Off to the Senate Races Edition

The Obama campaign announced yesterday that his grandmother Madelyn Dunham is seriously ill and Obama has cancelled some campaign events scheduled for Thursday and Friday so he can go and see her in Hawaii.

Obama is very close to his grandmother, who along with her husband Stanley, helped raise him.

Obama fortunately has a team of surrogates to send out, with Biden, Michelle and of course Hillary. He and Hillary made an appearance together Monday in Florida, timed to concide with the start of early voting in Florida. "Change never comes without a fight," Obama said. "In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over. We've seen it before. And we're seeing it again: ugly phone calls; misleading mail; misleading TV ads; careless, outrageous comments. All aimed at keeping us from working together, all aimed at stopping change."

McCain's got a new stump speech -- he's tossing "Socialist" at Obama to see if that will stick. See, John IS getting the hang of Facebook-- it's just like SuperPoking: "John McCain has thrown a polar bear at you." "John McCain has drunk a beer with you." "John McCain has thrown a Socialist at you." Unfortunately the Socialists are not amused. "Obama is about as far from being a socialist as Joe The Plumber is from being a rocket scientist," said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "I think it's hard for McCain to call Obama a socialist when George Bush is nationalizing banks."

By the way, McCain unveiled the Socialist charge at a fabulous rally yesterday in St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis. Remember St. Louis? A couple of days ago Barack spoke to a crowd of 100,000 under the Gateway Arch, and then later that day, he had a rally in Kansas City attended by 75,000 people. John McCain drew 2,500 on Monday at a residential development. Now I grant you, Obama's events were free and open to the public, while John McCain's events required a ticket. But doesn't that just sum up the difference between the two approaches here?

Foreign Hilarity

I'm gonna turn on the mute button and stop listening to Sarah Palin's rally in Reno, NV before I hurt someone. She actually kicked this thing off by saying Barack Obama doesn't have the experience to deal with an international crisis. Seriously. Ms. I live acros the Bering Strait from you-know-who and that qualifies me you-know-how-much to comment on foreign policy. Oh, for the love of Mike...

Different topic. Ever wonder how those Palin-isms "Joe Six-Pack" "Maverick" and "Hockey Mom" get translated into other languages? Rita Abdelkader of NYC News frames the struggle: "Al Jazeera reporter Abderrahim Foukara wrestled with how to describe "maverick.'' The world's most watched Arab network finally decided to define the American colloquialism as "a bird that sings outside the flock.... Le Monde U.N. Bureau Chief Jean Louis Turlin translates Joe Six-pack using a French cartoon character, Beauf. 'Le beauf' plein de bière,' said Turlin, is an 'uneducated, extremely conservative brother-in-law" who is "narrow-minded as well as racist.'...Radio Marti's Carmen-Maria Rodriguez defined hockey mom as 'madraza' or 'a great, boisterous mom.'... In Italy, [for maverick] 'cane sciolto' or 'dog without a leash' would be used, said ANSA Italian journalist Matteo Bosco Bortolaso.