Barack Obama and John McCain will face off in Long Island tonight in the final debate before the presidential election. McCain has one last chance to reestablish himself as a viable candidate and reverse his steady decline in the polls. In the spirit of bipartisanship, The Jed Report has produced a helpful debate prep video for John McCain...

(I'll be on the Rachel Maddow radio show at 6:34 ET/3:34 PT today talking about the Accountability Now 2010 Primary Project.  You can listen live here -- jh)

They don't even seem like they're preparing these poor bastards before they throw them on TV any more.  It's like chum to sharks.

McCain campaign spokesman Ben Porritt is completely flummoxed today when David Shuster asks him about the head of McCain's transition team, William Timmons, who lobbied for Sadaam Hussein.   Porritt just waffles and tries to stall until a good answer comes to him, but that never happens so he makes the rather outrageous claim they've had "no associations with any lobbyists on our campaign."

Exqueeze me?  Baking powder?

Shuster manages not to guffaw and asks him if he's ever heard of Charlie Black.

It's just getting sad.

I wrote pornography for a living–well, okay for pin money to pay for my addiction to books and fancy face cleansers. You can't really make a living scrawling smut, but you can supplement your cash flow a bit, and you are getting paid to write. And in general, porn is sexier in the first person because the person reading becomes the person doing. Witness the success of Penthouse Forum. Those um, aren't real.

Nor were the things I created out of my silly little mind while working for Larry Flynt, slaving away over a hot keyboard clad only in a vintage silk slip and a light floral perfume as I waited for my petite, punky girlfriend to come over so we could order a large sausage….pizza. You know, for research.

Memoirs which nowadays clutter bookstore shelves have become the hot new literary commodity, shoving fiction to the floor with a hard thud. Readers want the guilty joy of knowing what they are reading happened in real life. Just like those Penthouse Forum letters. Ah, the schadenfreude of lust and remorse. And more than a few of those, like A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences, pack as much veracity as my 2,500 word feature for Larry Flynt about women who think hand guns are sexy…very…very…sexy.

Which brings me to Frank Marshall Davis, the bohemian author who was introduced to Barack Obama in Hawaii by the then-ten year old Barack's grandparents. Davis, who had risen to prominence as a poet and journalist during the Depression and the Second World War, was lauded by many readers. But by the late 1940s and early 1950s he was also the target of careful scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

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