Crossposted at Motley Moose and DailyKos.

Heh.  You read me right.  Ha, ha, ha, ha!  Joshua Trevino, co-founder of the conservative blogging flagship site Redstate can't pull the trigger for the McCain/Palin ticket.

I've been lurking around MyDD since John Kerry lost in 04, but today I thought I'd introduce myself.  My name's Dan and I'm a Democrat.  And I'm damn proud of it.  I'm a milk drinking, whatever-happens-to-be-running-this-week driving, NASCAR watching, salmon eating, progressive populist liberal.  I'm not sure what exactly that says about me and my politics, but that's the format all the cool kids in the political world are using to describe themselves and others these days, so I thought I'd better start off with that.  If you'd care to indulge my biographical ramblings,  I'll tell y'all a bit more about myself, how I came to vote for Obama today, and why I'm fired up to win this thing.

I grew up in Burlington, Iowa, which sits in the southeast part of the state right on the Mississippi.  My dad has a little farm and through most of my childhood years worked in the Case backhoe plant in town.  He's still a member of the UAW.  I still remember being too young to read, holding up signs and walking the picket line.  Like most hopeless addicts I picked up politics at young age, taking notes on the Lieberman-Cheney debate even though I was only 12 or 13.  (Yeah, I've got it bad.)  I knocked on few doors that year, but I really got my feet wet in '04 when I did some voter contact volunteering for the Kucinich campaign before the caucuses, and then John Kerry in the general.  Kucinich may be a vegan and look more like the Traveling Gnome than JFK, but you know where the man stands and who he's fighting for.  Come to think of it, I'm not sure I even knew what a vegan was before Kucinich ran, but I digress.  While I was disappointed when Kerry lost, I was mainly just more fired up to get Democrats elected in '06.  One thing I'm glad I learned early: Politics isn't about particular candidates.  If your candidate loses in the primaries it's not the end of the world, you just hope that their involvement helped shape the debate and pushed the party in the right direction.  And if your party's candidate loses in the general, you get mad as hell and work twice as hard next time.

Which brings me to the '08 election cycle.  Which started back in '06 if I'm not mistaken... Anyhow I remember watching C-Span in my senior year of high school (05-06) and excitedly calling my mom into the living room every time Barack came on and saying, "That's Barack Obama mom, he's probably gonna be the first black president.  In 2016 or 2012 if we lose in `08."  (Hopefully I'll be half right.)  And every time I'd have to coach my mom through pronouncing his name, but after a while she got it down.  I ended up becoming an early supporter of Edwards.  I liked Obama, but as I said at the time, "Marshmallows and rainbows aren't policy issues."  I thought Obama was too vague and too soft and cautious with his rhetoric and policies on the economy and health care.  He still pisses me off from time to time when he does things like easing back his criticisms on NAFTA and telecom immunity.  But the fact of the matter is I think my fellow Democrats picked the right candidate and a dang good one too.  You don't become president by agreeing with me on every single thing.  You do it by doing what Barack Obama's been doing: Running an effective campaign.  When the economy took a nosedive I was sitting in my living room, annoyed as hell, wondering, "When is he gonna hit McCain with Keating?!"  This is why his campaign staff gets paid the big bucks and I'm still in college.  Rather than being knee jerk they waited for McCain to hit and then used Keating hit back.

What to make of Pennsylvania's status as a top tier battleground state? According to RealClearPolitics, Obama has a 13.8 lead in that state, far greater than his lead in NJ or OR, both of which are assumed to be safe states for the Democrats, and haven't warranted a visit from either candidate.

Politico is featuring a story today on McCain's continuing attempts to win the state, calling it a "risky play:"

Pennsylvania hasn't voted Republican for president since 1988. Democrats have increased their registration numbers here by more than a half-million over the past year, and Barack Obama has a double-digit lead in the polls.

Yet John McCain's campaign continues to signal that it intends to contest the state and its 21 electoral votes to the end. It is a high-risk, high-return endeavor: Pennsylvania represents a costly gambit, one that siphons resources from must-win states such as Ohio and Florida, but a win here would enable McCain to lose a few other states that George W. Bush carried and still capture the White House.

Of course, McCain could be making a "Hail Mary" attempt to carry the state in the hope of pulling off a miracle as his chances sink across the board. But if that was the case, wouldn't the Obama campaign just ignore him and focus on making inroads elsewhere?

Instead, Obama was in PA just yesterday, with four separate rallies in just two hours.

And Biden, whose Scranton roots were part of the reason for his pick, has made several visits to the state, including a rally tomorrow with both of the Clintons:

Biden will stump in Scranton Sunday with Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, a schedule that will bring Biden's total days campaigning in the state to five -- the same as Palin.

In other words, Obama's team is taking McCain's efforts to contest PA seriously, UNLIKE IN IOWA, where they don't seem to be.

And here's Rendell at the rally yesterday, making them sound like the underdog here:

At one rally, in a North Philadelphia neighborhood near Temple University, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the popular former Philadelphia mayor who backed Clinton in the primary, warned the crowd of 20,000 that Obama would need a massive turnout in Philadelphia to carry the state.

"In the primary, only 53 percent of registered voters in Philadelphia turned out," Rendell said. "Ladies and gentlemen, 24 days from today, 53 percent will not cut it. It will not cut it. If we want to make sure Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States, we need to turn out at least 75 percent."

In 2004, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry crushed President Bush in the city by more than 400,000 votes on his way to winning the state by about 144,000 votes. Since then, Democrats have increased their voter registration edge substantially in the city.

Rendell told reporters after a rally in city's Germantown section that his goal is for Obama to drive a historic turnout in Philadelphia and then to meet or exceed Kerry's showing in Pittsburgh and the rest of the state. Rendell predicted the best opportunities for improvement are in south central Pennsylvania, which is becoming less conservative as it absorbs population from Philadelphia, and traditionally Democratic northeastern Pennsylvania.

So what's the deal with the polling here? Clearly, both campaign's internals must show a closer race than 13 points, but how much closer? And, if that's true, why are the polls so far off?

In case you missed it, over the past two days, the Obama campaign has rolled out the endorsements of several newspapers in states critical to victory in November.

The St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh (PA) Post-Gazette, Toledo (OH) Blade, and papers in Michigan and Wisconsin have all asked their readers to vote for the Illinois Senator in this year's historic presidential election.

Below are excerpts of the papers' endorsements:

This is a very personal diary and not a story I've told to many.  It wasn't until the last couple of years that I told it to ANYONE.  But I know from personal experience that being homosexual is not a choice and I will share that here on this very important day.

And why this year?  Because California may pass a ban on Gay Marriage, they may write this bigotry into the State's Constitution.  And even though my husband is running for State Senate, I believe this bill is far more important than him winning.  Yes.

Why?  Because it can't be undone.  It's 2008 and we can't let a bill like this pass.  If you call yourself a progressive or a Democrat or even a liberal, we cannot say that civil rights can wait until later.  They cannot wait.

It's become accepted wisdom that McCain is losing ground in the polls right now because the economy is in such bad shape.

I think the real reason is that Obama has run a smart campaign and McCain has run a dumb one.  McCain and his advisors have made at least three fundamental mistakes in the general election campaign so far--mistakes that seem so basic that I can't understand how these people got as far as they did in politics.

As we've all probably heard from countless sources, ACORN, "the nation's largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families", is under relentless attack by the GOP's vote suppression machine. The charge is vote fraud.

This is what ACORN has accomplished in this election year.

Here are the facts regarding their  methods...

Wick Allison, Editor in Chief of D Magazine in Dallas-Fort Worth, is another true and established Conservative to realize that Obama is the best hope for this country... and the most likely to preserve HIS values. In an article entitled A Conservative For Obama, Allison states that "Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan." Now there's an interesting observation.