Team Obama is busily preparing to dash his supporters’ hope for change should he win the presidential election on Tuesday. Even in the final days before the election, the pressure to deliver on his lofty promises has Obama attempting to dampen expectations on the campaign trail:

“The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

“I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy – especially now,” Mr Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday, citing “the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq.”

This should be a huge wakeup call to any voters who remain undecided.  Hope and change are on backorder.  Barack Obama is scaling back his resplendent rhetoric because it has been empty rhetoric. He is a demagogue whose promises of hope are as fraudulent as his fundraising operation. Whether or not you find inspiration in his message, understand that Barack Obama cannot and will not deliver positive change. Can unfulfilled hope sustain you and your family for the next four years?

I won’t make false promises that a McCain administration will someday inspire unparalleled awe and reverence in historians. His presidency will revolve around the decidedly unsensational task of cleaning up inherited messes, and he isn’t likely to provoke tingly exhilaration in crowds. But all evidence indicates that John McCain is a man of his word who loves his country with breathtaking intensity and unwavering devotion. He is a man of honor who doesn’t need need an Olympian backdrop to lend gravity to his words or an embellished resume to inflate his experience.

Only one candidate has told the truth about the state of the union and the challenges we face. When Barack Obama spoke of hope and change, he was blowing smoke. When John McCain says he’ll put country first, he means it.

This extravagant prime time broadcast will be funded, in part, by a fraudulent donation racket deliberately facilitated by Team Obama.

Take a stand tonight. Use your remote control to show the country and the world that the American people are sickened by Barack Obama’s campaign finance fraud. We’re not interested in another half hour of carefully scripted pablum. Let his campaign know that we’re not buying what they’re selling, even if the Shamwow guy himself offers up an endorsement.

Barack Obama can slice and dice pineapples in mid air or guarantee a sleigh full of confidence and a sack full of pride, but it won’t matter. You see, people buy infomercial products knowing that they have the Better Business Bureau, the FTC, and their credit card companies to protect them from fraud. But Americans know that their votes are the only things to protect them from an Obama administration.

So tonight, show your support for John McCain by NOT tuning in to one of the seven channels airing Obama’s As Seen On TV Extravaganza. ( I promise you’ll be able to catch it on the Internet later, or you can check out Michelle Malkin’s live blog of the Obama variety half hour.)

Instead, take the thirty minutes between 8pm and 8:30pm eastern time to join John McCain’s voter-to-voter phone bank. Come on, you know you have at least thirty unused cell phone minutes this month, so make a few calls to Ohio or Pennsylvania and help get out the vote.

Leave the infomercials to Chef Tony and Ron Popeil.

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

Please, Senator McCain, remember who your opponent is tonight as you debate Barack Obama for the final time. America is worth fighting for, and Barack Obama is worth fighting against, so stand up, stand up, stand up and fight!

Hat tip: The Corner

Part of the problem is that even McCain supporters don’t seem to understand his health care plan well enough to defend it adequately. Even the official campaign Web site doesn’t do a great job of laying out the nitty gritty.

That’s why this concrete example of how the plan would work is required reading.

Suppose a worker gets $50,000 in cash wages and $12,000 in health insurance.

Right now, he pays federal income taxes on the wages but not the health insurance. Let’s assume, for reasons of simplicity, that the tax rate he is paying is a flat 25% on his wages. He therefore pays $12,500 in federal income taxes. His after-tax, after-health-care income is $37,500.

Now, under the McCain plan, his employer keeps paying the premium, which is now counted as income to the worker. He therefore pays federal income taxes on $62,000, or $15,500.

But he also gets a tax credit of $5,000 for health insurance, which means that, all in all, he owes $10,500 in federal taxes, or $2,000 less than he does today. His after-tax, after-health-care income is $39,500.

Continue reading at The New Atlantis to understand how McCain’s plan would work if this same employee opted to buy his insurance directly from an insurer in the open market. The McCain campaign would be well advised to add similar examples to the official Web site.

How do you prefer your smears? Overt or covert? Team Obama is playing it both ways now, and in all likelihood has been for some time.

So which is worse, the Obama campaign smearing Sarah Palin via a clan of astroturfing sockpuppets or Obama’s latest radio smear campaign against John McCain? And will it matter to voters?

Just askin’.

Dear Jong,

Erica, on Saturday I read your HuffPo piece, Not That Stupid: Erica Jong’s Dear John Letter, in which you label Sarah Palin a racist for cutting funding to black teen mothers, and I wanted to tell you you’re right. You’re right that American women are “not that stupid.” Most of us don’t buy it when you try to peddle your fictions as fact.

Calling Sarah Palin an anti-feminist racist was nothing more than an amateurish attempt to advertise to the world how progressive you are. Perhaps circulating that lie was some sort of perverted apology to black Americans for the white privilege that plagues you so?

Erica, I understand you’re a 9/11 truther, so facts may not interest you, but I’d like to set the record straight for any of your readers who happen upon this letter.

“Cutting funding for black teenage mothers is anti-feminist and racist,” you wrote.

The myth that Sarah Palin slashed funding to teen mothers arose from a Washington Post report about government money allocated to Covenant House Alaska, an organization that happens to run a home for teenage moms. As I’m sure you already know, that smear has been thoroughly debunked.

Sarah Palin actually increased Covenant House funding by more than three times, from 1.3 million dollars in 2007 to 3.9 million in 2008. The state of Alaska will be phasing in further support for a capital project Covenant House has undertaken.

The notion that Sarah Palin somehow directly targeted black teenage mothers is truly absurd. Even if Governor Palin had cut the Covenant House budget (which she didn’t), African-American clients made up just 11 percent of the youth they served in 2007 (PDF). Perhaps, Erica, you decided otherwise when you looked at the Covenant House Web site. A photo of a black teen must mean all of their clients are black, right?

Or maybe you simply made it up.

Did you think spreading lies about racism was funny? Did you try convince yourself you were working in the interest of “the greater good”? Or were you trying to soothe your guilty conscience by publicly coming to the “defense” of black people?

Racism is alive and well in America, and there’s a filthy trail of it leading right to your wretched heart. Next time you decide to write something, Erica, we’ll tell you thanks, but no thanks.

Jenn Q. Public

But Barack Obama is still an ass.

With the Obama campaign’s release of a new campaign ad today, we saw a desperate attempt to use John McCain ‘s reported lack of Internet fluency as an indicator that he is generally out of touch. As it turns out, what the Obama camp paints as neo-Luddism is actually attributable to lingering effects of the McCain’s POW injuries. Jonah Goldberg explains:

The reason he doesn’t send email is that he can’t use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes.

Mark Steyn wonders how team Obama could have missed this. Maybe they don’t know how to work The Google.

Allahpundit points out a recent NYT piece in which John McCain says he is learning to get online by himself. I would guess that McCain is either accessing the Web with assistive software, like a voice recognition application, or he has an alternative input device that offers better ergonomics for someone with reduced range of motion.

Suitably Flip shares a Forbes article from 2000 that describes McCain as “the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist” and “an inveterate devotee of email.” The article says Cindy handled the physical aspects of computing for her husband at that time.

This means the charge that McCain “can’t send an email” isn’t just offensive, it’s categorically untrue.

So bring on the next smear, team Obama. The right side of the blogosphere has a Google and they’re not afraid to use it.

Granted there are benefits to being Web-savvy, but c’mon, the man has people for that.

I don’t agree with all of John McCain’s ideas about how to run our country, but when it comes to the American people, he’s way more plugged in than Barack Obama, even if he doesn’t know how to vandalize Wikipedia and read viral email smears.