? It's an important one.

Spring is usually mud season here on the East Coast -- the snows are melting amid warming temps and there's mud everywhere. At least it signals the start of spring! There's another mud season, of course, the one that comes around every four years and coincides with a Presidential election. This is something of a new-ish phenomenon, since discourse was much more civil fifty years ago when every mis-spoken word didn't go round and round the 24/7 news cycle.

Sarah Palin opened mud season this year, slinging Obama with the old and discounted Bill Ayers attack this past weekend. John McCain's campaign spokeswoman muddied things some more by invoking Tony Rezko's name, though this story has also been hashed and rehashed and found to amount to not a whole lot. John McCain himself indicated today that the gloves are off and he'll pretty much say anything to get elected.

What did Barack Obama do about all this? He said that John McCain was running out of ideas and out of time. Sen. Obama's campaign then unveiled a 13-minute video about John McCain's proven long-term association with Charles Keating, the savings & loan kingpin who caused tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to lose their life savings while he perpetrated a colossal fraud with their money. Keating's debacle (remember the "Keating 5" during the 1980s? sent Keating to prison.) was the start of the financial crisis that we are still slogging through today. A congressional ethics investigation into the whole affair found John McCain guilty of "poor judgment" with respect to Mr. Keating, the patron saint of his political career. No kidding.

All that said, what I see from my kitchen table is that this mud season will do nothing to lower my taxes, improve health care in America, end the misguided war in Iraq or stop global warming. Time and again during this presidential campaign, Sen. Obama has implored Sen. McCain to STAY ON THE ISSUES. How maverick-y is that?

Eight years of Republican partying have led to this mess... time to cure the hangover.

From Joy, a fellow mom in L.A. -- we moms GET IT. So does Joe.

* * * * *

There’s an old Jewish proverb that says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden gave us in last night’s vice-presidential debate.

People may talk about the law of diminished expectations for Sarah Palin, which somehow means that even when she falls on her face she doesn’t really fall on her face. But what I’d like to hear is a discussion about Biden’s generosity. The guy gets it. Dare I say it? Biden is a mensch.

It was clear from the get-go that Joe could have taken Sarah down, big time. He had the facts at his fingertips and the foreign policy expertise to whoop her in the behind. Instead, through her winks and “shout-outs” at the folks back home, he didn’t condescend. He smiled patiently. He spoke the truth about people at their kitchen tables, about global warming, about bringing our troops home from Iraq, about the need for a Barack Obama presidency. And, finally, he spoke from the heart.

Despite all the coaching, all the cockamamie talk of being a maverick, all the sound-bite answers from his opponent, Senator Biden did the unthinkable: he had a real moment. There was a catch in his throat and an emotional second when he shared with us the gravitas he knows and the deep longing that comes with being a parent. The grief, too, even this many years later over his first wife’s death.

For a politician to allow such a moment into the spectacle of a debate is extraordinary. It means the man understands what it is to be human, the paradox of living with loss and hope.

So, let the commentators and pundits carry on about how Sarah Palin saved herself and the Republicans last night, despite the fact that she was all fartootst about the mainstream media. Doesn’t her whining about the press remind you a little of Spiro Agnew’s complaints about the “nattering nabobs of negativism?”

In any case, the debate was really about Joe Biden’s emotional intelligence -- what my grandma would call the guy’s chachma. That’s Yiddish for wisdom.

Once again, Michael Moore is spot-on in his assessment of his countrymen. In a new piece on his web site, he makes the case for studying this Wall Street crisis a bit further before we jump in to rescue a bunch of golden boys to the tune of $700 billion. The more you think about this whole mess and look at the proposal currently being thrashed about on Capitol Hill, the more you see that isn't much more than a bailout of Wall Street titans and the companies they keep. These ostensible bankers are pointing their fingers at US and effectively saying "if you don't take these ill-advised mortgages off our books, we're going to take down the entire banking system and your 401(k) with it." Talk about petulance! Like we would ever put up with this kind of attitude with our kids.

I think it's high time we hold our horses and study this whole bailout thing a bit further. If we took even half that $700 billion in bailout money and used it to help Americans who are struggling with their mortgages, we'd probably solve this crisis right then and there. And I'm sure there are countless other solutions I haven't even contemplated. The bottom line is we need some TIME before we spend $700 billion in taxpayer dollars for what could be the WRONG reasons. I mean, the last time President Bush and his administration asked Congress to vote on something quickly -- "We need to invade Iraq now! Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!!" -- look what it got us: $500 billion poorer and 4,000 empty seats at Thanksgiving tables all around the country.

Since the stock market is unlikely to go to zero by next week, we owe it to ourselves to think this one through.