ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (CNN) — With 10 days until Election
Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov.
Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense,
they are spilling out in public, sources say.

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become
increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going
rogue.”

A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is
simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a damaging and
mismanaged roll-out.

McCain sources say Palin has gone
off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the
incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled
robocalls — recorded messages often used to attack a candidate’s
opponent — “irritating” even as the campaign defended their use. Also,
they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the campaign’s
decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain
adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us,
her family or anyone else.

“Also, she is playing for her own
future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember:
Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the
beginning and end of all wisdom.”

A Palin
associate defended her, saying that she is “not good at process
questions” and that her comments on Michigan and the robocalls were
answers to process questions.

But this Palin source acknowledged that Palin is trying to take more
control of her message, pointing to last week’s impromptu news
conference on a Colorado tarmac.

Tracey Schmitt, Palin’s press
secretary, was urgently called over after Palin wandered over to the
press and started talking. Schmitt tried several times to end the
unscheduled session.

“We acknowledge that perhaps she should
have been out there doing more,” a different Palin adviser recently
said, arguing that “it’s not fair to judge her off one or two sound
bites” from the network interviews.

The Politico reported
Saturday on Palin’s frustration, specifically with McCain advisers
Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt. They helped decide to limit Palin’s
initial press contact to high-profile interviews with Charlie Gibson of
ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, which all McCain sources admit were highly
damaging.

In response, Wallace e-mailed CNN the same quote she
gave the Politico: “If people want to throw me under the bus, my
personal belief is that the most honorable thing to do is to lie there.”

But two sources, one Palin associate and one McCain
adviser, defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited
after she was picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and
that the missteps could have been a lot worse.

They insisted that she needed time to be briefed on national and international issues and on McCain’s record.

“Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was
dramatic,” said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the
process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was
probably the “hardest” to get her “up to speed than any candidate in
history.”

Schmitt came to the back of the plane Saturday to
deliver a statement to traveling reporters: “Unnamed sources with their
own agenda will say what they want, but from Gov. Palin down, we have
one agenda, and that’s to win on Election Day.”

Yet another senior McCain adviser lamented the public recriminations.

“This is what happens with a campaign that’s behind; it brings out the
worst in people, finger-pointing and scapegoating,” this senior adviser
said.

This adviser also decried the double standard, noting that Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s
running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, has gone off the reservation as well,
most recently by telling donors at a fundraiser that America’s enemies
will try to “test” Obama.

Tensions like those within the
McCain-Palin campaign are not unusual; vice presidential candidates
also have a history of butting heads with the top of the ticket.

John Edwards and his inner circle repeatedly questioned Sen. John
Kerry’s strategy in 2004, and Kerry loyalists repeatedly aired in
public their view that Edwards would not play the traditional attack
dog role with relish because he wanted to protect his future political
interests.

Even in a winning campaign like Bill Clinton’s, some
of Al Gore’s aides in 1992 and again in 1996 questioned how Gore was
being scheduled for campaign events.

Jack Kemp’s aides
distrusted the Bob Dole camp and vice versa, and Dan Quayle loyalists
had a list of gripes remarkably similar to those now being aired by
Gov. Palin’s aides.

With the presidential race in its final days
and polls suggesting that McCain’s chances of pulling out a win are
growing slim, Palin may be looking after her own future.

“She’s no longer playing for 2008; she’s playing 2012,” Democratic
pollster Peter Hart said. “And the difficulty is, when she went on
‘Saturday Night Live,’ she became a reinforcement of her caricature.
She never allowed herself to be vetted, and at the end of the day,
voters turned against her both in terms of qualifications and
personally.”

It sorta looks to me like if we put the spending freeze in place as McCain proposes, excluding the programs he can’t stop, we get to cut a total of 28 Billion. which coincidentally is almost perfectly identical to the 26 billion we currently collect in Estate anf Gift taxes, a tax that McCain wants to eliminate. The spending freeze wouldn’t do anything to impact the 407 Billion budget deficit, but hey, why worry about that when there’s estate taxes that rich people pay that can be eliminated in full by cutting the social programs that middle-income and poor people rely on. Let’s separate the classes by an even larger gulf!

If you’re going to say someone attacked you, and carved a B in your cheek because of your mcCain bumpersticker, please make sure to have the letter pointing in the right direction…

And don’t try to set up Barack Obama as the attacker!
A Republican campaign worker who told police she was assaulted by a
man angered by a John McCain sticker on her car admitted she made up
the report, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, assistant police chief said
Friday.

Ashley Todd,
20, of College Park, Texas, has been charged with filing a false police
report, a misdemeanor, and may face more charges, said Pittsburgh
police spokeswoman Diane Richard at a news conference.

Todd is incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail but had not been arraigned Friday night.

Todd was a volunteer for a John McCain phone bank in Pittsburgh, the campaign said.

“This has wasted so much time. … It’s just a lot of wasted man
hours,” Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at the same briefing.

The woman told investigators a man approached her Wednesday night at an
ATM in Pittsburgh’s East End, put a blade to her neck and demanded
money, Richard said.

Police said they found “several
inconsistencies” in Todd’s statement and she was not seen in
surveillance videos taken at the ATM. She was asked to take a polygraph
test Friday morning, Richard said. The results were not made public.

Later, Todd came to the police station to help work on a composite
sketch of the alleged attacker. When she arrived, Todd “told them she
just wanted to tell the truth” — that she was not robbed, and there
was no attacker, Bryant said.

Todd originally told police a man
“punched her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground, and
he continued to punch and kick her while threatening to teach her a
lesson for being a McCain supporter,” according to a police statement.

The woman also told police her attacker “called her a lot of names and
stated that ‘You are going to be a Barack supporter,’ at which time she
states he sat on her chest, pinning both her hands down with his knees,
and scratched into her face a backward letter ‘B’ on the right side of
her face using what she believed to be a very dull knife.”

Bryant described Todd as “very cordial, polite, cooperating,” and said
the woman was surprised by all the media attention. Asked whether the
false report was politically motivated, Bryant replied, “It’s difficult
to say.”

“She is stating that she was in her vehicle driving
around, and she came up with this idea,” she said. “She said she has
prior mental problems and doesn’t know how the backward letter ‘B’ got
on her face.”

However, Todd was the only one in the vehicle, and
“when she saw the ‘B’ she thought she must have been the one who did
it,” Bryant said.

“We’re talking with the district attorney’s
office and conferring on just how we’re going to handle it,” she said.
“It’s been different stories through the night and this morning.”

She said there was no indication that anyone else was involved.

Richard said the woman had described her alleged attacker as an
African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short
dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.

Before the revelation that the report was false, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said that McCain and running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin “spoke to the victim and her family after learning about the incident.”

The Obama campaign also had issued a statement wishing the woman a “speedy recovery.”

The Republican machine has released it’s latest attack and this one is sneaky in a particularly dastardly way. The McCain camp is actively letting be thought in certain circles that they think this will be a Obama landslide. The reasonong is pretty simple, energize your own base to try and stop the flow, and lull the opposition voters into thinking it’s in the bag and they don’t have to show up. Don’t fall for the trickery. Vote! Early.

Please return your stimulus checks to the Bush Government that gave YOU taxpayer money for nothing.

Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions could encourage
America’s enemies to test it during the early days of an Obama
administration, Sen. John McCain said Wednesday.

Sen. John McCain says he will consider a second economic stimulus package if he is elected president.

“And the thing that probably may encourage them a little is that Sen.
Obama has been wrong,” McCain said in an interview to be aired on CNN’s
“The Situation Room” at 6 p.m. ET Wednesday.

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they
would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to
usher in a McCain presidency.

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web
site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily
and economically, “impetuous” Republican presidential candidate Sen.
John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as
McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American
soldier,” the message said. “Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain
in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his
predecessor, Bush.”

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Md., monitors the Web site and translated the message.

“If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American
interests,” the message said, “this act will be support of McCain
because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so
that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will
succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it.”

Guess since I don’t live in Western PA, I’m just a traitorous heathen in John McCain’s eyes..
In Moon Township, Pennsylvania, John McCain said

“I couldn’t agree with you more than the fact that Western Pennsylvania is the most patriotic, most God-loving, most patriotic part of America, and this is a great part of the country,” McCain said Tuesday, to cheers.

As of the census of 2000, there were 22,290 people, 8,445 households, and 5,767 families residing in the township. The population density was 939.1 people per square mile (362.5/km²). There were 9,200 housing units at an average density of 387.6/sq mi (149.6/km²). The racial makeup of the township was 93.17% White, 3.58% African American, 0.06% Native American, 1.94% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.25% from other races, and 0.97% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.99% of the population.

Guess when your population is over 90% white, things are more patriotic and god fearing? So far McCain and Palin have tried to stick to venues where minorities represent well under the national average.

Apparently Alaska is run by the Palin Children. Or at least this is the argument that Sarah Palin is putting forth to explain why her children accompanied her on a total of at least 88 flights since becoming Governor in December of ‘06. Normally politicians have to pay for their children to accompany them, but in Sarah Palin’s case, she simply stated on the various expense reports that the children were traveling on official business. In many cases apparently, the organizers of the various events were not even aware that the children would be coming until Palin showed up with the kids in tow. So, that means that the ‘Reformer’  who has spent $21,012 of Alaska’s money to ferry her children around with her is working to convince America that this is the type of ‘Reform’ she plans to bring to Washington, namely that it’s not wrong if it’s of a benefit to her.

That’s the assessment of a top McCain insider as to the states of Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado. Colorado was considered at one point a must-win state, but recent polling suggests that it will go for Obama and as a result, the McCain camp seems to be shifting to Pennsylvania, which hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate in 20 years. Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager still believes that Colorado will break for McCain in the end but he is clearly in the minority, and his position there only goes to further highlight the fractured nature of the McCain campaign machine.