DDay nails it:

(Just to be clear, the bill has too many tax cuts, and if the Axis of Centrism can't swallow the price tag, they can get rid of the $70 billion AMT patch and the $35 billion home-buying credit and the auto-buying credit, cuts which won't help anyone who can't afford a home or a car and will just give away free money to people who would have bought those items anyway. There's your $100 billion in cuts.)

So if Nelson, Collins et al want to whine about the "cost", they can clip $100 Billion off the price tag by dumping the pointless, wasteful tax custs and credits injected by the wingnuts.  Actually, all the tax cuts woiuld be better replaced by direct spending, since spending has a 1.5:1 effect on GDP and tax cuts only 0.75:1.

Dreading those confrontations with wingnut relativesduring the holiday season?  Here is some useful information on their deeply held and wholly incorrect beliefs about "liberals" that will help you maintain your sanity, courtest of Sara Robinson at Ourfuture.org:

As you prepare to head once again into the family fray, it might be useful to note that most of the right wing's favorite anti-liberal slanders are rooted in some deeply-held—and deeply wrong—assumptions about who liberals are, and what we believe. If your relatives, God bless 'em all, insist on going down that road, your best defense this year might be to listen closely for these underlying myths and fables at work—and be prepared to challenge them head-on when they surface in the discussion.

Read the rest...

UPDATE3: Missouri finally finishes counting votes and goes (barely) to McCain.
UPDATE2: Obama won one additional electoral vote, in Nebraska, which allocates its 3 electoral votes by congressiona district.
UPDATE: AP has called NC for Obama.  Total now 364-162.  MO still finalizing counts.

Factoring in population produces a FAR more revealing picture than the usual "red/blue" maps. 

The right-wing noise machine can blather all they like, the results are a clear and crushing repudiation of "convervative principals" in general and the Republican party in particular.
 

 
h/t technopolitical at DailyKOS

More evidence, courtesy of the New York Times (via DailyKOS):

Jed Lewison at DailyKOS put together this excellent takedown of McCain's ongoing stream of lies and misrepresentations of Obama's proposed tax plan.  To summarize, no-one with a taxable income of under $250,000 will see an increase, and will in fact get a tax cut.  Taxpayers in the $250,000+ brackets will see a modest increase, as the tax brackets are returned to those in force before the Bush tax cuts (which favored the wealthiest Americans).

Well, its an exciting day so far in the phony "war on voter fraud" being waged by the RNC and McCain campaigns.  first the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision on disenfranchising over 200,000 new Ohio voters.  Now the Obama campaign has requested the Justice Department add the highly questionable "investigation" of ACORN to the list of items to be pursued by Special Prosecutor Norah Dannehy in the DoJ's illegal firing of U.s. Attorneys.

"With this voter fraud [investigation], we're seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.

Full story at Talking Points Memo.

It's amazing to me that the McCain campaign would dare to play the "guilt by association" game, attempting to tie Barack OBama to a former 1960's radical, when McCain's own background has such a rich vein of questionable associations to be mined by anyone so inclined.

Steve Benen has more: 

But as long as we're on the subject, McCain's associations continue to be increasingly interesting as well. We've known for a while that McCain has befriended a convicted felon who advised his supporters on how best to shoot federal officials, used the money of a convicted criminal to help buy a house, befriended a radical anti-Catholic televangelist, befriended a radical anti-American televangelist, was a long-time associate of Charles Keating, and hired for his campaign the publisher of a Confederate nostalgia magazine who has described Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist." This week, we also learned about McCain serving on the board of the extremist U.S. Council for World Freedom, where he worked alongside Iran-Contra figures, and a eugenics researcher studying "white superiority."

As part of their ongoing strategy of "making stuff up" the McCain campaign has latched onto former Weather Underground member William Ayers.  Although Mr. Ayers was never convicted of any crimes he is open about his activities during the turbulent late 60's.   Ayer's supposed "connection" to Barack Obama is tenuous at best;  the two men lived in the same Chicago neighborhood and served on the board of an educational foundation.

The McCain smear characterizes the foundation as "radical",  another baseless canard.

Full details are available here.

McCain is out of ideas and running out of time. He's losing, and losing BADLY. This is all he's got left. Pathetic.

McCain and Palin have been making much of Barack Obama's so-called "palling around" with William Ayers, claiming Ayers is a "domestic terrorist".  In point of fact, although Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground in 1968, Obama was 8 years old at the time.  Mr. Ayers was never convicted of a crime and is now a college professor.

Ms. Palin, on the other hand, has a number of very unsavory associates in the Alaska Independence Party, an extremist group that seeks to secede from the United States and make Alaska a separate nation.

h/t Jed Lewison at JedReport

The economy is in a tailspin;  his "suspending my campaign" gambit was a failure;  his disastrous VP pick was handily crushed in her "debate" with Joe Biden ("you betcha!").   His poll numbers are collapsing. What does John McCain do?  He knows he's wrong on all the issues, so he refocuses his campaign on smearing his opponent.

This is an admission by McCain that if the campaign is about issues, or about his own judgement, he loses.  The only path he can see to winning is tearing down Barack Obama with a hail of lies and distortions.  This isn't surprising since smearing opponents with lies and distortions is the only thing McCain's Rove wanna-be strategist Steve Schmidt knows how to do.

These people are pathetic.

Barack points this out in this new ad:

John McCain likes to tout his "experience" in Washington. 

It's true that he is no stranger to economic crises - he was in the middle of the S&L meltdown and found himself in deep trouble for influence peddling with his close friend Charles Keating.   McCain and 4 other Senators used their positions to deflect banking regulators away from Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan, which ultimately failed, costing investors millions as part of the S&L collapse that cost American Taxpayers 500 Billion dollars.