Voter Outreach of America ? a front group run by Republican operative Nathan Sproul and financed with more than $600,000 from the RNC ? hired Tyrone Mrasek to register voters. The LA Times reports, Mrasek “was given a written script to ask people whether they favored Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry. To those favoring the Massachusetts senator, Mrasek replied that he was just taking a poll and thanked them for stopping.”

I stumbled across a great website that is everything you wanted to know about the Electoral College. (electoral-vote.com) Most interesting

In this month’s New Republic, Jonathan Chait follows the evolution of the “flip-flop” in this year’s presidential campaign. Analyzing 37 Kerry “flip-flops” listed on the Bush campaign website, Chait concludes only six are “legitimate reversals”

The most recent report from the Weapons inspector in Iraq takes away every excuse Bush has used for going to war there. Remember, the reasons have changed over time, each time they were discredited.

New job numbers are out this morning, and they’re more bad news for a president who has already received a truckload of it this week. The economy added about 96,000 new jobs in September. That’s fewer than analysts expected, fewer than what’s needed to keep up with population growth in the job market, and way fewer than what Bush’s own Council of Economic Advisors projected in December.

I read a good summary of the Vice Presidential debate on Salon.com. I agree that mainly Cheney managed to continue throwing out information he knows to be inaccurate, but Edwards seemed more concerned with making his talking points that responding to those false statements. Neither hurt each other’s campaign, but Edwards missed some chances to hit some home runs.

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry squared off in Miami last night for the first presidential debate. The result was a solid hit for Kerry. This morning’s papers describe the scene: Bush is described as coming off as “petulant,” “tight-mouthed,” and “frustrated.” Meanwhile, Kerry was “presidential,” “in control,” “serious and substantive.”

As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration?s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

Reports, including one in The Nation Magazine by Kathy Pollitt, point an incident at the University of Arizona in Tuscon where Fox News reporters attempted to intimidate and threaten students conducting a voter registration drive on the UA Mall.