Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Florida political waters: defective voting machines have returned to the Sunshine State!  Yesterday's local elections in Hillsborough County featured the first use of new optical scan voting machines, and guess what? "Glitches Mar Debut Of New Voting System In Hillsborough."  The machines were made by Premier Election Solutions. Guess what the former name of Premier was?  You got it: Diebold!

Anyone who followed my comments and diaries during the primary season knows that I was a strong supporter of Obama and not a big fan of Hillary Clinton.  But that does not matter anymore, because the primary is over.  The only thing I'm focused on is beating John McCain in November.  So I'm here to wish Hillary Clinton my sincere best wishes at the convention tonight.

Wow, this was unexpected.  Today's Arts & Living section of the Washington Post offers us the McCain House Tour!  The tongue-in-cheek article, complete with a little slide show, is fun and shocking reading, and damning to McCain.  Let's take the tour together, shall we?

In the five years I lived in Kansas City, I never thought much of Steve Kraske, the chief political columnist for the Kansas City Star.  He definitely appears to me to have Republican/conservative leanings, and he rarely writes anything that is terribly insightful or original.  But Kraske has his moments, and one such moment occurred today.  In his Sunday column, entitled  "McCain meanders on Social Security," Kraske describes his recent first-hand experience with McCain's double-talk, confusion, evasion of tough questions and, yes, his temper.  Let's just say that Kraske was left less than impressed with McSame.

This isn't specifically a political diary, but kant's diary motivated me to country McCain's Olympic buzzkill with an inspiring story that I hope you'll find relevant. Today's victory for the U.S. swimming team in the 4x100 freestyle relay was particularly notable for me. It was not because of the relay team's thrilling, come-from-behind victory that made it most memorable for me, although it was indeed so. What made it most memorable for me was the fact that history was NOT made today.  One member of the relay team, Cullen Jones, became the second African American to win a swimming gold medal. I'm thankful that this is no longer a "first." But the fact that Jones is only the second still saddens me a bit.  And his story takes me back to my days as a competitive swimmer and all the discrimination and prejudice I saw in the sport, and it connects to a harrowing tale in my life that occurred just two weeks ago. Allow me to explain.

Ever since the primaries I have not read Paul Krugman as much as I used to.  But his latest column is a must-read.  Krugman explains that Republicans, who once hailed themselves as the "party of ideas," have become the "party of stupid," and he shows, quite depressingly, how their celebration of stupidity could help them keep the White House this year and prevent landslide losses in Congress. If we want to figure out how to defeat the GOP big time in November, Krugman offers some helpful food for thought.

In an interview with Mike Allen from Politico that was published today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drops several less-than-subtle hints that she might be a closet Obama supporter.  Is Rice trying to gain back her soul after eight years of working for the devil and having blood all over her hands?

I tend to reserve most of my heavy blogging activity for sites like dailykos, where most of the other users tend to share my political views and values system.  But in the last year or so I've also started adding my 2 cents in the reader comments for articles on the websites of our two local papers here, the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times.  I usually comment just to vent, and I don't usually engage in a lot of back-and-forth with other folks who post in the reader comments on these sites, in large part because you tend to get a lot of scary, crazy, knuckle-dragging comments that I felth just weren't worth my time to respond to. But that changed the other day, and I may have just convinced someone to vote for Obama.

I was not able to attend Obama's town hall in St. Petersburg yesterday. I live in Tampa and didn't have time to drive over to the St. Pete office for tickets. But I read some excellent coverage of the town hall here in diaries like the one from smash artist, which portrayed the town hall as a great event and a complete success for Obama.  But as I prepared to read the coverage of the event from our two local dailies, the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, I braced myself for some BS coverage, fully expecting to read about an event that bore no resemblance to the one described by smash artist.  But after reading the articles I was pleasantly surprised. The reporters seemed to - gasp - report on the event as it really happened, which meant that Obama came off favorably. Surprise of surprises.

Today the St. Petersburg Times here in my hometown has absolutely blasted John McCain for running a campaign that appears to be based on nothing more than blatant lies and baseless smears.  As you can see from the headline of the paper's editorial, "From 'Straight Talk' to Smear Campaign," the Times pulls no punches in calling out McCain for getting as far away from his so-called "straight talk" as he can get.

We here at dkos often complain, and rightfully so, about the media's tendency to treat John McCain with kid gloves and to be complicit in helping McCain maintain a bogus "maverick" image. So let's give kudos when the media actually do their job. Today the conservative-leading Tampa Tribune published a front-page story that blasts the "McCain maverick" myth and exposes the seedy underside of his closest adviser, Charlie Black (who was a University of Florida grad, who knew?).  The information in the article is nothing new to most kossacks, but I think it's significant that the media is starting to finally tell -- gasp! -- the truth about McCain -- and a conservative paper in Florida to boot.

A few days ago I wrote a diary about how John McCain and his toady VP wannabe Charlie Crist accomplished an impressive double flip-flop on the issue of offshore drilling in a span of just a few days.  It was breathtaking to watch.  Apparently the St. Petersburg Times noticed this too, and today published an editorial blasting McCain and Crist for spinning so hard and fast on the issue of drilling off the coast of Florida.

In yet another breathtaking flip-flop - a double flip-flop to be precise - the Tampa Tribune reports today that John McCain now says he supports a federal ban on oil and gas drilling off the coast of Florida, a week after saying he supported ending the federal ban on offshore drilling.  And his VP wannabe toady Charlie Crist has dutifully followed right along with the flip-flop-flip-flop. It's enough to make your neck hurt.

A friend of mine who works for the Social Security Administration (SSA) just shared with me an official SSA document regarding the agency's new policy on same-sex marriage, in light of the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusets and (as of yesterday) California.  SSA staffers received the new policy today.  As you'll see in the policy, the SSA is being forced to change its policies regarding same-sex marriage in subtle but signicant ways. But overall, the policy shows in stark detail that we have a long, long way to go before full equality will be achieved for GLBT couples.

Barack Obama clearly has a problem. Or should I say Obama has a problem with "problems." It seems that not a day goes by when the mainstream media isn't trumpeting a serious "problem" Obama has with a certain segment of voters. Sometimes it's a "problem" that the media has already been repeating ad nauseum for weeks or months on end; sometimes it's a new "problem" that media has just uncovered. If you only watched the 24/7 cable news outlets during the primary season, you could have reasonably wondered how Obama got any votes at all -- let along won the nomination -- since he seemed to have so many "problems" with so many different groups of voters -- much more so than Hillary Clinton. Obama's problem with "problems" seems to be repeating itself in the general election, and it needs to stop.  

In looking at some poll results over the past two days in states that are labeled "battleground states" for the presidential election on kos' battleground map, I think kos needs to do some updating. Two new polls show Obama with double-digit leads in two "yellow" battleground states on kos' map: Wisconsin and Massachusetts.  The Wisconsin poll in particular has nothing but bad news for McSame.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the greatest political battle this fall is not going to be between John McCain and Barack Obama, but between John McCain and John McCain. On issue after issue, John McCain-Version 2008 is finding himself battling against his own words and his own positions on issues, taking the concept of flip-flopping to a whole new level. Today's McCain v. McCain topic: social security.

This week we started to see signs of what is clearly going to be a big problem for John McCain in the general election: a gaping generation gap.  McCain doesn't seem to fully understand the 21st century world in which we live today, and it's going to hurt him big time with voters. This isn't really about McCain's age, because I believe people of any age have the ability to learn "new tricks" and adapt to societal changes. But over just the past week we've seen several examples of how McCain still seems to be partying like it's 1979.